Thursday. Thor's Day. Hammering away. I guess.
I went to the gym today. Not because it was Thursday, but because it had been a week since the last time I was there, and what with a week of 'vacation' in California, I had some concern about... well, deterioration and things.
The workout went surprisingly well. Better than the last one, as a matter of fact. How this could be, I'm not going to question. I hope the trend continues.
A trend I'm seeking to reverse, however, is the weight gain, which is hardly a surprise. I've added four luscious pounds to my frame, most likely because all I did, out in the land of sunshine and oranges, was to stay indoors, more or less prone, either doing a crossword puzzle, or reading a murder mystery, or plinking away at this contraption, to keep my bloguing pledge. Oh, and there was the eating. And eating. And eating.
I did take some walks, but it was freakin' cold out there! All I had for outer wear was a tweed jacket I found in the Salvation Army a few weeks ago, while I was searching for men's pink shirts to turn into paper. This jacket may have become my favorite garment, because the tweed is so uncannily beautiful -- a black/grey herringbone, with little flecks of every imaginable color scattered through the pattern. Plus, it's exquisitely made, fully lined, and with operational sleeve buttons! I think it cost all of $4, because there was some kind of special that day.
In any event, I'm sure everyone in Claremont CA got a good look at this jacket (if they weren't hiding at home themselves) because I wore it everywhere. And there was ice on the sidewalks. Not just little bits, but great yard-long swathes just made for slipping and breaking something. Hence the time indoors.
Here at home, of course, it's quite clement, so there's no excuse for me to avoid going outdoors. Except for sheer laziness, that is. Of which I think I have a rather generous natural endowment.
So I plan little post-workout rewards for myself. Little diversions in which I indulge on my way home. A stop at a non-Starbux coffee shop in Milburn, where the brew is ferociously strong, and after I've bought ten cups, the eleventh one is free. Don't tell them, but I'd still go there and buy their stuff even if the eleventh cup was twice the price.
I also stop, generally, at Trader Joe's, which requires a quick, deft left-hand turn against two lanes of rather intense west-bound vehicles, and then an immediate deceleration, to avoid running over the shoppers in the parking lot. So far I've managed both maneuvers pretty well.
Today, the only reason I stopped there was to pick up some apples for John to take in his lunch -- the Honey Crisp are done for the year, and now we've got to content ourselves with the (much smaller) Pink Lady or Braeburn or Gala variety. I bought some of each kind, as a kind of test.
I also bought some flowers. It's pathetic, I know, and stupid, but ever since I had that odd realization about the yin/yang imbalance in our home, I've tried to inject some feminine elements that don't involve actually cleaning anything. Flowers seem appropriate.
This time, the only ones that caught my attention were the daffodils. I'm pretty much of a stickler about floral longevity, but I'm tired of looking at alstromeria for weeks on end. We had some tulips recently, that were very nice -- they kept snaking around in the vase, seeming to grow even though they'd been cut. And because I enjoy watching things go bad, I left them in the vase until they looked less like Renoir, and more like Egon Schiele. Persephone beauty, someone once called it. The enchantment of age and decay.
Daffodils. I bought four bunches, picking the ones with mostly closed buds, and one or two opening flowers, with the rationale that, if the buds open, they'll last longer than the flowers that have already been showing off for no one in particular.
I was unpacking them -- each bunch was held together by two small, thin blue rubber bands, and then stuck into a plastic sleeve, which was itself held in place by a length of knotted elastic cord -- and cutting their ends afresh, when I looked a little more closely at those elastic cords. Unlike the continuous rubber bands, these lengths of elastic was turned into a useful circle by a little overhand knot, made by doubling the cord and making sure that the knot sits about half an inch in from the ends. I go to this length to mention this, because there's no machinery that can do this -- every knot looks to me as though it's been tied by hand.
I have three of them on the table next to me now -- one untied, the other two intact. (I don't know what happened to the fourth. I hope it didn't go down the drain) For some reason, I'm picturing some dark-complexioned men and women, sitting in a sea of cut flowers, hunched over as they count stems, bundle them with blue rubber bands, sheathe the bundles in plastic, and then quickly slip a knotted string around the bunch. Which they pop into a different bucket, while they're reaching for the next bundle. I wonder whether it makes any difference to them, what flowers they're wrapping?
I used to wonder what would be the most boring job in the world. Once I thought it would be tucking those little paper slips 'Inspected by #16' into shirt pockets. Then I thought about whoever it was who had to do quality control on the press operation that produced those little bits of numbered paper. Where does it end?
And as for the flower wrappers, I feel as though I'm in something of a quandary. Besides the yin/yang thing, of course. If I keep buying flowers, am I dooming this unknown knot-tying piece worker to endless hours of repetitive, boring toil, at far less than minimum wage, with no health insurance, etc etc? If I stop buying flowers, am I endangering the (comparatively) pathetic livelihood which seems to be the lot of this deft, unnamed individual? And of course, the flowers are probably the least of my worries, ethics- and morality-wise. So much of what comprises modern first-world living is, I suspect, tainted with far more distant woe than most of us can imagine -- but is taking the pittance from the hand of some Pakistani seamstress a better thing to do? I don't mean these questions to sound flip or arch -- I really am puzzled, and have been for a long time.
What this makes me think of, improbably enough, is the way I imagine a coming-of-age ritual, in some non-industrialized culture. I imagine a group of young boys teetering on the brink of manhood, following their male elders out into the hunting fields, where, as a group, they fan out, to lie in wait for their prey. Perhaps it's an antelope, or an elk, or a whale. Perhaps the hunt is swiftly successful; perhaps it''s a long wait before some creature falls to human wiles.
And then comes the wrenching payoff, as I see it. We have a group of relatively ungainly, weak, flimsy bipeds, standing over a still-warm giant eland, and for a moment, before the slitting and the gutting and skinning begin, there's the inevitable comparison -- I am scrawny and slow, while you have a terrible beauty and strength about you. And, with the help of others like me, I am going to cut you up and eat you. Your life for mine.
Perhaps there's a prayer of thanksgiving before the necessary slaughter. I would hope so. But no one eats without being stained.
Maybe this is, indirectly, what I'm hoping to avoid, somehow? To live a life that rides on no sacrifice on the part of any sentient thing? I suppose I could look into Jainism, but I'm not really in the market for a new religion at this point in my life. And even broccoli has to be picked somehow.
The best thing I can hope for, in this regard, is that there's some kind of compensatory tidal effect, and that kindnesses done for no particular reason can have a way of seeping back through the web of human interconnectedness, and result in, perhaps, a larger serving of soup, or a nice neck massage, for that bundler of daffodils, tying lengths of elastic, over and over and over again.
© 2013 Walter Zimmerman
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