I Verb You a Happy Noun

Every year, I attempt to write a holiday letter to my nearest, dearest, and slightly-less-near-but-nonetheless-delightful friends.  In Fairbanks in December, poetic sunrises morph directly into elegiac sunsets.  Perhaps as a result, I use this annual letter as an opportunity to plumb the depths of a different literary styles, exploring promising genres such as Choose Your Own Adventure, Epic Poem, and Third Grade Homework Packet.

In contemplating how best to frame this year’s masterwork, it struck me that 2016 might read a lot better if edited, augmented, or outright bowdlerized.  Thus, this particular holiday letter is written in the form of a Mad Lib.

As such, you will need to fill in the following blanks before you can proceed.  No peeking ahead; remember, this is the season when Santa is stalking your moral minutiae.  Feel free to ask for contributions from family members, friends, passing strangers, or sworn enemies with lurid vocabularies.  

Go ahead and share your completed entries, although there are no prizes whatsoever -- unless you don’t yet have a potholder woven from strips of old t-shirts by industrious children.  I can totally set you up with one of those.

1) Adjective ______________

2) Adjective ______________

3) Animal ______________

4) Place ______________

5) Noun ______________

6) Plural noun

7) Gerund*

8) Plural noun

9) Noun ______________

10) Adjective _________________

11) Plural noun ______________

12) Verb _______________

13) Plural noun _______________

14) Noun _________________

15) Verb (present participle) _______________

16) Verb (present participle) _______________

17) Noun _______________

18) Liquid _______________

19) Ordinal number _____________

20) Noun _________________

21) Adverb ________________

22) Body part _______________

23) Body part (plural) ________________

24) Adjective ___________________

25) Adjective _________________

*  You are in no way surprised, because you already know me. 

A Retrospective on the Fresco/Cable 2016

At the start of the year, we didn’t leave home.  Given how (1) __________ and (2) ____________it is in Fairbanks in January, this was a questionable choice.  But Jay was happy as a (3) _____________, training for his epic 1000-mile snow-bike ride to (4) _____________ along the entire Iditarod (5)____________ – an event which he finished with flying (6) ______________.

Despite a wanton lack of (7) _____________, on Easter Sunday I, too, hit the (8) _____________ -- in the annual White Mountains 100.  I managed to snow-bike 100 miles without damaging myself, my chocolate eggs, my psyche, or my (9) _______________.

Meanwhile, my performance in Fairbanks Drama Association’s quirky romantic comedy “Almost Maine” was reportedly (10) ________________, which is perhaps not surprising, given that it involved enthusiastically removing most of my (11) _______________ on stage.

When spring arrived, my mother came up to (12) ________________ us for three weeks.  She enjoyed the (13) ______________, went camping with us, and helped us celebrate Molly’s and Lizzy’s tenth (14)________________.

Our summer hiking and biking adventures didn’t involve (15) _____________ bicycles on airplanes or (16) _____________ with European sheep, but we did have to beat a hasty retreat off a (17)____________ after being repeatedly blown off our feet by a July hailstorm, and encountered particularly deep and viscous (18) _____________ on our annual hike to Tolovana Hot Springs .

When fall rolled around, the twins headed off to (19) _____________ grade, and I adding teaching a (20)_______________ to my workload.  Jay, of course, while continuing to work as a programmer at UAF, also began training for his next adventure.  Oh, and we voted.  (21) _____________.

These past couple of months, the kids and I have once again taken to the stage, spouting such memorable holiday-themed lines as, “You’ll shoot your (22) ____________ out” and “I can’t put my (23)______________ down!”

All in all, 2016 has been (24) ______________, and I’m sure that working as a climate change researcher will be even more (25) _______________ in the coming years.

Thanks for playing.  And, even more importantly, thanks for continuing to tolerate me -- not only for another 365 days, but on February 29th, too.  You are a remarkable bunch of people.  May you all have a light-filled, warmth-wrapped, and delicious Solstice, Hanukkah, Christmas, and New Year.

Whole-grain friendship

“She doesn’t watch TV…” said Lizzy.  “She’s a really good reader… and she isn’t into stuff like pink and princesses all the time…  she likes riding bikes and being outside… “   She thought for a moment longer.  “One thing I like about her is she doesn’t eat just a white-bread sandwich.  She has a real lunch.”

Well, that clinches it: this isn’t just any old friendship -- it’s a liberal, outdoorsy, intellectual, WHOLE GRAIN friendship!

Is it possible for half of my brain to giggle gleefully while the other half cringes?

On one hand, what parent wouldn’t be pleased that her twins had managed to find an official Best Friend with delightful manners, precocious academic prowess, and a penchant for consuming fresh, locally grown organic produce?  On the other hand…  Oh my god.  I’ve totally brainwashed my kids. And on the third hand (yes, parenting requires growing a third hand) -- do I really have a better grip than my second-graders do on what true friendship actually entails? Should I be surprised, given my own selective proclivities, that they are choosing to hang out with bookish, intellectual, middle-class [knee-high] liberals?

From other conversations with Molly and Lizzy, it has become clear that the nascent social partitioning among the seven-year-old set is amusingly – and horrifyingly – advanced. The kids are figuring out the religious beliefs of their peers, their environmental commitment (or lack thereof), and their politics.  That’s right: although my children have trouble remembering whether Alaska is a town, a state, or a nation, they are attempting to parse the nuances of the political spectrum.  And, apparently, they are also bread snobs.

This social parsimony seems particularly startling, given that neither twin has ever been what you might call extroverted -- or, to be honest, socially skilled.  The two of them have played with each other since they were old enough to toddle, but they’ve always tended to hang around the edges of playgrounds.  One twin in particular received preschool reports full of kindly, euphemistic phrases such as, “Does not initiate play with others.”

Thus, I was thrilled when, back in kindergarten, Lizzy told me that maybe (just maybe) there was a girl in her class she liked.  What?  You’re actually interacting?  Hooray!  A birthday party invitation was issued.  Playing took place.  The little girl’s family seemed delightful.  In fact, they seemed like people I might have sought out as friends without the helpful aid of my small children.  That is… um… bookish, intellectual, middle-class liberals.  She has a real lunch.

The following year, the same child – I’ll call her “E” – was in Molly’s class, and the triumvirate Best Friendship was cemented. 

But what, exactly, does friendship entail in second grade?

Well, it seems that in addition to appropriate bread choices, literary discussion is important.  A few weeks ago, I swung by E’s house at the end of a playdate, and found that the kids had attempted to dress themselves as characters from The Mysterious Benedict Society.  Moreover, they had been busy with letter magnets belonging to E’s little brother.  They were spelling out the names of their favorite authors.

BEVER Y   C EARY? 

Well… close enough.  The little brother (given the spelling of his name) was not willing to budge on the issue of L-sharing.

I loaded all three girls in the car to head back to our place for the ensuing sleepover.  Our guest’s mother offered a fond farewell and a classic reminder to her daughter: “Don’t forget your manners.” 

As we pulled out of E’s driveway, there was silence from the back seat.  At last, Molly spoke up.  In cheerful, confident tones, she told E, “You know, at our house, you don’t actually have to have manners.”

Come on over, eat with your hands, and make fart jokes!  Yup.  Best Friendship, second-grade style. They’re a trio of solidarity, for sure.

 It might not have been this way, though.  It almost wasn’t.  At the beginning of second grade, E was missing.  Her family had moved to a bigger home.  The move placed her in a different local public school.  The twins missed her sorely.  Every day.

“You’ll make other friends!” I chirped.  “There are lots of nice kids in your classes!”  But Molly and Lizzy bemoaned her absence.

E attended that new school for about a week.  And then she came home with this poster:

Although the two schools were academically equal by all accounts, her parents shifted her back.  They committed themselves to driving her to and from school, every single day -- to be with her friends.

I was touched.  But, at first, I was also taken aback.  Really?  Someone is going to haul their second-grader across town?  Just to be with my kids?  Haven’t they noticed that my delightful little angels tell fart jokes?

I felt a little odd, and a little guilty about the whole thing.  Is it really worth it?  The three children – Molly, Lizzy, and E – ended up in three different classes, thus covering all of the second grade teachers in the school.  They only saw each other at recess and in reading group.  How important, and how permanent, I asked myself, is a friendship between kids whose biggest concerns in life include tooth fairy earnings and who can build the coolest Lego structure?  How meaningful is a friendship based on lunch choices, Beverly Cleary, and bikes?

Then again… books and bikes are kinda high on my list of friend-attributes, too.  I’ve got my very own set of outdoorsy, nerdy, non-princessy buddies (well, okay, maybe some are a little bit princessy).  I have WHOLE GRAIN friendships! 

I found myself squirming a little, mentally.  Yeah, my own choices are so adult, so diverse, so darned nuanced!  Just how thrillingly deep do I think I am, compared to my second-graders?  What is friendship supposed to be about?  And what, over my almost 42 years of existence, has friendship actually entailed?

I found a Best Friend when I was seven, too.  Like my kids’ Best Friend, mine was (and still is) a lot like me: bookish, intellectual, and middle-class-liberal.  Together, we created complicated treasure-hunts full of cryptic clues.  Together, we built obstacle courses in the back yard.  Together, we studied for Advanced Placement exams.  We went off to Ivy league schools.  We both eventually became professors. 

But in other ways, we weren’t so alike after all, my Best Friend and I.  I was the scabby, grubby, always-up-in-a-tree one.  She was cleaner, quieter, shyer, and definitely sweeter.  Her family put up a menorah when mine (somewhat arbitrarily) put up a Christmas tree.  As adults, she settled in suburban New York and became a swing-dancing expert, and I went to live in an unplumbed cabin in Alaska and took up odd hobbies such as hundred-mile wilderness racing on skis or snow-bike. 

We were alike.  We were different.  We stuck by each other through some horrible teenage crap that I’m no-way-in-heck going into in this blog post.  We grew up together.

In college, I found a Best Friend who was, again, bookish, intellectual, and middle-class liberal.  Together, we made a valiant – and inexplicable -- attempt to learn Esperanto; we sweated over multi-variable Calculus; we imprudently decided to climb down a fire escape and explore the steam tunnels; and we made loud jokes about phalli. 

Again, my Best Friend was so terribly, achingly like me – and yet not like me.  I spent summers wielding an axe and heaving rocks about, while he did research projects.  He was publically exuberant and affectionate, and I didn’t know what to do with a hug.  He reveled in geographic trivia; I barely knew my lats from my longs.  He faced the desperate struggle of a being teenage boy coming out as gay to friends and family, while I’d barely considered what life would have been like had I not been conveniently straight. 

We were alike.  We were different.  We stuck by each other.  We thought we were already grownups, but of course we weren’t – so we grew up together, too.

Of course, no one is ever all the way grown up –or, if they are, I’m crossing them off my list RIGHT NOW.  We still – and always – need people to keep on growing up with us.  To me, a true friend – a Best Friend, if you will -- is someone who does that growing in concert and in synergy with me, but also in a state of constant challenge – stretching me, pushing me, extending me.  A best friend is someone who can get me to ski a hundred miles or write a novel, not by goading or nagging me, but simply by believing I can.  He or she is the keeper of a lost piece of my brain – someone who makes the inside of my head a less lonely cavern, someone with whom to share not only thoughts and adventures, but also hidden shames and peculiar joys.  You feel that way too!? Holy crap, I thought no one else ever felt that way in the whole history of the universe.

That friend and I can run our brains sometimes in parallel and sometimes in series.  We can create a devil's-advocate spark, and set alight an intelligence, humor, and joy greater than the sum of its parts: friendship as emergent property.  We can go on a six-hour hike, talking non-stop, laughing about everything, from profound to profane.  We can share obscure, nerdy jokes predicated on Latin roots or imaginary numbers.  We can wax lyrical about physics, in the next breath quote Beowulf, and in the breath after that make some kind of pun so filthy that it would make a nun's hair fall out in an instant.  Or we can be silent together – comfortably, slowly, deeply silent.   

Maybe my connection with my own close friends isn’t any more cosmic than my little girls’ connection with theirs.  Life, after all, is mostly built of small moments, not Epic Events (although I manufacture a few of those, to keep myself feeling important). A true friend is the person who knows too much about me, and judges too little.  She’s the one who eats the other half of the box of Girl Scout cookies at midnight, helping me to drop crumbs into my textbooks.  He’s the one who swings by for a game of Scrabble even though I’m not very good at shuffling my tiles while nursing twins.  She’s the one who knows which book I’d like, and leaves it in my mailbox, and never asks for it back. He’s the one who drives to the airport in the middle of the night to whisk me – and my horribly jet-lagged kids – to a nearby Chinese restaurant, so we can catch up, and reminisce, and laugh together over our trumped-up fortunes.

True friendships last.  Nonetheless, old friends scatter, and are seen only rarely -- and new Best Friendship is harder to find, for middle-aged individuals such as the person that I have somehow unexpectedly become.  Sociologists note that development of true friendship requires frequent unplanned interactions and a relaxed setting.  In addition, although kids (and adults) should all learn to foster empathy, respect, and affability across even the most yawning gulfs of diversity, close friendship requires a sense of commonality – shared interests, shared beliefs, a shared quirky twist on this screwy thing we call life.  It also requires a significant and continued investment of time.

Proximity.  Commonality.  Time. 

One day a few weeks ago, I picked up the kids from school.  This is rare for me (Buses!  Public Transportation!  Yay!), but we had a dental appointment scheduled.  I loitered uncharacteristically by the neighboring doorways of Molly’s and Lizzy’s classes.  When they emerged amidst a welter of bouncy little bodies, I accompanied them down the hall toward the exit.  A few doors down, we passed E’s classroom.  It had already emptied out.  But one tall, dark-haired girl was standing there, waiting.  She fell into step beside her friends.  For the hectic two or three minutes that it took us all to reach the snowy curb, the three of them quickly caught each other up on Important Stuff.  We’re going to the dentist!  And I realized that, unseen by me, this happened every day.

Proximity.  Commonality.  Time.  She’s a really good reader…  She likes riding bikes and being outside… she isn’t into stuff like pink and princesses all the time. E is not the same race/ethnicity as the twins.  She prefers scarier books than the ones they choose.  She plays hockey and soccer, while they eschew team sports. But… She doesn’t watch TV.  She has a real lunch. At that moment, I understood.  They are alike.  They are different.  They stick by each other.  Maybe they will grow up together, and maybe they won’t.  But they are in the same school again.  With our two families, they hiked over thirty miles together, and skied many more, this second-grade year.  They wait for one another, to catch those tiny moments in the hallway.  They are being given the chance.

In all likelihood, my kids don’t yet fully understand what a Best Friend really is.  Maybe their bonds and their memories won’t last.   Then again, maybe thirty years from now their childhood friend will be strong-armed into playing Monopoly with their own kids -- or editing their blog posts for them (um, thanks, Childhood Friend).  But, regardless of the outcome of this particular friendship, learning to make those individual, quirky, hard-won, joyful ties is as important as all the other skills they are learning and practicing in second grade (reading, subtraction, fart jokes).  No, it’s not just important – it’s crucial.  Even for the most independent or introverted among us, what would a life be like, without strong, meaningful human connections?  

I can only offer my kids the same thing that – I now realize – I owe to myself: time for friendships (carved out of the packed strata of life) and proximity to a wide range of potentially mind-meldingly, challengingly, hilariously, brilliantly, fabulous friends.  From there, it’s up to each of us to find the connection, the bond, the spark, the glorious commonality.  And if, for my seven-year-olds, that means a whole grain friendship… well… I can count myself lucky to have some of the same.

Unfinished business

“Watch out… the boards underfoot are narrower in some places than others… and when the trails are hidden under all this fresh snow…”

A movie line popped unbidden from some dusty junior-high corner of my brain as I was welcoming (or attempting to welcome) Jay’s sister Charlotte to our home: “Now, careful. Walk on the LEFT side!”  Should you ever happen to find yourself rushing into a dilapidated castle to find aid for an injured hawk – who is actually a beautiful young woman under the curse of an evil bishop – it helps to know about the idiosyncrasies of the drawbridge. Likewise, should you come stay at our home just outside Fairbanks, there may be a few idiosyncrasies you should know about, too.

Alas, my warning was of little use to Charlotte.  She plunged right off the narrow edge of that fickle boardwalk and ended up with a generous bootful of snow.  Nor did the situation seem much better as I handed over the keys to my ’99 Ford Escort.  “Oh, you can use my car while you’re here,” I heard myself saying blithely.  “I hardly use it anyhow. It still runs…oh, but keep in mind that the window on the driver’s side doesn’t open.  Also, the hatchback sometimes seems like it isn’t really all the way closed, but it really is.  And, oh yeah, the lights on the floor shifter don’t light up when you turn on the headlights, but that doesn’t matter, it’s summer anyhow…”

As I reeled off this litany, I realized -- with burgeoning embarrassment -- that my apparent attention to quality control, structural integrity, and aesthetically necessary repairs was not merely comparable to that of the wine-sodden (and fictional) Imperius; it was much worse. 

When I do a walk-through of my life – for example, while temporarily borrowing the clean-slate perspective of a visitor -- I realize that pretty much everything is frayed around the edges, loose, incomplete, wobbling, stacked in untidy piles, faded, unedited, wadded up in the corner, dangling, or in dire need of a coat of paint.  The sheer quantity of clutter, quirks and imperfections is daunting; the fact that I generally don’t notice any of it… well that seems as if it ought to be disturbing.  Shouldn’t these wanna-be tasks at least maintain little blips on my radar?  I am awash is a sea of unfulfilled intentions that have lingered for so long that I have utterly acclimatized to them.

That blue blanket that I spread on the Esteemed Guest’s bed?  Yeah, it’s unraveling all the way down one edge.  I fully intend to sew it up.  Sometime.  The guest-room door that’s pretty much an unsanded piece of plywood with a handle?  I meant to fix that up, too.  The huge blue electrical cord – the heavy-duty kind, natch – that hangs from the ceiling, parabolically, between the wall and the track lighting?  Jay and I were going to wire that in permanently of course.  A decade ago. 

When Jay and I built our cabin, more than ten year ago now, we put in a lot of attention to detail.  We really did.  In part, we were spurred by the advice of good friends who had recently undertaken the same endeavor.  “Do not,” they cautioned us, “under any circumstances move in before the place is done.  All the way done.  Otherwise, you will end up living in a half-sheet-rocked house forever.”

At the time, this seemed like an exaggeration.  Surely we could do the shelving later?  Finish the cabinetry?  Screw in the wall plates on the electrical outlets, make a cushion for the window seat, and put in some window trim?

No, our friends insisted.  Do not tempt fate.

Since we were comfortably housed in a rental cabin only a five minute walk (albeit a boggy, buggy, ankle-twisting-tussocks walk) from our (seemingly endless) building project, we heeded their advice.  While Jay finished the wiring, I struggled to make all the kitchen cabinets and counters from scratch, using decorative locally harvested birch.  (Note – a PhD in biology is not a useful prerequisite for Advanced Woodworking.)  While Jay built the window seat, I continued to struggle with cabinets and counters, using a vocabulary more toxic and volatile than the varnish (see above).  While I made a super-last-minute twelve-foot high bookcase to accommodate the several hundred can’t-possibly-get-rid-of books we’d sort of forgotten we’d need a place for, Jay finished the window seat. (Note – a degree in computer science is not a useful prerequisite for Advanced Woodworking, either.)  Thus, when we finally did a last run-around with the shop vac and called the place done, it really was. 

Almost.  There was the track lighting still to add.  And the siding.  The plywood exterior walls were properly coated and perfectly serviceable, but we hadn’t yet gotten around to nailing up special-order siding that we’d so laboriously hauled and stacked nearby.

Fast-forward a decade. Sometime this past winter, Molly (then aged six) asked me about the siding on the house.  That is, she asked me why only half of the house actually HAS siding.

“Well, we meant to finish it.  But we got busy.”

“With what?” she asked guilelessly.  She and her twin sister looked at each other, as if to say, what the heck could have been keeping Mommy and Daddy extra busy for the past six or seven years?

“Well, for one thing, we had to build on your room.”

This was true.  We “finished” our cabin in the spring of 2004.  In winter of 2005, I found myself squiggling on my back on the frozen ground beneath the framed-in floor-box of a new 12-by-16 room, desperately trying to hold up a sheet of plywood with two knees and one hand while I wielded the screw gun with the other.  I was incubating two rapidly expanding fetuses; there was no time to lose.  By the time the roofing was going on, I was too large to reasonably be the person atop the ladder, so I held it for Jay, wearing a pair of his Carhardtt overalls, the sides entirely unbuttoned (this is a classic Fairbanks look, so I was nothing if not stylish).   By the time the two closets were built and the final coat of paint was on the walls, we had a pair of infants who were almost (but, whew, not quite) too old to safely keep in bassinets next to our bed in our wholly open and railing-less loft. 

Molly pointed out that their room has been done for a long time.  Actually, I think she said a “loooooong” time – which I will have to allow as accurate, give that from her perspective (and Lizzy’s), it’s been a lifetime. 

Still, I had to defend my honor.  I protested that getting any sort of construction work done when they were babies was impossible.  I mean, during their long Do Not Ever Put Me Down phase, I pushed the limits on safety by stir-frying while wearing one of them in a backpack and the other (the hazard-toddler) in a Baby Bjorn.  I was not, however, willing to do the same thing while standing on a ladder with a nail gun. 

Molly considered this.  “But now we could help,” she offered, with all the confidence of someone who is doing pretty well in first grade.

“Well… maybe we could work on it this summer…”

My kid knows me too well.  She heard the wishy-washy hedging.  She took the reins.  “I’ll do it for you,” she declared.

Obviously, my child has higher standards than I do.  This is also true of Jay, in some realms: for example, outdoor equipment, bike parts, and cars.  However, even he seems perfectly happy to ignore a dysfunctional parking brake, to repair a door handle with electrical tape, or to suggest that duct tape is actually the correct and preferable way to deal with rents in tents, and there are rarely fewer than five of his garments strewn about the living room.  As for the last member of our nuclear family, well, tidiness and perfectionism are almost never qualities displayed by Lizzy – a fact that is as maddening as it is endearing.

On the other hand, some of my friends and acquaintances appear to have definitively higher standards than I do.  Dazzlingly higher standards.  They live in homes in which all the wiring is demurely hidden in the walls.  They drive vehicles that still have all their hubcaps, and wear clothes that have not a single patch, tear, stain, or safety pin.  I enter such houses and feel, in truth, a bit lost. 

Much as I admire these folks, I also fear them.  Where are the crooked stacks of magazines that have been accumulating in a corner since 1993?  Where is the pile of “treasures” squirreled away by a child who picks up broken bicycle brakes, lug nuts, and the floor mats from trucks?  How do these families manage to exist without a section of kitchen counter dedicated to objects that don’t quite have a home anywhere else, such as the child-crafted ashtray for the house full of non-smokers, the button that fell off and hasn’t been sewn back on yet, the birthday party invitation that needs an RSVP, and the bike blinkers that will be needed again in just a few short months?  Where are the three jars full of pens and pencils, two thirds of which are either inkless or pointless?  What about  the sleeping bag draped over a chair because it was airing out after the last trip, but is going to be packed up for the next trip soon enough anyhow?  Haven’t these people got a rug that the cat has scratched a few too many times, or a hamper of clean laundry that hasn’t been sorted yet?

I worry that if the Flawless People see the cracks in their own world with such immediacy that they always take instant corrective action, then without a doubt, they also see the smears and smudges in my world – not just the ones that I vaguely know about, but also the ones that I’ve forgotten so completely that I haven’t even mentioned them.  They see my invisible ineptitude.

And therein lies both the contradiction and the salvation: not only am I unlikely to ever live up to these folks’ standards, but I can’t.   Sure, some of the frayed edges of my life are things that I really do see, and do (truly!) deal with, in time.  The laundry ultimately gets put away, sometimes I even weed through the dead pens, and I’m now actively looking for a newer car (pssst -- you got one?)  But if some of the ragged detritus of life becomes invisible to me, maybe that isn’t such a bad thing.  The people who truly want to spend time with us can put on their own hazy goggles, and those who don’t?  Well, at least they won’t ask to borrow my car.

Luckily, it seems that Charlotte is entirely capable of putting on those goggles, and operating within the bounds of our standards, and my car.  The Escort’s parking safety switch short-circuited while she was in command of my vehicle, rendering it inconveniently impossible to shift the automatic transmission out of PARK.  A few 15-amp fuses and a brief online search later, I found that jamming a chopstick down onto the override button did wonders.  Although I did properly repair the issue a few days later, through judicious transactions with actual mechanics, Charlotte didn’t bat an eye at my chopstick.  She also left behind a gift of a slightly stained and faded t-shirt that declares, with a chirpy and obscure cheesiness, “Someone who loves me very much went to Muscat Oman and got me this T-shirt!”  Needless to say, I love it.  This is a woman who understands me – and who does not complain when she falls off our boardwalk into a snowdrift.  And, somehow, through great good luck, I seem to have found a cadre of other fine friends with equally relaxed sensibilities and equally adjustable blind spots.  If they don’t see the wretched refuse of my teeming house, well, I don’t see theirs, either.  We can lift our lamps for one another.

There may, in the last analysis, even be occasional advantages to disrepair, disorder, and never quite getting things done.  My duct-taped bike seat looks a lot less theft-worthy than all the others on the rack.  Children who ingest a bit of dirt may have some slight immune advantage. I never have to waste time locking or unlocking my car.  The tax appraisers seem to have knocked quite a bit off our house value on the basis of it looking so very unfinished, in its half-clad state.  And as for that tricky boardwalk?  Well, if the evil bishop’s pugilistic henchmen come looking for us, we have our own built-in defenses.

“Remember… [SPLASH!]…Walk on the left side…”