Better Off_ Flipping the Switch on Technology - Eric Brende [72]
“That depends,” I answered, “on the kind. With some you can, with some you can’t. A lot of the time, it’s just a matter of accepting the mood itself instead of thinking there’s something wrong with you. If you get up and feel sad, rather than pretend you’re happy or act as if it’s terrible not to be happy, you should say, ‘I’m sad today,’ not act as if you were always supposed to be happy. Otherwise you really tie yourself in knots.”
I went on with my amateur psychobabble, describing studies I’d read on depression among the Lancaster Amish. There were two kinds of depression: “unipolar” and “bipolar.” The first was everyday, “common cold” depression; the second, a more serious organically based malady, sometimes called manic depression. Despite all their modernization, the Lancaster Amish still largely sidestepped the American plague of “unipolar” depression; they were five or ten times less likely to come down with it than the general population. “Bipolar” remained equal among Amish and outsiders.
“How can you tell them apart?”
“I really don’t know exactly, but a psychiatrist could do it most likely.”
Wilbur looked thoughtful, but from here the conversation drifted. The shocks seemed to grow heavier and heavier. We were into oats, and oats, someone said, are half again as heavy as wheat. Guesses at the temperature ranged from eighty-five to ninety-five degrees—it was hard to tell because the humidity was so high. Every sheaf felt like sheer, dead weight—like a bowling ball on the end of a stick. Inertia was all that kept me going. Objects again began to swim hazily before my eyes. Conversation took conscious effort, like the work itself.
It was, frankly, a little depressing.
As the moving mountain of sheaves retreated to the barn, my eyes shifted to two tiny figures in the distance bearing an object that dangled between them. The men tensed in anticipation. The figures enlarged and became teenage girls in white head coverings; the object became an ice chest. Up flew the lid.
Ice cream!
In three large translucent plastic pails, raspberry, praline, and vanilla. Cool, foamy, rich, and sweet, it settled in the stomach, radiating a heavenly chill throughout the torso and upper abdomen.
Last winter’s pond ice, preserved in sawdust, had come to the rescue.
Rejuvenated by the ice cream, conversation rebounded. Did you hear the latest? Someone had told so-and-so personally. You, yes you, can get a pet pig that won’t grow larger than forty pounds. It comes house-trained and costs five hundred dollars.
“Who would want a pet pig?” somebody asked. “Pigs are the dumbest animals.”
“Pigs,” I corrected him, “are smarter than dogs.”
Wilbur shook his head and snorted. “Someone told me that too, and I said, ‘The only thing dumber than pigs is the person who says that dogs are dumber than pigs.’ ”
Squinting to avoid the suspicion in their squinty eyes, I stood my ground: a pig, I pointed out, recently rescued its drowning owner from a pond. Pigs outscore dogs on I.Q. tests.
Wilbur upbraided me: “How can a pig take an I.Q. test?”
A pig’s I.Q., I explained, is determined by its ability to negotiate a maze.
We were now in a long and narrow field that dipped precipitously into a hollow, then rose up again.
Stories of valiant pet dogs began to circulate among the men, who swaggered around the wagon like sailors drunk with boasts. Wilbur, though, speculated quietly. “You might have something,” he said, reverting to the humble tone of his religious upbringing. “Imagine if you raised all your dogs together in a pen the way you do pigs. You have a point there.”
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