Cool, Calm & Contentious - Merrill Markoe [69]
Slowly I began to remember how to do the jazz walk, with its accompanying head bobbing and finger snapping. I remembered that when we learned it, a couple of my friends instantly did it more gracefully than I could. I practiced and practiced, in my room in front of the mirror, to no avail; my friends still looked better doing it than I did. By age fourteen I would become so self-conscious that I would call a moratorium on all dancing, forevermore.
Meanwhile, back in the future present: had I been the victim of a devastating fire that had dismantled everything I’d built in my life, there I would have been, sitting on the floor of my new unfurnished rented apartment, trying to comprehend my loss. Well moisturized, and dressed in sweatpants and a button-down shirt, I would have opened up my “My Treasures!” box, examined my horseback-riding ribbon, and then realized there was nothing left to do but stretch, stretch, stretch, down, up, and clap.
Hopefully there is a learning curve to living through these “annual fire and wind events” and their specter of loss and devastation. Maybe next time I will know how to pack more carefully, remembering to at least take socks, bras, underwear, and shoes. But the experience still coalesces for me in a haunting question: Why don’t I go through my house and throw away the things I know I will have to leave behind when this happens again?
It’s a good question. And one to which I will give some thought, as I turn, clap, and jazz-walk to the back line.
Selfishness 101 (for Dogs)
I GOT UP EARLY, TOOK ONE LOOK AT THE FRONT PAGE OF THE newspaper, and went right back to bed. A short day, but a satisfying one.
The next time I woke up, two hours later, I was so filled with dread and a sense of foreboding that it felt like waking up in the middle of the night, only brighter. Even surrounded on all sides by four large dogs—a relaxation technique lauded the world over for the many health benefits derived from breathing in big lungfuls of pet dander—I was overwhelmed by anxiety. That’s the kind of bracing start a perusal of the morning news can offer a person.
Today I was fretting about how the BP oil spill had not just officially become the worst environmental disaster in our country’s history, doing untold damage to an exacting and fragile ecosystem via massive quantities of both oil and toxic dispersant, but also had the ability to corrupt the whole food chain and lead to international environmental contamination, social chaos, governmental collapse, and, eventually, an empty-eyed thug with a tattoo that he’d carved into his own forehead busting down my front door and forcing me to turn my house into his special Malibu breeding farm for morons. I was furious at the way yet another bunch of jowly white men in overpriced casual wear had been in too big of a hurry to devise a worst-case-scenario plan before they’d drilled in the only Gulf of Mexico the planet would ever have. I was also so pissed off and terrified of their plans to drill in the future that I felt envious of the pleasure religious people must take in imagining the bunch of them writhing eternally in the torments of hell. Damn! Something was actually making me wish I believed in hell!
I rolled over and pulled the covers over my head, drowning in terrifying images: me, in a faux-leather Mad Max outfit, my arms and face covered with mud, roaming through a landscape of frenzied mutants and rubble, armed with nothing but a grapefruit knife and the remaining two-thirds of that huge container of flashlight batteries I bought at Costco.
I decided I wouldn’t get out of bed until I could figure out some concrete