City Mouse Country Mouse

November 28, 2016

Greetings from the edge of town,

Recently I met a woman at a party and in the course of getting to know each other she told me where she lived.  I was wistfully envious of her, a term I use whenever envying something I have no real knowledge of.  I usually save this level of envy for automobiles that have a heater and a tape player that works.

In this example, the town the woman mentioned is reputed to be a charming village setting with interesting shops and a quaint main street all nestled in a bucolic setting.  Good schools connected by well-maintained streets to beautiful neighborhoods lined with homes of such quality one would never find them in one’s own town.

The woman continued; “But I’d rather live in Chicago.  It’s my favorite place in the world.”  This intrigued me so I asked what it was about the city she admired so much that she would trade it for the pastoral paradise in which she lived.  While she was responding I wandered off in my mind to see how I would fill in the answer myself.  And that made me think of Aesop.

I will pause here to say that usually when I ask a question I pay attention to the person answering with such dedicated focus one might think I had been hypnotized.  I only mention this in case there is ever a conversation in which I am involved with you where you think I am not listening, but I am.  Honestly.  I heard everything you said.

In Aesop’s fable ‘The Town Mouse and the Country Mouse’, which I have read in the original Greek, we learn that sometimes one environment, however wistfully envied, is often good for one mouse but perhaps not for the other.  In the interest of full disclosure I should explain that I don’t actually understand Greek, original or otherwise, and in spite of the mandate of cheap humor to which I am bound, I will not use the phrase ‘It’s all Greek to me.’ But I will justify my earlier statement by saying that I have read the words but did not understand their meaning until much later when I read them in English, which may not be original.

I like Chicago.  When I was wondering if I would like living there I envisioned the hustle and then the requisite bustle.  Good pizza.  Night life. Interesting architecture.  Lots of museums and parks.  Access to good coffee.  I remembered getting a cupcake at a place called ‘Sprinkles’.  And armed with that deep research I could imagine living there.

I have spent time in most big cities in our country.  Explored their nooks and crannies, run their streets, found where the locals eat.  I think I have some feel for what it might be like to live in a metropolis.  The noise of traffic.  The crush of people in elevators, in line for bagels, in subways, in the apartment above you, taking your parking place.  The high cost of food, of apartments, of coffee.  And the beauty of diversity, the interesting music, the towering skylines, the townhouses and lofts and cobblestone streets.  The corner bistro, the sidewalk café, the secret green spaces, wedges of nature among concrete.

And I have spent time in small towns of all sizes; the spectrum from stop sign intersections surrounded by miles of corn to train towns to bedroom communities braced against the burgeoning metropolis they serve.  Logging towns turned into respites for big city parolees, or planned rows of little boxes on the hillside and they all look the same. 

And in all the places in between where there are only neighbors who see each other at the general store or the co-op.  The little scraps of people in secluded mountain towns where the only sign of humanity is the smell of wood smoke or a sign that has the local population written in chalk.

I have been in these places on a visitor’s visa, and I know it’s not the same as living there.  But I have an imagination and I can sense what it’s like to be a resident of Enid or Austin or La Jolla or Seattle.  I know I could live there; it’s easy to know since I am not saddled with the burden of familiarity, and I am inspired by my wistful enviousness.  I could love New York City, I could leave my heart in San Francisco.  I could live off the grid.  I could live over a bakery.

 I love meeting the people in the places I pass through, and among that great and varied throng there is always a subset that willingly shares with me that they would rather be living somewhere else.  Thankfully we don’t all get our wish in this regard or else we would all be somewhere else and strangers would slowly be getting bored with where we were from. 

The woman who would rather live in Chicago had a ready list of what made it her kind of town.  Chief among its attractions was this: ‘My sister lives there.’  See, I was listening. 

Ironically the town I live in is so much like her little town I was so wistfully envious of that you might think that I described it that way on purpose to carry the irony further.  I did, but it’s still true. 

Big city, small town, condo in the mountains, one room third-floor-walk-up in Harlem, drafty farmhouse in the dustbowl, damp brick shotgun bungalow by the levy.  Each comes with an experience and a price.  Occasionally it is sensible to look at that price and make sure it is worth our paying it.  Sometimes the reasons to stay or move are sensible and well thought out and sometimes it’s your sister.

Go where you will, but remember; wherever you go, there you are.

Hope this finds you at home,

David

Cell

November 21, 2016

Greetings from the parolee,

Recently I was in jail.  It was voluntary, and so I walked in with choice and carried it with me until I chose to walk out.

As many times as I have visited there you might think that it would become discouraging.  There is a perpetual line of men and women to fill the cells.  Most are new faces, many are back for a refresher in whatever lesson you gain while incarcerated.  Which, by the way, is not the lesson that makes the line shorter.

The inmates, sometimes men, sometimes women, will ask for prayers.  In that time they will give a glimpse of their lives, and I get a page of their stories.  Inevitably someone will talk about their sentence, or the system, or their dreams, or their regrets, or the day that will finally allow them to get out and see their family.  It is often a moving experience.  Strangely it gives me hope.  But the most tangible result of this time with the men in orange is this renewed perspective.

The inmates are locked up.  They talk about what that loss of freedom costs them.  I have heard it, seen it, smelled it.  I have stood up, with my visitor’s badge barely clinging to me, and felt it already seeping into my skin as I leave.

I walk to the door and the deputy who sees me presses a button and there is a grinding, buzzing noise and the door is unlocked and I can walk out.  And every time, every single time, I am relieved.  And reminded.

In that moment outside, I can fully appreciate what I am given every morning I wake up.  And then I go about my life, slowly sanding down the gift of perspective, until there is only a fine dust to remind me of what I learned.

I move around in the population which does not wear orange jumpsuits.  And I get a page from their stories.  There are real pains, regrets, there are challenges, there are crises, and chaos and sadness and loss.  Among all of that though, among this population, in which I am counted as a member, there is a freedom that few of us recognize, let alone feel gratitude for.

Many of us are serving a life sentence in cells of our own making.  We have put in place, bar by bar, the restrictions in our daily lives that keep us from finding what will bring us a full, satisfying life.  We think the richness we have been hoping for is just beyond the bars.

One bar at a time.  Regrets.  Envy.  Self pity.  Procrastination.  Guilt.  Fear.  Grudges.  Resentment.

Something goes wrong, maybe we break a rule, or we are unfairly charged and we go in the hole; solitary confinement.  Sometimes we tell others about being in the hole, they commiserate, but we know unless they have been in this particular cell, which would be impossible, they don’t understand.  So solitary becomes more solitary.

Some of us think we will get a better deal with good behavior.  We try to earn the freedom we are already given every day.  I’m a big fan of good behavior, don’t get me wrong.  But trying to deserve this freedom is a never ending staircase. 

Turns out the cells, even the ones we construct, are unlocked.  We test the door, it doesn’t move easily so we sit down and wait for enough time to pass that we qualify for what we want.  And we are not even sure what our sentence is, really.  So each morning we look thru the bars and pine for the freedom that we already have.

Wait.  Don’t roll your eyes and sigh about this.  This is not a metaphor for someone else to figure out.  This is the same thing we are all faced with.

Here’s what I know: I walked in and out of jail armed with choice.  It was a gift, I didn’t earn it or probably deserve it but it’s mine.  I walked out into the free air and then I was faced with a million other choices.  Starting with what to do with the freedom I have.

And each day my plans and dreams intersect with a world that was not designed to make life easy, but to teach and challenge, to make me adapt and bring out the best of what I have.  And whatever I am presented with, I am armed with the same gift; choice. I get to choose what happens next. 

“Be thine own palace, or the world's thy jail.” John Donne

Hope this finds you pushing harder,

David

Absentee Voters

November 7, 2017

Greetings from the poles,

Tomorrow will mark an important milestone in our country: we will stop complaining about the election and start complaining about whoever is president.  It’s kind of a tradition.

But, sadly, some citizens will not be able to take part in this tradition. 

There have been a great many polls asking why people skip going to the polls.  The result is almost always the same:  I don’t like the candidates.  I am too busy.  My vote doesn’t matter because of the electoral college/my wife votes for the other candidate/illegal aliens/the Republicans or the Democrats will shred it/I’m disenfranchised.  I don’t want to show my ID because then the Government will find me. I’ll be out of town (but don’t tell the Government or they will find me).

There are a variety of rules that allow people to go to the polls without actually going to them.

And yet people do not go in staggering numbers. 

For purposes of argument, which this will undoubtedly provoke, let’s say there are 220 million citizens of legal voting age in our country.  If we follow the example of the last presidential election, then approximately 43% of voters will stay home. 

So that means that approximately 9.3 million people will not vote.  Or to put it another way, that is like everyone in New Hampshire, Rhode Island, Nebraska, Vermont, Alaska, South Dakota, North Dakota, Delaware, Montana,  and the city of Scottsdale Arizona, all skip voting.

According to some recent studies, less than 50% of voters could identify these states on a map, and except for its residents no one knows where Scottsdale is.  So in more approachable terms, if you combined all of the people who didn’t vote, they would occupy approximately 23,000,000 cubic feet. Can you picture that?

How about this: If you laid all the non-voters end to end they would reach from the North Pole the South Pole, but they would have to stretch their hands over their heads.  In other words if they don’t make some effort then they would not reach the poles.  (See what I did there?)

This is a convoluted way of bringing the issue to your attention, with the hopes we might be able to do something about it.  Our fellow Americans are being deprived of their constitutional right to gripe about the how the county is run.  The only way we can change this is to give them a reason to vote, so they can grumble about it for the next four years.

In some countries it is mandatory to vote, which is one way to get people to do things.   I know, I know, you can’t tell Americans what to do.  There would be a rebellion, an uprising, people would turn out in the tens of millions to protest.  There would be riots, insurrection, wholesale routing of the entire elected body.  See how that could work?  So, one way to get people to vote would be to tell them if they don’t vote then they will HAVE to vote in order to not vote in the future. 

The other possibility is to pass the Use It or Lose It amendment.  If you fail to vote then you are not allowed to vote.  That would get some attention.  Imagine if we told everyone in New Hampshire, Rhode Island, Nebraska, Vermont, Alaska, South Dakota, North Dakota, Delaware, Montana, and the city of Scottsdale Arizona that they were not allowed to vote; there would be such a hue and cry you could hear it at the North Pole.

The answer is not more civics classes in junior high, or creating even more nonprofit organizations with arcane acronyms to educate the non-voting populace.  (Dave Berry would say that ‘Arcane Acronyms’ would be a great name for a rock band.)  There is already a proven way to get people out in long lines when they should be at work.

Powerball.  Earlier this year this super lottery sold 635 million tickets for a $1.5 billion dollar prize.  That’s like 3 tickets per eligible voter.  Imagine if the government promised a Powerball ticket for every person that voted.  People would be lined up for miles to cast their ballot.   Naturally the government would take back half of the prize money in taxes, and the rest of the cost could be charged against social security or hidden in the military budget. 

And the winner could move to a different country if they didn’t like how things were going. 

I’m just full of good ideas.  Maybe I should run for office.  I’ll bet that would get people out to vote in a hurry.

Hope this finds you making your mark,

David

Copyright © 2016 David Smith