The Accidental Voice

It happens every year. As we descend into shorter days and longer nights. As the earth’s axis tilts the northern hemisphere away from the sun and the light and radiant heat strike the U.S. at a more oblique angle, things change. The air cools, water condenses and when the temperature gets cold enough, it freezes and floats to the ground robbing the air of moisture and humidity. Dryer means more static electricity. And more static electricity means more getting lit up any time you touch a remotely conductive surface.

Albert Einstein once posited that if we evolved properly we would eventually exist as pure energy. Imagine that, all of us just blobs of light or sparkling spheres floating around. The fashionistas would certainly figure out a way for us to change our colors and we wouldn’t need to drive any more, we’d just float to where we needed to go. Or better yet, we could probably use the theory of quantum mechanics and simple just appear there using super position and time travel. We wouldn’t need to eat (my guess is we could subsist on sunshine), we wouldn’t need our fancy cars or the gas to run them (if we did need cars, we could just jack in and run them ourselves) and we wouldn’t need anything else but energy. So as long as that big fat red giant was shining, we’d be good. No need to work or do anything else, really since the evolutionary process would take us beyond needing to understand the universe, since we’d now be a part of it. We would be everything and everything would be us. Kind of like we are now, but we’d actually be aware of it. We’d just float around, interacting with each other as energy. Some would simply pulse and flash in some kind of highly advance conversation and some would interact as Steve Gutenberg and Tahnee Welch did in Cocoon. That would be interesting.

However, as fascinating as that mental exercise is, that’s not the way it is now. We’re still bags of bones, our skin still gets dry and papery, we itch and turning on the lights becomes a new adventure coming up with all manner of turning on the lights. The back of the hand, a hip, an elbow, anything. Anything to prevent the static shock from striking at the point on where some of the most sensitive nerves exist. I hit the light with my knuckle and try to swipe quickly by, thinking I’ll beat the electricity before it gets out of the thing I’m touching. But that’s folly since my hand is not going to be traveling at the speed of light any time soon. Not until I am a ball of energy anyway. So, as Winter progresses, reaching toward anything remotely electrical is a tentative, apprehension laden affair.

Even though our skin seems as if it’s made of paper during this time of year, the inside is still about 80% water. The dryness in the air makes it harder for electrical build up to disperse and within that paper sack that’s 80% water are the same salts that are in sports drinks. Electrolytes. There’s a reason they’re called that. High school chemistry class taught us that when NaCl (erm, salt) is put in water, the Na and Cl separate leaving the Cl part with a negative charge and the Na part with a positive charge. We all happen to be electrically charged because there are a whole bunch of other salts that do the same thing and they are in there, too. This makes us all really excellent conductors of electricity. And because of that we’re pretty good at collecting that electricity up. The more charge we have, the more that charge wants to get out. What better way than to jump from us to something connected to the giant battery we call earth. Zap!

When I was a kid, I liked to mess with electronics. Mostly it was pulling things apart and looking at all the miniature cities rising out of the circuit boards. But I learned some things, too. I learned was that capacitors were components that store up certain amounts of electrical charge. They are often what make a light blink, releasing energy each time they becomes charged to some specific limit before charging up again. I watched a friend use a pair of pliers to cross the two leads on a capacitor that was the size of a soda can. They spot welded to it! Capacitors store energy. Lesson learned.

My friend and I also figured out that if we carried a capacitor around the house holding one lead, shuffled our feet and then touched the other lead to a lamp or other grounded metal, the static shock would go into the capacitor, not us. After a few times doing this, depending on the size of the capacitor (and never with one the size of a soda can), the capacitor would start crackling which we correctly assumed meant it was “full”. But that charge had nowhere to go since the two leads weren’t connected up to anything. At least not yet.

That’s where my sister came in. Or when we weren’t feeling ornery, we’d have a duel. Like a knife fight with the leads of a tiny electrical component as the knife. Once both leads made contact with skin all the electricity we’d stored in it would be released and all the tiny static shocks would become one big shock. SNAP! It would light a person up or just make a cool blue light. Electricity is fun, Mr. Wizard! Here, hold this.

So I am a giant capacitor. And in these cooler, darker days we ourselves become more efficient capacitors, storing up energy in our electrolyte ridden bodies. Storing it up for when we reach to turn on a lamp or switch on an overhead light.

Since I’m not leaving the beautiful, but dry, climes of Colorado any time soon, I have resigned myself to swinging my hand quickly by a light switch (like a fool), leaning my leg against the bead on the corner of two walls (the paint, texture and my pants leg seem to lessen the blow) or simply gutting it out and going for it, watching to see how big the blue light it this time. I have resigned myself to being an excellent conductor of electricity. I have resigned myself to being a human Tesla coil.

I’m not a big fan of branding. I have a tendency to try to remove, cover or otherwise erase the brand names and logos that appear on the things I have, wear or buy. I’m not a big fan of items that do just one thing either. What if that one thing is something you only do once in a while. That appliance or tool or whatever is just taking up space the rest of the time. Seems a waste to me.

So, there are very few items in our kitchen that do just one thing (despite all those infomercials telling me I need this or that that does just this one thing, allegedly, the best and only way it can be done.) I remove the little plastic plate or sticker that has the car dealer’s name on it. I remove the license plate frame the dealer automatically puts on my car. I’m not being paid to advertise for them, why would I do it for free. I have also removed all the branding (except the stuff etched into the plastic cover) on my cell phone. I hacked into it and changed it so it did what I wanted it to do, not what they told me it should do.

I have not read the fine print on my phone so am not totally sure, but it seems right that I can mess with my phone and if I “brick” it, well, that’s my problem isn’t it. My little borg ear piece I used on another phone now works, I can download images from it and upload my own rings tones to it without having to go through their systems and paying for the data usage. And I like it that way. My boys’ had the first Nintendo DS systems before the light was put in a later model. They couldn’t be played in the car if it was dark outside. So, we put one in ourselves from a small kit we got online. Why? Because we could.

After all it’s mine right? Possession is nine tenths of the law. Isn’t it? Some would argue that I don’t really own that phone since its use is dependent on the network to which it connects which I definitely do not own. Intuit once told me I don’t own the Quickbooks software I use for my business. I begged to differ and offered for the nice customer service rep to come and try to get it from me.

It’s that kind of corporate “arrogance” (they don’t mean it) that makes me want to do whatever I like with whatever I have paid good money for. Why not? It may say “warranty void if opened/modified/unscrewed” but if it still works afterward and I don’t mess with the stuff they have control of, why not? It’s kind of fun stepping outside the comfort zone of the instruction manual and admonishments you find in the front of it.

Yes, usually, there are rules for a reason. After all, anarchy doesn’t usually end well. But sometimes being “bad” feels pretty good (if it keeps you up nights, you took it too far.) Sometimes making something do what you truly need it to do — above and beyond what the company you got it from says they want it to do; usually so they can make a profit on the “other” things it actually can do once you buy the add ons — is something many feel they should be able to take on.

Have you ever broken the rules? Not broken the law, just broken the rules; actually taken the adage that “rules were meant to be broken” and gone ahead and done it. Maybe you’ve taken a photo where it says no photography. Or maybe you’ve torn the tag off a mattress or pillow (ok, that’s not really a rule, but with all that legalese on those tags it feels a little criminal doesn’t it.) Or maybe you’ve applied Jailbreak to your iPhone (I don’t own one so don’t know about this particular hack but it sounds liberating).

The manual with my heart rate monitor watch says the battery shouldn’t be changed by anyone other than a “qualified technician.” I did it anyway. The outside of some electronics say “no serviceable parts.” Servicable? No. Modifiable? There’s only one way to find out. Look at the first five to ten pages of anything that plugs in, has sensitive parts, is sharp and moves fast or is otherwise associated with electricity, technology or building materials. These pages are usually diatribes of legal spew that were most likely created to discourage the morons who use their vacuum cleaner as a hair brush or their blow dryer as a cooking utensil from suing the maker into the ground.

But what about us regular folks? Those with brains and a penchant for questioning everything, or at least wondering how that hell that thing over there on the counter works?

I say, make it yours. Make it do what you want it to do or additional things beyond that for which it was intended. If it’s safe (for the love of pete, use a fry pan for those eggs) then I say go ahead. Give it a shot. I can tell you first hand, doing so gives you the feeling that you have control of things in your world. It’s a karmic slap in the faces of the marketers and corporate lawyers and whomever else feels the need to dictate what you do, how you think and what you do with your possessions. Make that cell phone do your bidding, take apart something and use those parts to make or fix something else. Or search on the net, find a DIY site and pick something that looks interesting to do. Then do it with just what you have around the house.

There is in fact a whole group of people who do this kind of thing. A relatively new magazine called Make is targeted to those who want to find new ways to use old stuff, or DIY ways of making things only big companies have the resources to make (anything from robots to a wallet made of duct tape…really.) And it’s not really about taking control and being “bad”. It’s more about tinkering and creating and feeling happy in the end that you took that journey to make something with your own two hands. And even if that thing becomes a “sculpture” instead of an automated toaster, it’s really the journey that matters and the success of getting to the end, anyway.

There’s also a website called instructables.com where folks like this congregate. It’s like a catalog of “things to do on a rainy day.” It is full of ideas of how to make stuff out of other stuff. I have made two different kinds of video camera stablizers (one a “steady cam” type apparatus and one a version of something called a “Fig Rig“) out of copper pipe and PVC. They cost me about $30 when professional equipment of the same sort of thing costs a hundred times more. My boys and I once made a model of a light saber out of plumming supplies and posted it on Instructables.com. We had the best time making it and they love them. They cost about $33 a piece which isn’t the $15 you can spend on a cheaper plastic one in the toy store. The way we did it just feels better. (full disclosure: The light saber project was published recently in a book called The Best of Instructables by O’Reilly in a joint venture with Make and Instructables.com. I do not, however, make any money off the sale of Make subscriptions or the book. I just happened to think they’re really cool.)

So if you need something done around the house for which you could easily buy the solution. If you have a few hours to maybe do it yourself, then see if there’s something around that you can modify, open, take apart, rework or combine with something else to do the same thing. You might save money, you might have a lot of fun doing it and you might have a scuplture for the family room. But there’s a good chance you will have fun doing it, whatever it is.

Steve is a boy of six. He is a nice boy by all accounts and isn’t one to get into trouble. I don’t know him. I just know someone who does. But who he is isn’t important. What happened is.

It was after school on a typical Spring afternoon. Steve was finishing up his day and getting ready to go. Looking at the clock he realized it was later than he’d thought. He was going to miss his bus, so he darted out of the school toward the bus loop. Just as he arrived, he saw his bus pulling out of the parking lot. Worry stole over him because he knew his mother would be mad if he was late coming home. She might even be mad he’d missed the bus even if it was an honest mistake.

His only alternative was to get home on foot and get there fast. So he took off running heading for the corner at the end of the street. All he could think about was that he was late. Plus he didn’t want to get in trouble, so he dashed into the street. At the same time, a pickup truck was turning onto the same street. Steve was struck and dragged under the truck for thirty feet.

Thankfully, Steve is fine. He spent a few weeks in the hospital and there was concern there would be nerve damage in his pelvic region, but there’s not. I have heard nothing else, but the indication last I did hear was that he would make a full recovery. What a great thing the human body. How incredible it is the power it has to heal itself when those on the outside think it can’t.

During his hospital stay and when things were touch and go, a lot of people began to wonder why or how this could happen. And then someone said something that struck me as a little bit odd. Referring to the news that Steve would be OK and would recover, he said “Someone was looking out for him.” Being a fairly religious person, obviously, he meant that someone to be God.

But I suddenly found myself perplexed. If someone was looking out for him, where was that someone when the driver was picking up his keys? Couldn’t He have made the driver drop his keys, or forget where he put them? It would have only needed to be a few seconds of delay. Couldn’t He have created a confusion that caused the driver to return to the house to check the stove. Something subtle. Or remember something else he needed to bring? Why look after Steve *after* he’d be rendered nearly dead? And if subtlty wasn’t necessary, maybe just stop the truck cold a few feet from Steve, the front end crumpling against an unseen force.

It was such a strange thing to me. To hear someone say this and feeling, knowing, that I completely didn’t buy that thought process. That little boy got very badly hurt and no matter how you look at it, it was not at all good. It was a bad thing. Very bad, and no good can come out of it (other than Steve thanking his lucky stars when, later, having more wisdom he can reflect on how lucky he was.) And I also think no one healed Steve but Steve. He wasn’t done coloring. He wasn’t done riding his bike and he wasn’t done dreaming about playing football for the Broncos. Steve deep down was watching out for himself and Steve repaired Steve. That’s what I think.

The next week, more news came of recovery and someone told of speculation by one of Steve’s relatives that the mother was being punished because Steve had been “unplanned” and she didn’t treat him very well. She loved him, but with a young son like that when she thought “she was done”, it was posited that maybe she felt trapped. Who knows, I don’t even know the whole of any part of their lives or story, let alone the inner workings of Steve’s mother’s mind. So I am more speculating than not and simply rummaging around in my own mind to reconcile something unreconcilable. I don’t judge anything…just wonder.

But it was shocking that the conjecture was that Steve was some pawn in a scheme to get the mother to straighten up and fly right. How can this be? Who would use an innocent six-year-old to teach some mother a lesson? That’s just sick!

I asked a friend about this dilemna and she said it’s important to have faith that all things happen for a reason. And in that faith, the reason doesn’t need to be presented immediately or ever. Some might say horrible events like this are tests of faith. Maybe. But it still doesn’t sit well. And I may never know, but I do know all things are connected. Thinking in a vacuum can be a sketchy proposition. It seems folly to just look at a single event and say it happened on it’s own as a singularity. Time is not made up of discrete parts that can be broken up and held out on their own. It is a smooth ribbon of events all flowing into each other. Life doesn’t happen in a vacuum. It just doesn’t. If it’s thought to, reasons tend to get overlaid upon tragic events that don’t make sense in the continuum of time and logic. And for various reasons mostly psychological and based on my own life experiences, I tend to ask a lot of questions and continually evaluate what I’m looking at to make sure I am seeing it as it truly is. Call it situational awareness, to use the vernacular of aviation.

A friend died when some moron flew his plane into the Pentagon and my brother died when I was four due to a hill, a truck and a faulty or unset parking break. No one has ever been able to tell me why. Because sometimes there is no reason. We are not actually bullet proof and ten feet tall, things just are and sometimes those things just suck.

Whether you call it fate, faith, belief, accepting, putting it on His hands, Karma or whatever else, for me (and this is my thought and mine alone), I prefer reasons and processes and cause and effect relationships whenever I can get ‘em. Even if they amount to life just handing me a steaming pile. Some would actually call that faith. So I guess that’s my faith and I will ask questions of everything to understand better.

I suppose all of the explaining and reasoning and rationalization is just a way for us to feel like we’re in control or someone’s at the helm (even if it’s only our own self-conscious.) Because if no one’s driving this train, where’s it going and what, by the way, I am doing on it?

You’re watching TV. An attractive couple lies in a bed breathless and obviously happy. They hold each other and whisper sweet nothings. Planting a quick kiss on her lover’s cheek, the woman says she’ll be right back, pulls to comforter to cover her nakedness and slides out of bed. On the way out of the room the comforter slips revealing her bare backside.

People are up in arms.

Two performers are singing a song with subtle erotic intent. It is a song about a man desiring the woman and promising her they’ll be together before the song finishes. With the final assertion that he’ll have her naked by the end of it, he reaches over and strips away part of her bodice to reveal a bare breast, a star covers her nipple.

People lose their freakin’ minds!

A man is being chased by the evil doppleganger of a female character. He has information that she needs to become more powerful. The gap closes and the man with the briefcase is eventually cornered amongst the desks and file cabinets of a dimly lit office building. The event of his death is hinted at just before the commercial break. The next scene is a shot of him lying face up, eyes open. His feet are up by his head because he has been cut in half and he lies in a very red and disturbingly large pool of blood.

No one says a thing.

Jack Bauer chases the badies each week. He gets them every time. Each 24 hour period we see him consistently save the country from becoming a smoking hole. And in the pursuit of that justice he must employ any means necessary. In fact, on a single season of “24″ there were 57 graphic depictions of torture.

Barely a peep.

Let’s be clear people. We, as animals, are here for only two things at our core. To survive and to make more of us. The first makes us eat, breath, sense trouble and scamper away or fight back if we get in a jam. The second makes us make love and desire that act in order to further the species (granted this is all an over simplification but it furthers my thesis, it’s my story and I’m sticking with it.)

All the rest, the cars, money, power, possessions, clothes, power ties, titles and perceived influence over others is all window dressing. If someone kills another person simply to gain something that person has, it is not because of the two reasons above, it is something that is many degrees removed (although might be tracable to, say, survival in some way). But that’s the story that leads on the local evening news.

So tell me, why is it OK for TV to have depictions of violence, very disturbing violence, but not OK for depictions of love and kindness and gentle intimacy? People absolutely love watching boxing or Mixed Martial Arts (and they pay huge sums of money to do it) in which two people go at it with no holds barred, bare-fisted pummeling of each other. Every Sunday we watch as giants slam into each other and slam each other to the ground in order for one team to take the other’s land away (George Carlin posited, once, that it was simply a weekly reenactment of the white man’s treatment of the Indians.) My wife and I have speculated that it is only a matter of time before the days of the gladiators are brought back. And MMA is pretty close as it is. Such hostility, such anger and such seeming hatred.

Where does this come from? A romantic comedy about two friends who are in love but don’t know it yet, and decide the only way to get out of the financial hole their in is to make an erotic movie gets an “NC-17″ rating (Zack and Miri Make a Porno. Oooh, it has porno in the title and shows naked people.) A movie, the fifth in a wildly popular series, about a guy who wears someone else’s facial skin as a mask and tortures people in a serial rampage gets a rating of “R” (Saw V. No questions asked.)

Does anyone else see the madness in this? The sheer and absolutely stunning imbalance? Last time I checked no one was walking around in tall hats with buckles on their shoes, but holy moly it seems the puritans have come home to roost. As if the crusades were OK, but making love to someone is, oh heavens me, something to cover up, close a door on and make sure you never discuss in public. Just last night we saw three ads for video games that were rated M and had quite a bit of violence. One actually showed an image of a hand with only a bloody stump where the thumb used to be. All before 9 pm. I saw no naked butts though. My land o’ Goshen, no.

We are all naked under our clothes and we all grow up wanting (needing?) to make love with someone. But we are not all serial killers, torturers and violent to our core. I, for one, would much rather see someone naked on television than see a man cut in half in a pool of his own blood. And I would definitely prefer that over watching two guys beat each other to a bloody pulp for sport. OK, full frontal nudity might be taking it too far, especially if it’s a guy, because, face it fellas, women have the upper hand on this one. And too, it could be disturbing to young children so some decorum and logic are necessary here. But come on. What’s the appeal of all this violence?

There is enough violence in the world in reality and enough people willing to use that violence or the threat of it to bend the “people” to their will. Despite all that, for some reason, people love to go see more of it in fantasy. And when Cher says “F**k ‘em” about the critics who said she wouldn’t last (a case currently before the Supreme Court) or a naked breast is shown for but a second and then quickly covered, people lose their minds, the FCC is all up in arms and the telephones at the complaints departments light up. Lawsuits are filed and there’s all this tut tuting about how offensive a word or naked body part is. And a bloody thumbless hand isn’t?

Who has instilled this fear of love and sex in our society? Who has decided that the very thing that makes us human is a disagreeable thing? It’s not! Who felt it necessary to cover up something so magnificent and wonderous and lovely as the human body while allowing violence, rage, hatred and anger to flood our senses unabated?

We live in a society where it’s shocking when a rich heiress is seen naked and sexual on a video tape (but oh, how the networks love to show snippets and how people love to search the internet for it. That’s for another blog maybe) but it’s not shocking that Blockbuster displays incredibly disturbing DVD covers throughout its stores. DVD covers for the Saw series and other violent horror films. Images of a girl being tortured, realistic dead people or knives with copious amounts of blood dripping from them. Images of pale hands with broken and bloodied finger nails. Images that, when seen by a young boy of 9, produce nightmares for a week. We don’t sit in wonderment when those DVD covers are willingly displayed, but covers of DVDs that depict a lot of naked people are relegated to the back room or not carried at all. And while we’re at it, I am not sure if it’s more disturbing that it’s being shown or that there is someone in the world who is capable of actually thinking this stuff up.

Let me pause here and say that 99% of adult videos take it way too far, are fantastically unrealistic and have a tendency to debase the actors or treat both the men and women as simple objects and not humans. And they’re kind of silly, but this is not what I’m talking about here, and although I have not seen many of them, it doesn’t take a genius to see a pattern. This particular genre is a study unto itself.

There is a story about an anthropologist who goes to visit a tribe of Indians in an arid part of the southwest. Every morning the shaman goes out to the rim of the canyon and sings to water. Without fail, as the sun rises, his songs in praise of water drift out over the vast expanse. Every song is different. The anthropologist thinks this a bit odd so asks the shaman why there are so many songs about water. The shaman answers that it is the thing they would miss the most if they were without it. It is the one thing they most need in their lives but have very little of. The shaman also mentions that he’s noticed a lot of the songs in America are about love and that seems odd to him.

So if we crave the affections of others and need love and tenderness so badly that we create song after song after song about it; if we work so hard to connect with others and connect with that special person with whom we wish to share the joys of intimacy; if we step back a second and realize that physical intimacy tends to be the underpinning of many of the things we see around us, how is it there is such a celebration and popularity of the violent, the angry, the visceral. Why are horror movies given a rating of “R” without a thought but when a movie depicts a little more than general nudity, anguished decision making, wringing of hands and arguing between the director and MPAA ensue? Movies are boycotted even. Kids are taught that sex and intimacy are dirty and are things to be embarrassed about. That the human body should not be celebrated but covered up and hidden. It just seems all so skewed to me. So out of balance.

Would that our songs could be about water…

There are some things in life that you experience young but only fully understand when the wisdom of age has layered enough of it’s dust upon your heart. Over the past decade, there have been more than just a few times which, for me, bear this consideration out. One such instance has to do with newspapers, AT&T, a money changer and a 12-year-old, toe-headed boy who was just not aware enough because he just wasn’t old enough.

From the time I sold newspapers at the old AT&T building in downtown Wayne, PA until now in my current self-employment and business ownership, I have only been fired once. And it was from that paper selling job (I wouldn’t call it a paper route because I just stood there and sold papers, no route to follow.) Of the 15-20 positions I have held, I have always kept myself to a standard of decency, hard work and integrity that has been a pretty fine way to operate. ( Well, mostly anyway…there was that one time, but that’s, perhaps, another story.) This paper selling job was no different.

I would practice making change with one of those metal change holders you hook to your belt with the cool levers that shot coins out the bottom. I’d pretend someone handed me a five or a one and would whip out the proper change; quickly subtracting thirty-five cents and making up the difference from the stacks of coins in the tubes just large enough to hold quarters, nickels, dimes and pennies. I would practice folding the paper in a tri-fold as quickly as I could and pretend to hand it off as I made change. While standing there when I saw them come out from around the corner, I would see if I could tell what money they were carrying so I could get a head start on making change. And although I sometimes got distracted by counting the cars on the train that occasionally passed across the street and on the other side of the parking lot, I’d be attentive and serious about my job.

And so it went and I loved my job. It was simple, it was indoors in the lobby of the red brick building with the tall tower. A tower so high you could see if from just about everywhere in town. The red brick building that had darker brick squares on the lower floors because of a spate of smoke bombings some years before (I was never really sure why that happened…too young, but I knew the best parts of the story…smoke and bombs.)

And every day there would be a stack of papers waiting for me when I rode up on my bike. I would sell just every one, most days, but sometimes I would have a few left over. That was OK. I had a procedure for that. I’d ask the guard from Pinkerton to pull out his little card with the commission conversion chart on it and I’d take what was mine. Then I’d put the rest in my other pocket, ride down to Rexall Drug and walk to the back of the store. There, I’d put the driver’s money into a white envelope, wrap the envelope up and put it into a mortar and pestle that was on top of the back shelves behind the pharmacist’s counter. The extra papers (if I had any) would go below than on another shelf at the bottom. And out I would go…a few dollars richer and proud to be doing what I was asked to do. Doing it right as rain every single time.

So, I could never understand why every once in a while, the driver would say I shorted him some money. Every once in a while, he’d say there weren’t enough papers left for the money I’d left in that envelope in the mortar and pestle. And I was sure I’d counted right. I began counting twice and it was right. But I kept being told I was short.

Then one day, the paper called my mom and said they no longer needed me. I cried and was sad for a while. I was so proud of my job. And I had always thought they let me go because they didn’t need to sell papers there any more. The Philadelphia Bulletin folded not too many years later so maybe it was because they were trying to cut costs. After all, I was only making them maybe ten or fifteen bucks a day…nothing really. And eventually, it faded into the dark reaches of memory. It became an insignificant time that had very little meaning other than being one of those books on the shelves of your mind.

But then one day a few years ago, it occurred to me what might have happened. I don’t know what made me think of it, nor could I even begin to think of why it mattered. It was just there.

I will never have any proof but I became convinced that the nice man behind the counter (he was probably 25, maybe 30 years old), was taking papers and perhaps others were too. After all, they were sitting there in the back out in the open and the papers the store sold were up front.

What’s to stop someone from just putting one into their stuff to take home. But, then again, anyone could have come along and made the mistake of thinking they were for sale, too. And maybe that’s what happened. Maybe the nice man behind the counter wasn’t being mean and stealing my papers. I will never know for sure and it doesn’t really matter. And maybe it’s not resolved all that much. But I felt better when I thought of those possibilities. Maybe honest mistake, maybe theft, maybe my mind fabricating something that never was. I was relieved to think that my diligence wasn’t for naught and I had done everything right and I had counted properly.

Connecting the dots of a past uncertainty with newly found wisdom of age may not always quite solve a mystery, vindicate a wrong or suddenly bring clarity to something that has always caused confusion. But it can still tie up a loose end, or close the book on a chapter that is long overdue of being finished. Wisdom is a funny thing. Sometimes it can make you smart and sometimes, it can simply perform a little piece of historical magic.