Eve and Tom

I don’t write about music, mostly because I don’t know anything about music. I can’t sing, don’t play an instrument, and couldn’t explain the difference between melody and harmony, even on an open-book test. I’m lucky if I can figure out how to turn on the radio. Once in a while I find myself reading music reviews, but my comprehension tends to be low because they use words and phrases like retro, electro-pop, cross-cutting riffs, and jazz-inflected rhythms. I never have the slightest idea what they’re talking about.

As with food and wine, I’m unable to break music down into its basic components and analyze them in any in-depth, comparative way. I don’t know the language and have trouble tuning into the nuances. But I know what I like. It’s either something I want to listen to, or it isn’t.

Recently, I discovered the music of Eve Selis and her band. Eve is married to my nephew, Tom — my oldest brother’s oldest son. I love Tom with all my heart, and so just before meeting Eve, I promised myself I would love her, too, if for no other reason than because of her husband. As it turned out, those private promises proved unnecessary. Eve is every bit as lovable, and would be so, even without her immense talent as a singer, songwriter, and guitarist.

The Eve Selis Band

The Eve Selis Band has won about two dozen prestigious awards and has appeared onstage all over the world. Originally called Kings Road, the band has grown and evolved over the past twenty years. Several members have gone on to separate careers, and one passed away. Along with Eve and guitarist Marc Intravaia, the band now includes Jim Soldi, Sharon Whyte, Rick Nash, and Larry Grano. Their appeal, if I may venture into my own personal land of the uninformed, is partly a combination of sound, songwriting skill, and some kind of chemical reaction that seems to happen when they perform together. For me, it isn’t just how they sing, but what they sing about.

They sing about life. Not the perfect life as described by all those sugary, sappy songs that make you want to damage your own eardrums. And not the miserable life bemoaned by so many singers who seem intent on compelling you to fill up the bathtub and drown yourself. These are songs about real life — the annoying struggles and the pleasant little surprises, the devastating heartache and the uplifting joy. They’re about what hurts us and what makes us feel happy, and how sometimes they’re the same things.

"Family Tree" (Click image to order.)

The group’s latest CD — their tenth — is Family Tree, and you need only read the titles of the songs to know that these musicians have felt the sting of life’s sharp edges: “Don’t You Feel Lonesome,” “I Don’t Want To Cry,” “When Is Everything Enough.” But other songs reflect the band-members’ ability to take the knocks and bounce back, singing: “Bump in the Road,” “Water Off A Duck’s Back,” “All Roads Lead To Here,” “Crazy That I Love,” and “Hallelujah”.

And that may explain the popularity of these six talented people, not just locally in the San Diego area, but all across North America, Europe, and everywhere they travel. When I listen to their music, I hear the familiar themes of that real life: loss, betrayal, trust, devotion, dreams, gratitude, courage, fear, struggle, self-delusion, determination. The willingness to endure, but the refusal to be destroyed. Having hope without being irrational, and being realistic without becoming grim. Feeling the pain, but remaining strong. Their lyrics remind us that sometimes all we can do is cry, and sometimes we just have to laugh. These people have learned life’s lessons the hard way, which is the only way to learn them. And their music inspires me to at least try to do just what they’ve done themselves: turn those hard lessons into something beautiful.

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Eve sings in at least six major charity fundraisers every year, and is active in the fight against breast cancer. Her music can be heard in four independent films, and she’s performed live on CNBC, ESPN, and CBC Radio. Visit her website and Facebook page for a lot more information about the group, and to hear some of their amazing music. I don’t know if you’ll find any retro, electro-pop, cross-cutting riffs, or jazz-inflected rhythms. But you’re going to love Eve, and her band. That much I know.

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From www.essortment.com:
“Melody is a musical and successive line of single tones or pitches perceived as a unity. Its characteristics include range, shape, and movement. Harmony is the relation of notes to notes and chords to chords as they are played simultaneously. Harmonic ‘patterns’ are established from notes and chords in successive order. Melodic intervals are those that are linear and occur in sequence, while harmonic intervals are sounded at the same time.”

(See what I mean?)

Then, around age eighteen, we began to intoxicate ourselves with the idea that we were in control of our lives. We had a plan in our head and we decided things, believing if we made the right choices, they would take us closer to our goals. So off we went, rolling the dice and moving around the board. And that seemed to work well, at least from one move to the next. But what we didn’t notice was that every time we made a move, or just stood still long enough, the entire board changed. We had limited vision, so we couldn’t see the whole board, and made new decisions based on the small part we could see. Meanwhile, everyone else was doing the same.

But I now realize that it wasn’t a game at all. It was something much more complex and elusive — a series of fields that overlapped and affected each other in ways that only occasionally became visible. The weather may be an appropriate comparison, although I know very little about the weather, other than that there are cold fronts and warm fronts, and that a heavy downpour is a delicious thing, unless you happen to be operating a table saw out on the sidewalk.

Actually, this is closer to how I picture it:

Facing a situation that offers a broad set of options is like entering a huge subway station. You’re at some point in a three-dimensional system of tubes, tracks, and platforms. You can get on the train going in either direction. Or you can wait for the next train, or the one after that. Once you decide on a train, you can sit wherever there’s an available seat. Or you can stand. Or walk from car to car, mumbling out loud about government conspiracies and the price of lettuce. If you sit next to someone who seems mostly harmless, you could strike up a conversation. That person might invite you out for lunch, or offer you a job. Or completely ignore you, which causes you to get off at your stop, go straight home, and eat an entire coffee cake.

It’s also possible that the person would have offered you a job, but you chose to sit next to the guy reading the newspaper instead, and all he did was fold the pages in front of your face. Your life just changed and you don’t even know it. Or maybe you sat in exactly the right seat, but the person with the job to offer has missed the train. Somebody else would get your job. Or maybe nobody would. Everyone on that train, and on every train in that system, made a decision that could have been different because of whim or circumstance. Each one of those decisions changes the mix. One person absent means an empty seat for someone who otherwise would have had to sit somewhere else. What if, rather than sitting next to a potential employer, you’d sat next to someone with the flu? Three days from now, instead of earning a living, you’d be throwing up.

After you ride a while, you can get off the train at any station and go anywhere from there. But where? Maybe it doesn’t matter; you’re just out cooling off after a really bad argument with your landlord, who keeps expressing an irrational objection to the fact that you practice bowling in the hallway. Or maybe you’re lost. Or you fell asleep and went right past your stop. Any one of those possibilities opens up countless new options and consequences. And the same is true for everyone else riding on every train and standing on every platform.

It’s easy to overlook the complexities of human interaction. I still sometimes go back into my memories and try to change one thing, and keep everything else the same. Only it doesn’t work that way. Everything changes everything. Making the mistake of turning left instead of right at the intersection may delay my arrival by four minutes, but it may have also prevented me from getting into a head-on collision. The thing is, I have no way of knowing that, because the collision didn’t happen. So rather than feeling a tremendous sense of relief at not getting killed, I instead feel slightly annoyed at being four minutes late.

I don’t use that example lightly.

When I was fifteen, one of my older brothers asked me if I wanted to go somewhere with him in his car. I said that I didn’t, but then almost immediately decided that I would go. As he was heading out the door, I changed my mind yet again and told him I wanted to stay home, after all. An hour later, the police called to let my mother know that my brother had gotten into a bad accident. He was banged up, but all right. The car, however, was totaled. He had swerved off the road and run full-speed into the end of a guardrail. In those days, guardrails didn’t end in a curve or a flat plate, but projected their sharp edges directly into traffic, like giant kitchen utensils used to plunge out the cores of apples. My brother had hit the end of the guardrail such that it pierced the right front tire, speared through the glove compartment, and rammed itself straight into the middle of the passenger’s seat.

For years I wrestled with the meaning of my seemingly insignificant decision about whether or not to get into the car that day. I couldn’t remember why I chose to stay home, but I was sure that if I had gone with my brother, I would’ve been impaled by that guardrail. My life had apparently been saved by a choice that was so trivial it could have been made with the flip of a coin.

Or had it?

What caused the accident? Had he swerved to avoid a squirrel running across the road? Maybe the car ahead of him had slammed on its brakes and my brother, who’d glanced into his mirror, looked back just in time to avoid the other car. But what if I had gone with him? Would he have pulled out of the driveway at exactly the same moment? Leaving even a few seconds later would have allowed the squirrel to get across, or might have put a few more cars between ours and the guy slamming on his brakes. Or maybe we would’ve gone a different way, I would have eluded the accident that never was, and my mind would have been free — all these years — from thoughts of a sheet metal skewer through the chest.

I’ve been trying to remind myself to take a fresh look at other past events, too. We’ve all done things we wish we hadn’t. Guilt and regret have their place. But this process of mentally rewinding the tape, making one revision, and then watching the story unfold in some predictable way is a delusion. The truth is, we know only what happened; it’s impossible to know what would have happened. Our destiny is a bundle of twisted strands — things we can foresee and control, and things we can’t.

If you’d gotten into law school, would you be happier today? If Uncle Leo had introduced some moderation into his addiction to Bavarian Cream, could he have avoided that fatal heart attack? If my father had bought stock in Coca-Cola in 1952, would our family be wealthy now? Maybe. But everything changes everything. Financial riches would have altered my family’s path, and I would have never been born. Talk about missing the train.

I have, too.

Occasionally, big problems come along, and we have to be ready. We know what to do if there’s a tornado heading right for us. (Run!)

We know what to do when a marauding horde of barbarians charges down from the mountains, throwing thick slabs of wood at our heads. (Duck!)

And we certainly know what to do when some unimaginable catastrophe yanks the ground out from under our feet and causes us to question everything we’ve ever held to be true and important. (Eat candy!)

But what about the small things? Those tiny, maddening mysteries. Those quirks of nature that trip us up, often without our awareness. These, too, can be handled effectively. Of course, the first step is to recognize the problem. Knowledge is power! That’s my motto. Actually I have more than one motto, because “Knowledge is power” doesn’t exactly cover every possible circumstance. Another motto I have is “Hey, life is funny sometimes.” I once insisted on giving my daughter a haircut, and when I was finished she looked like an alpaca. As she stared into the mirror and her eyes welled with tears, I started to say “Knowledge is power,” but caught myself and quickly switched over to “Hey, life is funny sometimes.” It worked out beautifully, although I did have to buy her a hat.

Anyway, my point is that the world is changing, and it’s important that we keep learning and growing. Here are a few tips that I’ve found useful. I hope you do, too. For your convenience, I’ve divided the tips into categories. That’s another motto of mine: “When you have no idea what you’re talking about, divide everything up into categories.”

Creativity
Everyone likes to say these days that it’s important to think outside the box. This is meaningless nonsense. Where is the box? Has anyone ever seen it? It stands to reason that if you don’t know where the box is, you can never be sure that you’re thinking outside of it. I’m pretty certain the box doesn’t exist.

Cooking
The International Grading Scale for Olives includes thirteen different sizes. You might think that Large would be at the top of the scale, but you’d have to think again: there are eight sizes of olives above Large. Eight! Jumbo is bigger than Extra Large, while Giant is bigger than Jumbo. Colossal is bigger than Giant, but Super Mammoth, the largest specimen in the olive kingdom, is bigger than even Super Colossal. Eggs, on the other hand, come in just six different sizes: Pee Wee, Small, Medium Large, Extra Large, and Jumbo. This is why it’s so very difficult to substitute olives for eggs in most cake recipes.

Electronics
If your Internet connection is down, and you call technical support only to get a recording that advises you to visit their website for troubleshooting information, be careful. This kind of thing will cause your brain to become caught in a mental loop, and it could spin like that for weeks. It’s similar to fumbling around when the power suddenly goes off during a lightning storm — you know the candles are there somewhere, but you can’t find them because it’s dark, so you keep trying to turn the lights on. Forget the Internet and the candles, and go take a nap. By the way, this last bit of advice about taking a nap can easily be incorporated into a motto.

Safety
Never attempt to sleep in a Murphy Bed. In case you don’t know, this is an invention that’s designed to help you save space in your home. The frame is attached to hinges and instead of making the bed, you fold it up onto the wall, like a giant vertical mousetrap. It’s a little-known fact that the inventor of the Murphy Bed was the same guy who came up with Murphy’s Law: “Anything that can go wrong will go wrong.” Combine that little nugget of wisdom with a piece of furniture that catapults itself ninety degrees off the floor, and there isn’t much else that needs to be said.

Gardening
Seeds don’t work. I don’t know how it started, but we’ve all grown up believing this myth that plants develop from seeds. I’ve planted thousands of seeds in my lifetime, and not one has ever grown. The tip-off to this hoax can be found in the directions on any seed packet: “Make holes one-eighth of an inch deep.” It’s physically impossible to dig a hole in dirt that’s only an eighth of an inch deep, and even if you could, you still have to cover the seeds. There is no soil on Earth that can be sprinkled so precisely. The truth is that all plants — whether flower, vegetable, fruit, or shrub — come from a nursery of some kind, and not from seeds. The veracity of this idea becomes obvious when you look at a seed and compare it to a tree. You’ll notice that the tree is very big and the seed is very small. Just ask yourself: Where did all of those leaves come from?

Language
If you want to learn a foreign language, go to the country where they speak it. Don’t try to learn by listening to tapes or CDs, because you won’t know what you’re hearing. The words will all run together, and you’ll end up saying something stupid at a really bad time. Also, nobody who speaks the language ever says those things you hear in the lessons, and if you say them, everyone will laugh at you. The most important part of speaking like a native is the facial expressions and a lot of flailing arms. Think about English for a second: most people who speak English never actually say much of anything. I have to believe that the rest of the world is no different. There are more than six thousand languages, and I doubt anyone is communicating very far beyond waving their hands around and making weird faces.

Hidden Pictures
There’s a graphics puzzle that appears in daily newspapers and kids’ magazines. The challenge involves trying to locate hidden objects in a drawing. I’ve never been able to find the hammer or the snake, but I’ll tell you right now and with complete confidence that the fish is always in the tree. Always. Remember this and you can amaze your friends with your visual acuity. Also, mention the word acuity in a way that sounds as though you know what it means, and they’ll be doubly amazed.

Nutrition
Everyone is driving themselves crazy attempting to eat healthier and keep up with the latest studies on cholesterol, sugar, salt, food additives, and pesticides. I’m telling you, there’s nothing to worry about. There are millions of men and women — living otherwise normal lives — who eat bizarre things, and have been doing so for years. These people secretly consume plastic, leather, cigarette ashes, pieces of broken pottery, telephone books, and even entire bicycles. If it’s possible to eat a flower pot and survive, I can’t see how a bag of Skittles is going to do you any harm.

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If any of this information helps eliminate some of your stress, I’m glad. It’s like I always say: Knowledge is power. And if none of this seems worthwhile, well, would you have preferred that I gave you a haircut? Besides, we can try again. I still have plenty of tips, many even more valuable than the ones listed here. I just have to divide them up into categories. But first I’m going to take a short nap.

Meanwhile, have fun tonight, and please be safe. I hope the coming twelve months are filled with happiness. In fact, I might even consider adopting that as my new motto: Happy New Year!

I like that. It’s simple, yet sincere. You know, life really is funny sometimes. But maybe it doesn’t always have to be so complicated.

Up to that point, I’d been holding fast to the childhood illusion that Santa was a supernatural being who represented goodness and generosity, an otherworldly visitor who came once a year to remind us of what was possible. But now I had to face hard facts, and my mind immediately came to the only logical conclusion I could find: my father was Santa Claus! Just as Superman and Batman had secret identities, Santa had one, too — a person he pretended to be all year long. I’d wondered about that possibility before, but I expected his secret identity to be a retired baseball player, or maybe Captain Kangaroo. The idea that he might be a spice salesman from the Bronx had never entered my mind. On the other hand, this did explain the so-called bowling league on Tuesday nights: he was sneaking off to make toys! But why wasn’t my father wearing the Santa costume now? I didn’t know, but I was sure he had his reasons.

The following year, on Christmas Day, my father and I went to visit his cousin, a man with eyes like those of a barracuda, and lips that never approached a smile. He was, I was sure, a vampire, and I was terrified of him. Again, this was back in the 1960s, when vampires were still people you didn’t want to hang around with. But he was interesting, too. He had the first speaker phone I’d ever seen; it was a black box that sat on his desk, and he demonstrated it for my father and me. He dialed a number, then connected the phone to the box somehow, and we waited. Sure enough, from across the room, we could hear a voice that seemed to come from nowhere. My father looked at me with pride, expecting me to be amazed and impressed. I was certain his cousin had murdered someone, drained his blood, and injected the person’s soul into that contraption on his desk.

In 1965, my grandmother got a pain in her leg, went to the doctor, and found out she had a brain tumor. I was nine, and had no real conception of what that meant. I just knew she had to go into the hospital, and was there for quite a while. When she came home, I interpreted that as a sign that she was getting better. My grandmother lived upstairs, on the third floor, and I went to see her every day. I noticed that she almost never got out of bed, and that her hair was suddenly gone. And she looked tiny, even to me, and I was pretty small myself. For Christmas, I got her a brush and comb set. They were light purple and came in a see-through plastic box with a ribbon around it and a bow. I thought it was a good gift for when her hair grew back. On New Year’s Day, 1966, New York had a new mayor and my grandmother began her last two months of life. She died in early March. The brush and comb were still in the plastic box next to her bed.

Several years later, I’d pretty much decided that my father’s cousin wasn’t a vampire, but just one of those relatives who, for some inexplicable reason, seemed creepier than he probably was. I’d also assured myself that my father wasn’t Santa Claus, or even Captain Kangaroo. But gifts did arrive mysteriously every Christmas Eve, and wherever they were coming from, I was sure that a Frosty the Snowman Sno-Cone Machine would be waiting for me under the tree. It wasn’t. Sensing my shock and disappointment, my uncle tried to ease the pain by explaining that I simply wasn’t old enough for a Sno Cone Machine. I couldn’t accept that. This was crushed ice and cherry syrup, for crying out loud. Besides, his son was two years younger than me, and he’d gotten a chemistry set that included enough acid to melt half of Manhattan. I’d had a vision of people lined up around the block, waiting to plunk down a shiny new dime for a paper cone full of my Famous Old World Style Flavored Sno, with “Snow” spelled without the W, just like they did in the olden days. As the grown-ups gathered the torn and crumpled wrapping paper from the floor, that vision evaporated into thin air. My ten-year-old cousin, meanwhile, got right to work dissolving the lower branches of our aluminum Christmas tree.

On December 21, 1968, three astronauts were launched into space aboard a Saturn V rocket. Their mission was to leave the planet’s orbit — the first humans to do so — and circle the Moon. On Christmas Eve, they broadcast live from their command module, reading from the Book of Genesis and wishing everyone on Earth a Merry Christmas. My family was in the kitchen, eating and laughing and speaking in loud voices, yelling the way they tended to do even when there was no discernible reason for it. I sat on the living room floor, alone, and listened to the astronauts. I didn’t believe the Bible account then, any more than I do now, but it was nevertheless the most wonderful Christmas Eve I’ve ever had. The year 1968 had been, in many ways, a difficult one, filled with anger and hate. For those few minutes that night, it seemed possible that we might all get past those destructive behaviors and realize that we shared this small planet, and that we’d be better off if we could just treat each other with tolerance and respect. The promise of Christmas, the returning light marked by the winter solstice, and the coming new year seemed, at least to me, to be brimming with hope.

Almost three decades later I walked into a toy store, looking for a gift for my eleven-year-old daughter. Wandering up and down the aisles, I picked up and put down dozens of things that seemed too violent, too childish, or just too pointless. One of the items I rejected immediately was a red plush toy that, when squeezed, would laugh like an intoxicated chipmunk. It was called Tickle Me Elmo, and when I looked at its thirty-dollar price tag, I shook my head and threw it back onto the shelf. Nobody, I thought to myself, is ever going to pay that much money for such a stupid toy. Weeks later, just before Christmas, people all over North America were punching and stabbing each other to get their hands on a Tickle Me Elmo. I remember wishing I were sleeping in our living room again, next to the tree, discovering against all odds that Santa Claus was really a mild-mannered spice salesman from the Bronx. My grandmother would be upstairs, cleaning up after our Christmas Eve feast and preparing the next day’s dinner. Those were days when people got excited about a voice coming from a box sitting on a desk. When kids dreamed of something as simple as a cupful of flavored ice. When the world watched and listened as one, and saw pictures for the first time of the home they all shared. They seem like ghosts now, every one of them. And yet, there’s something about them that’s still alive, and still possible. At least, I hope there is.

Merry Christmas.

My goal was to become a grandmaster of chess. I’ve never told anyone this before, except my cat, and she knew how to keep her mouth shut. But I’m telling you because I trust you, and I know that if you’re going to laugh at me you’ll do it behind my back, like a real friend.

Grandmaster. It’s a glorious word. It sounds like grandmother, with the added privilege of being obnoxious and self-centered. I had assumed there was just a handful of such players in the world, but there are actually about thirteen hundred of them, which is quite a lot, if you think about it. By comparison, there are only fifty governors in the United States, and many of them seem to end up in prison, or pretending to be journalists.

Here’s a really elite group: the Blackjack Hall of Fame. It has just seventeen members! Blackjack, as you probably know, is a card game requiring players to be able to add and subtract numbers that total twenty-one. It’s much less complicated than chess, and there was a brief time when I thought about becoming a professional blackjack player. Then I found out that blackjack players were also professional gamblers, a career that requires a lot of money, and I didn’t have any. Plus, there had to be a catch, because the game seemed too simple, and how would I ever discover the secret? I was pretty sure that people who made their living in casinos weren’t going to spill the beans to some amateur looking to horn in on their action.

I could have entered Scrabble tournaments, I suppose, but you had to know a lot of weird words, such as GID, which is a disease common among sheep, and ZOEA, the larval stage of crustaceans. It occurred to me that I could practically memorize the dictionary and still lose in the semi-finals to some Biology major on a lucky streak. And I wanted nothing to do with Bingo, Uno, Yahtzee, or any of those others that required you to yell out the name of the game in order to win. That seemed like artificial excitement to me. The Super Bowl champions don’t jump up and down and scream “Football!” after scoring the winning touchdown.

So I turned to chess. It was quieter, and there was less chance of embarrassment, or ending up face-down in an alley with broken kneecaps.

Around the same time, personal computers were becoming popular, and some even came with software installed on them. One of my first computers had a game called Chessmaster. This, I was sure, was some kind of sign. I began playing several times a day. One of the nice features of Chessmaster was that you could select your opponent’s skill level. There were ten levels back then, with Newcomer being the easiest to defeat. Newcomer wasn’t just inexperienced at chess; he seemed to be unconscious. Just above that was Novice, which I believe was really Newcomer with a slightly better vocabulary. Then there was a player who seemed to be constantly distracted by something — maybe a chipmunk walking past the window — because he’d just make random moves that were so bad, even I could tell. I beat all three of these lowest-level opponents with great consistency, and eventually worked my way up to challenging the Chessmaster. At that level, I would spend fifteen minutes pondering every possible move, and then my opponent would take his turn so fast that I couldn’t even tell which piece had been played. It always gave me the feeling that he’d known what I was going to do, even before I did. This was intimidating. Also, the Chessmaster had an irritating habit of laughing out loud when he won, which was every game we played.

There are specific opening moves in chess, with names like the Queen’s Gambit and the Latvian Gambit. This word, gambit, sounds like something cute a baby clown would do, if there were baby clowns. But in truth, gambits are designed to humiliate you, right out of the box. I was already familiar with humiliation. A friend and I used to play chess a lot in high school, during lunch or study periods. He once beat me in three moves. To be really good at chess, I concluded, you have to be Russian or have a mustache or be out of your mind. I did grow a mustache in senior year, but it didn’t seem to help.The thing about chess is that you need to pay attention. My mind tends to wander, and inevitably my opponent’s bishop will sail across the board from another solar system and take my queen. When that happens, I always say the same, revealing thing: “Wow. I didn’t see that coming.” At this point, I can almost feel the other player relaxing. But the computer introduced a totally new element: You can undo your last move. This is what’s been missing in chess for centuries. The Do-Over. When I was a young stickball player, we could call a Do-Over for any number of reasons: the sun was in our eyes, the ball hit a pebble, we weren’t ready, there was a car coming, we thought someone yelled for time-out, third base was on fire, or we just wanted to talk about last night’s episode of My Favorite Martian. But chess had this ridiculous rule that once you moved a piece and took your hand away and got up to make yourself a sandwich and ate it and drank a big glass of ginger ale and went to the bathroom and came back and saw the insane way you’d left your king exposed, that it was too late and you were stuck with the move.

Here’s the weird thing. When I decided to become a grandmaster, I went out and bought a bunch of books. These were written by chess experts, and all claimed they could help me improve my performance. I studied diagrams, tried to solve chess puzzles, and examined theories in order to get a feel for tactics, strategies, and the art of the game. I rented videos of classic matches, hoping that I could learn to think like a master by watching them in action. (This proved to be another source of frustration, because chess players frequently resign rather than face checkmate. Almost always, they would do this while I was still trying to figure out who was winning.) And the more I read, the worse I got. I must have been thinking too hard, or not hard enough, or I was spending too much time wondering why the knights looked so much like horses. My skills, paltry to begin with, leaked out of me and evaporated into the air. I knew my dream was doomed when I found myself losing to Newcomer on a regular basis.

I don’t go near the chess board much anymore. In fact, I’ll only play against the cat. She’s pretty good, but her mind wanders even more than mine. When she gets up to make herself a sandwich, I steal her rook and hide it under the couch, and she never seems to notice. I call it the Meow Gambit.

Once in a while I consider pursuing some other career, but what? I don’t like climbing through rubble, I refuse to yell Yahtzee, and I’m far too feeble-minded to succeed at blackjack. Maybe I’ll run for governor.

“The last night of my life?” I thought. “Dance?”

I don’t know about you, but if it were the last night of my life, I don’t imagine I’d feel much like dancing. I’d probably prefer to spend the time doing something more constructive, like howling in despair or repeatedly hitting something with a crowbar. Besides, how would I know it was the last night of my life? I’d have to be extremely sick to be hovering that close to death. Would I be up to hovering and dancing? The two seem mutually exclusive. And if I wasn’t sick, that would mean I was going to die by getting run over by a train, or being hit by lightning, or finding myself in the crossfire of a gang war. There would be no time to dance, and if there were, I’m not sure how it would help or if it would even occur to me. Running might be more beneficial.

Still, this notion of being aware that you’re at the end of your life has always intrigued me. In Catholic school we were taught that God had a book, and in this book were inscribed our names and the exact dates of our death. Or something like that. I never got the whole story about anything when I was a kid, which always left me trying to piece together answers to big questions with just a few raggedy strands of information. There was a book, that much I was sure of. There may have been two books: one for those going to Heaven, and the other for the rest of us. Long before Judgment Day, apparently, our fate had already been recorded, which was somewhat disturbing. But it was the word inscribed that both confused and scared the daylights out of me. I remember wondering why God would need books. Was it an indication of an overworked all-powerful being? Did it mean there was some possibility for a clerical error? Could something be erased from one book and inscribed in the other? I had this actual thought: “Maybe God writes in pencil.” And most important, where were these books, anyway?

We would never see the books, and therefore had no way of discovering what they contained or where we were headed. Which now makes me think of the person waiting on death row, that rare individual who knows when he will die, maybe down to the precise minute. And that idea of the final dance reminds me of the condemned man’s last meal, served just hours before his execution. Again, would I feel like eating if I knew that I’d soon be strapped into the electric chair or given a lethal injection? I tend to lose my appetite if a bug hits my windshield. I imagine the warden standing over me, demanding that I stop playing with my food, the way my third-grade nun insisted that we eat those hideous green beans because there were children starving in some far-off place. She was stationed at the spot in the cafeteria where we emptied our trays, which gave her a chance to effectively scrutinize any leftovers on our plates. We devised counter-strategies, of course. These included secretly passing food under the lunch table to Marvin Pierce (who would eat anything), and when he wasn’t available, stuffing beef stew into an empty milk carton and learning to toss it with minimal splash.

But there’s slightly less privacy in prison. What must it be like to know that what you’re eating, hearing, and looking at will be the last experiences of your life? And if you had the choice — beyond the final meal — what would those experiences be? I’ve heard of people who, dying of a rare disease, worked like crazy to complete their law school degrees. Others take their dream vacation or finish writing a novel or start trombone lessons. But really, how do you relish any accomplishment when you know it’s your last? How does that thought not seep into, and contaminate, every moment of potential joy?

I understand that the song isn’t necessarily talking about dancing in the literal sense. It’s saying we should live each day as though it might be our last, that whatever we’re doing, we should do it with passion and enthusiasm. I just don’t think that attitude works for me. I need something to look forward to. Also, I’ve been around passionate people and they tend to talk loud, which after about an hour makes my skull vibrate. When I’m the one being enthusiastic, I usually start moving too quickly for my own brain and I end up with some self-inflicted injury, like when I pull hard to unplug an electric cord and punch myself in the mouth.

I’ve behaved impulsively many times in my life, and it rarely works out. It’s better if I slow down. In fact, sitting in bumper-to-bumper traffic is the safest place for me. It gives me time to think things through, to make decisions with no possibility of acting on them, and then more time to think again.

But sooner or later I’ll realize that my days are numbered. That’s one of the reasons I’m looking forward to driving when I’m very old. I have no intention of being like the other elderly motorists I see on the road, inching out of parking spaces, resting their foot on the brake pedal, and plodding along at twenty miles under the speed limit. I’m going to plaster a big sign on the side of my car that says, “My reflexes are totally gone. Watch out.” And then I’m going to drive to Florida and back as fast as I can, with the radio blasting and dancing behind the wheel like it’s the last night of my life. And if that causes my name to be inscribed in some book somewhere, well, it sure beats hovering. Or getting run over by a train.

As a freelance writer for more than thirty years, I’ve written the copy for a lot of marketing materials. Assuming I believe in the quality of the product or service, I have no trouble finding superlatives to describe my clients and their business activities. When it comes to doing the same for myself, however, I get kind of squirmy. This isn’t just insecurity at work, although that’s a part of it. It’s also that I think the best praise comes from an impartial source; otherwise, it’s just bragging. I never believe anyone who tells me how great they are. I always think, if you’re that tremendous, there should be other people saying it for you. And I assume anyone would have the same reaction if I tried to persuade them to buy my book by insisting that they’ll really like it. One of my kids once told me that I’d really like a sour candy called Warheads, and the producers of Cats said the same thing about their Broadway show. Neither claim turned out to be remotely true. The candy squeezed my face inside-out, and the musical caused me to go home and lock my own cat in a closet for two and a half hours, with a fifteen-minute intermission.

So I tend to avoid selling myself, especially in ways that involve aggressive hyperbole. This leaves me in the ridiculous position of publishing my own books, then hoping someone will buy them as the result of pleadings that I’ve sent out in the form of telepathic messages. In my wildly successful fantasies, that person tells a few friends, and suddenly word is spreading like mad. Book sales are soaring and I didn’t have to squirm a bit. But here’s a strange thing. There seems to be another force at work, and it opposes and contradicts the first one: When you’re reluctant to engage in self-promotion, prospective customers back off, sensing your hesitation and interpreting it as a reason to keep quiet — and to refrain from buying.

This has always been an issue for me. I’m uncomfortable with attention, and that causes others to look the other way. It’s as though, in most areas of my life, I’m sending out some kind of signal that tells people to ignore me. In high school, I was voted “Most Likely to Slip Away Unnoticed.” As an adult, if I walk past a store window, I’m sometimes surprised to see my own reflection. I imagine myself, at least at times, to be invisible, or even non-existent.

When I look at the cover of this new book, then, I’m surprised that it exists. I had no intention to start blogging. In fact, for twelve years I dismissed the concept as something I’d never do. And yet, here I am, with a printed collection of fifty-two essays, out of the 145 I’ve published online. The book is called Who Knew? and is available for $14.95 on Amazon.com. It’s softcover, 116 pages, and has about seventy-five cartoons. All of the interior images are in black and white, and even though the original illustrations were in color, they still look surprisingly good.

How do I promote the book? I don’t. I’ve let you know about it, and that’s all I’ll ever say again. But I suspect there are others out there flirting with the idea themselves. Some of these people have been blogging far longer than I have, and may possess enough material for two or three volumes. If you’ve been entertaining such a notion, I’d like to use my book as a way to inspire and encourage you to publish your own. (This approach, by the way, came to me as a suggestion from Melissa of Play101, and was enthusiastically affirmed by Priya of Partial View. Because I trust their judgment so deeply, I chose to go that route.)

If you decide to produce a book of posts, you may prefer a different size, style, or format. The possibilities are nearly endless. But I just wanted to let you know that it’s not as difficult as you might imagine, or as expensive. I’d be happy to discuss the details with you if you’re interested. And we can have that discussion either in the Comment section or in private.

I look forward to hearing what you think — as long as you’re not waving a torch.

There have been a few people who think I’m smart, because I read a lot and my brain has managed to hold onto a few facts. For example, I know the capital of Madagascar, and how to find the area of a trapezoid. But this isn’t being smart. It’s just a form of storage, not so different from bolting one of those huge plastic containers to the roof of the car so you can lug your color television to the campground. Also, these random bits of knowledge are difficult to work into everyday conversation. The next time you’re on an airplane or standing in line at the bank, eavesdrop on the people behind you. You’ll notice, as I have, that almost no one ever mentions trapezoids.

Although memory and intelligence may not be the same thing, when I go out to a restaurant I’m impressed with the waitress who can remember six different dinner orders — including the annoying requests for onion rings instead of mashed potatoes, and extra sour cream in place of the guacamole — and can do it without writing anything down. It reminds me of those memory experts who appear on late night talk shows and demonstrate how they’re able to recall everyone’s name in the studio audience. The waitress’s act is even more sensational, because she also has to balance enormous drinks and steaming plates of food on her forearm. I always think that maybe I could memorize orders too. But if on my way to the kitchen even one customer asks me where the bathroom is, I’d have to go back to the table and get everyone to tell me what they wanted again. And still, there’s a good chance somebody would end up with guacamole or mashed potatoes.

There has always been that connection between food and intelligence. When I was little, my parents used to encourage me to eat fish, because it would make me smarter. Even as a young boy, I wondered how anyone could possibly be sure about this. Did they give people a spelling test, then make them eat a tuna sandwich and test them again?

“Fish is brain food,” my father would say. I would try to make sense of this in my perpetually-baffled mind. Would the fish actually go into my brain? Or would the fish’s brain become part of my brain? Both thoughts terrified me. Besides, the fish that people ate were always the ones that got caught. The really smart ones would never end up in a frying pan, or a salad.

I doubt there’s a need to even mention this, but I never ate fish. I hated it. I especially hated that fish ate other fish. No other food seemed to do that. Cows didn’t eat cows. Chickens probably wouldn’t even eat eggs. For some reason, I found it unsettling, this idea of fish eating other fish. The fact that it tasted terrible didn’t help either. My parents also said, every chance they got, that carrots were good for your eyes. There must have been places in the world where they couldn’t get fresh carrots. I imagined everyone there constantly tripping over the curb and bumping into trees. And spinach, of course, was purported to give you big muscles. We had fish every other Friday. One night, we sat down to dinner and I found breaded flounder, cooked carrots, and a mound of spinach on my plate. It was then that I decided I wouldn’t mind growing up to be a stupid, nearsighted weakling.

Everyone else in my family loved artichokes. These are basically cooked bundles of leaves which you ate by scraping them across your teeth. You ended up with a pasty, green residue on your tongue that, according to my delusional parents and siblings, tasted good. Even more horrifying was the thought that buried deep beneath these leaves was something called the heart of the artichoke. No one could eat these things without making them the topic of conversation. While I quietly chewed and swallowed my peanut butter and jelly sandwich, they all maintained a non-stop play-by-play of their progress toward the heart, and then, finally, the endless descriptions of how soft and tender and delicious that internal organ felt and tasted. I tried to drown out the commentary with moderately loud humming, but the thought of this thing, beating in the chest of a vegetable, instilled in me a powerful desire to run screaming from the kitchen table. Not that fleeing would have helped. The words wouldn’t let me escape. Heart. Scrape. Even its very name ended with choke. It’s been decades, and still, when someone mentions artichoke hearts, I imagine jars filled with formaldehyde, resting in cardboard boxes on dusty shelves in the back room of a museum.

(I realize that artichokes have nothing to do with intelligence. I just felt like talking about them.)

Parents and teachers had other advice for getting smarter, too. They’d tell us to put on our thinking caps. This was yet another one of those things that must have been introduced on a day when I was home with the measles. I wondered if I was the only one who didn’t have a thinking cap. Maybe that was the cause of my struggles. If I’d had one, I thought, I could relax and let my mind wander, because it was the cap that was doing the thinking.

“Dad, the ball rolled down the sewer and when I tried to reach in and pull it out, my arm got stuck. What should I do?”

“Why don’t you try putting your thinking cap on?”

And I would have, too, if only the person handing them out had remembered that I was sick in bed and didn’t get mine, and if my arm wasn’t stuck in the sewer.

Sometimes the nuns at school would tell us to “wise up.” On less optimistic days, they would suggest we “smarten up.” When things seemed especially hopeless, they’d resort to demanding that we “stop being idiots.” But these things were easier said than done. I can still feel Sister’s hand smacking the back of my head when, in the first grade, I mistakenly circled the pictures in my phonics book instead of the matching words, as we’d been instructed to do. No matter how many fish sticks the lunch ladies tried to cram down our throats, for most of us, true brilliance was an elusive goal.

By the way, after Einstein’s death his brain was cut up into pieces, like a bunch of artichoke hearts, and stored in jars filled with formaldehyde. The jars are resting in cardboard boxes that sit on dusty shelves somewhere in New Jersey. Tests performed on his brain tissue probably refute my reincarnation theory, and I’m sure my friends would all have a good laugh over that. But I don’t care anymore, because I know something they don’t know. I know the capital of Madagascar.

The year was 1955. Let me try to give you some idea how long ago that was. The president of the United States was a man named Dwight. Have you ever met a person with that name? No, you haven’t. That’s because there have been only twelve Dwights in the past three centuries, and ten of them are dead.

The fifties was a time when people fooled themselves into thinking they were living at the pinnacle of modern technology. This belief grew largely from the fact that they could take pre-packaged meals out of the freezer, heat them in the oven, and eat them on folding trays while watching Gunsmoke. When frozen apple cobbler and brownies were added to the dinners, many people nearly lost their senses, sure that flying cars and robot maids were just around the corner. In fact, the goal of sending humans to the Moon was a distant dream back then, California had zero major league baseball teams, and the original Disneyland had just opened. But I was blissfully unaware of any of that. The larger world, and time itself, didn’t exist. There was nothing I had to do, and everything I chose to do at any moment was adorable and perfect. I only wish I could remember it.

Within four years I would find myself a middle child, with two older brothers, a younger brother, and my sister the youngest of five. Still, the demands of my daily schedule consisted mostly of trying to finish every page in a coloring book so I could show the pictures to my father when he got home from work. Then in 1965, my mother began watching a new soap opera. Its opening line was: Like sands through the hourglass, so are the days of our lives. She ironed clothes and stared at the fuzzy images on our black and white set, carried away by these people whose relationships seemed to be continually filled with pivotal moments and drama. Meanwhile, I played with plastic army men and tried to ignore the ponderous background music and the narrator’s creepy voice. But it was the line about the hourglass that haunted me, for reasons I can’t fully explain. I tried to blot it out by annihilating the enemy soldiers, pretending to shoot them repeatedly with my little-boy machine gun voice and then flicking them off the table. Despite my efforts, the words engraved themselves into my brain, and gave me a cold feeling in my stomach when I thought about the relentless flow from future to past.

What was I supposed to do with that time? And why did it have to run out? Why couldn’t we grab the hourglass and turn it again, to start all over? How much sand was there to begin with, and how much was left? These questions shadowed me throughout childhood.

But I didn’t actually experience the rushing passage of time. Quite the opposite. Each year on the last day of school, summer vacation stretched away like an endless landscape of dodgeball games in the backyard, swimming at the public pool, and staying out until nine o’clock. My birthday, Halloween, and Christmas approached in slow motion, as though they didn’t want to ever arrive. Time may have been finite, but there was so much of it that I couldn’t imagine it ever running out, or life changing very much. My world was small, and simple. I spent my days thinking about baseball, comic books, and television. There were stores around the corner that sold penny candy. A man drove a truck down our street every Friday and swapped fresh fruit and vegetables for fistfuls of change.

Always, there was family around, because my parents’ brothers and sisters all lived a few blocks away. One day, I grew tired of listening to my oldest cousin brag about how he could boss the rest of us around just because he was nine and a half. “Yeah, well, you’re going to die before we are,” I said, drawing from some hidden pocket of my mind where quiet reason had been replaced by verbal stupidity. “Not necessarily,” he replied. “You could all burn up in a fire tomorrow and I’ll still be alive.” I hadn’t thought of that, mostly because it required logic and a perspective I didn’t seem to possess. But it became my introduction to the idea that life can end without warning.

My next-door neighbor was a teenager named Wally, a good-hearted guy who was willing to play stickball with a boy half his age, and to be patient about it. Wally and I lived in the same small and simple world. His parents were proud and protective, and loving, and rarely let him leave the neighborhood. In 1967, Wally went into the Marines, traveled to some place called Vietnam, and never came back. He was nineteen years old.

When I was in the tenth grade, I had typing class on Friday afternoons. One Monday morning, I went to school and learned that our teacher had died over the weekend. I spent the rest of that week trying to imagine what could have happened to her, and feeling guilty about the thoughts I’d had the previous Wednesday when she criticized my uneven keystroke rhythm.

Holidays and birthdays were crammed with people, all taking advantage of the excuse to eat and laugh and talk loudly and stay up just a little later than they should have. I remember sitting at the top of the stairs one New Year’s Eve and peeking between the spindles, hypnotized by the sight of my mother and father, aunts and uncles, and even my grandmother whooping it up in our kitchen. They smoked cigarettes, drank liquor, and played cards. They danced to music coming from the same television on which I had just been watching My Three Sons, Leave It To Beaver, and The Twilight Zone. And the same television that would soon deliver the notion that the days of our lives were like sands through the hourglass. I was chased back to bed before the ball came down in Times Square, but I stayed awake and listened as the calendar flipped to a new year. At midnight, there was a loud and prolonged noise, followed by what sounded like a lot of kissing, and then subdued mumbling as the music and the fun trailed off. Or maybe I’d just fallen asleep.

I graduated from high school in 1973 and that’s when things began to pick up speed. At twenty-five, I considered the fact that I was now a quarter-century old, and it shook me. I went to bed that night and when I woke up the next morning I was a half-century old. If each grain of sand represented a day, more than eighteen thousand grains had fallen in my life. I couldn’t recall a single thing about most of them.

Recently, I recognized the fact that all professional baseball players — and many managers — are younger than I am. There are players who completed an entire career, retired, had sons who grew up to be ballplayers and who have themselves retired — all while I was doing those things I mostly can’t remember. For the first time, I am older than the president of the United States. There’s a justice on the Supreme Court who was born the year I started school. My parents and all of their siblings have died. I never see or talk to my cousins. I am no longer a middle child, but am now the oldest living member of the five.

And yet, I can look at the top of that hourglass and feel hopeful. Although I can’t be sure, it appears as though there are still a few grains left up there. I just have to avoid fires and typing class, and maybe those frozen dinners, too. But I also have to remind myself that the sand continues to flow, and I can either build castles with it or let it slip through my fingers. The time is mine to use, or to waste.

Yes, sooner or later the ball will drop and the party will be over. I’m older than I’ve ever been. On the other hand, I’m younger than I’ll ever be again. And that’s true for everyone who has ever been born.

]]> http://mostlybrightideas.wordpress.com/2011/11/10/hard-to-grasp/feed/ 168 bronxboy55 PartyScene BabyScene HourglassScene FatherTimeScene http://mostlybrightideas.wordpress.com/2011/11/01/the-hard-way/ http://mostlybrightideas.wordpress.com/2011/11/01/the-hard-way/#comments Tue, 01 Nov 2011 20:32:45 +0000 bronxboy55 http://mostlybrightideas.wordpress.com/?p=3356 ]]> It’s possible that I recently learned a valuable lesson. I qualify that statement because there are certain lessons I’ve learned three hundred times in my life, and if I took an honest look, I’d have to say I need to brush up on them again. I’m even missing those bits of wisdom we were supposed to have gathered in kindergarten. Yes, I wash my hands before I eat, and I try not to hit people or steal their stuff. But the truth is, I learned only two things in that first year of school.

First, I managed to figure out my right hand from my left. I did this with the help of a file cabinet, which stood over in the right front corner of the classroom. When we faced the flag, the file cabinet helped me remember which hand to put over my heart during the Pledge of Allegiance. Then over Christmas break, the custodian rearranged the room and when we came back, the file cabinet was in a different place, so I had to revert to the five-second pause and sneaking glances at my classmates. That was the day I stopped trusting furniture, and custodians.

Second, I figured out that if Michael Lucatelli grabbed the brown crayon, he was never letting it go, and I’d be coloring the cows purple again. These were the extra-thick crayons, the kind that made it difficult to stay inside the lines because you had to wrap your whole fist around them, as if you were coloring with a cucumber. They were blunt on the ends, too, I guess so a five-year-old didn’t take out somebody’s eye with them. (I heard this warning at least once a week from my mother. Apparently, anything you could hold in your hand — butter knife, pencil, stick, wooden spoon, even a straw — was a potential menace just waiting for the chance to pluck out an eye. The fact that none of us knew anyone who’d lost an eye in this manner seemed to not mean much.) If you wanted to break one of these crayons, you’d have to lean it against a wall and step on it really hard. But one day, Michael noticed the brown crayon was snapped in half, hanging by its wrapper like a broken arm inside a shirt sleeve. “Hey,” he said while glaring at me from across the table. “Look what you did!” With no interest in the pursuit of justice, at least at that moment, the teacher told me to gather my things. Then she changed my seat, sending me into exile at the other end of the room. That was the day I stopped trusting authority, and Michael Lucatelli.

When I was a teenager, I learned not to cut my own hair. It may not occur to most people to even attempt something like that, but I did. We had a barber in the family, my mother’s eighty-year-old uncle, whose heavy Italian accent and a bullet wound to the throat incurred during World War One made his speech nearly incoherent. His tools included the first pair of scissors ever made; they’d been hand-forged by a blacksmith during the Middle Ages, and had never been sharpened. They looked to be just the kind of instrument that might be used to persuade someone to change religions against their will. The scissors weren’t capable of cutting anything, so my uncle resorted to closing them around the hair and pulling with a sudden jerk of his wrist. Any wriggling, flinching, or screams of agony were met with a loud scolding, which I tried to obey even though I couldn’t understand a word of it. The session would end when he grew tired of either the pulling or the flinching, and I’d run to the bathroom to examine the bare spots and patches of blood.

One day, hearing that my uncle was coming for Sunday dinner, I decided to try my hand at cutting my own hair. Looking into the mirror, I trimmed around the front of my head, which was the only part I could see. Then I reached around back and began blindly snipping away. A few days later, my father took me to a barbershop to repair the damage. When the barber asked me what I’d done to my hair, I lied and said I hadn’t done anything to it. He called two of his colleagues over and said, “Look at this. He said he didn’t cut his hair.” They all laughed, as I sank into the chair and wondered why haircuts didn’t include some form of anesthesia. That was the day I stopped trusting barbers, and mirrors.

As I said, there are many lessons I’ve learned repeatedly. And yet, I somehow remain as blunt as those kindergarten crayons, as dull as my uncle’s scissors. The left side of my brain doesn’t seem to know what my right hand is doing, or even where it is. My mind is a bad haircut that no one else can see. For example, I believe, with great delusion, that I understand my insurance policies, extended warranties, and the details of my checking account fees. I continue to purchase things I’m sure are on sale, but, it turns out, are not. I trust that if the sign says I’ll receive double points today, that I actually will. And when the phone rings at dinnertime and the person on the other end asks me if I have three minutes to participate in a brief survey, I always say yes.

But as I also said, I think I learned a valuable lesson recently. And this time, it may actually stick, because lately I’ve been sharing it with others. In other words, I’ve been giving advice, which is a shocking development in itself.

The lesson came as a result of meeting, however briefly, a lot of fellow bloggers over the past three weeks. I noticed how many of them expressed a lack of confidence, an overwhelming sensitivity to criticism, and a strong sense of doubt about ever connecting with readers. I picked up on these beliefs because I’ve struggled with the same issues for most of my life. But I’ve arrived at this conclusion: The world is never going to love me. Most of the world will never know I exist. And that’s okay, because that isn’t what I should be aiming for. My goal is to do what it takes for me and my potential audience to find each other. I don’t know how big that audience is. It may be seven individuals, or seventy thousand. But there are now seven billion human beings in the world. I can’t possibly connect with all of them. The best I can hope for is a slice, and probably a thin one.

In truth, this is yet another old lesson, revisited. I took a novel writing course in college, and my professor told us that a bestseller doesn’t mean universal acclaim. In fact, he said, you could reach the top of the bestseller list, then spend the rest of your life going door-to-door, searching for someone — anyone — who’s read your book, or has even heard of it.

So the lesson I want to share is that there is an audience that will want to hear what you have to say, and will like the way you say it. But they can’t find you if you’re not out there giving them something to find. For many of us, this is the hardest part. I don’t feel comfortable with most people, mostly because they don’t seem comfortable with me. And yet, I have a need to connect with at least a few of them. So I write, and I interact with strangers. I know that some won’t like me, and most of those will simply walk away. A few, though, will stick around long enough to tell me what a useless jerk I am. But here’s the thing: those people are not part of my slice. They wandered in by mistake and are already on their way out. I need to let them go quietly so I can get back to my real guests.

There was a time when I gave the harsh critic more attention than he deserved. I thought to myself, “This is what I’ve been worried about. A smart person has shown up, someone who sees through my facade and can tell that I’m a fraud.” But that unfairly discounts the people who like what you’re doing. It assumes that the spiteful feedback is somehow more valid than the praise. And it fails to acknowledge that there are people who, for no good reason, seek to tear down what others have tried to build.

I’ve received my share of disapproval. In fact, I got a comment recently that bordered on cruelty. I chose not to dwell on it, but rather to keep it in perspective. Plus, the comment was written in brown crayon, so I’m pretty sure it was just Michael Lucatelli, at it again.

I hope this is the day you stop trusting critics — the ones out there, and the one inside your head. Your audience is waiting.