J: 4/22/03

Work Diary, 4/22/03

For me, hell is a Dantean place of two levels, neither hot nor cold but
definitely populated with other people's children.

The first is skin-deep, an irritating hell best illustrated quickly:
Imagine yourself in a nice hotel room. Make it a four-star hotel. A
comfortable bed is turned down, an ice machine is close but far enough
away that you can't hear its clunky rhythm. Now imagine the same room
with several size fours scattered on the floor, some piping voice
demanding food, a bitter battle over the remote. You step out of the
shower onto an obstacle course of plastic goodies placed carefully
along the pattern on the tile floor. Or maybe a loose tooth develops. A
lost hairpin becomes paramount. You buy the red can of soda instead of
the green. Someone projectile vomits onto the one remaining pair of
khakis you'd planned to wear. Another insists on pepperoni while
another doesn't.

Then there's the second level, a hell I'm still trying to figure out.
Have you ever, in the middle of the night, bent over to nuzzle your
dog's ear, to stretch the last bit of blanket over your dog to make
sure it's warm? The dog might move, but usually it stays put, a furry
rumble of demands and outright selfish content. It matters little that
that last bit of blanket means your own comfort. For a moment, before
you fall back asleep, your cold torso sacrificed to canine lethargy,
you experience the undeniable charm of selflessness (after all, why be
selfless if you can't feel good about it?). It's the perfect balm, a
natural valium that has yet to be bottled.

This is how I imagine real parents, those folks who ignore the awful
because the miraculous is sitting at the kitchen table, working on
multiplication tables and eating potato chips. And it is miraculous,
you know, so disarming that women in ugly skirts become she-devils,
foregoing their wallflower roots to become jackals in the face of the
lioness' teeth. Such women are dangerous.

But you never really feel like that about other people's children,
except in an emergency and you're pulling some young soul from the
swimming pool or ministering to the bawling lost. Not too long ago, I
pushed my cart through the grocery store, and turned the corner where a
tow-headed toddler stood screaming at the more adult-oriented cereals.
Somehow I knew to just pull up beside her, not meeting her eyes while I
extended one pinky finger and let her grab hold. She shut up
immediately, until we met up with her mother and she let loose with a
wail of rage so loud that it sparked this diary.

I will never feel that way, I think. By this I mean: I can always play
the part of a parent - because I think I know what that is - but I will
never be able to play the part of a child, so full of rage and
black-and-white and misunderstanding. In this day and age, there is no
way to say that without sounding like a self-help clich?, but there it
is.

So, hell is other people's children? Yes, comparatively speaking. Other
people's children remind me of my own jealousy, of my own failure to
wail long enough to get results. I will always hold out my pinky finger
to lost toddlers in the grocery store, just as I will always pull my
car over and whistle to lost dogs trotting along the sidewalk before
they meet the nasty traffic. But somehow the two mean the same thing to
me, and I've been told that's not right.

Or, as I've also been told, perhaps I should just grow up.