The Ride Stuff
Dear Mayor Ballard:
Just when I think things can’t get any worse in our country, I go to the movie theater and watch the previews of the upcoming shows. They are, without fail, movies about futuristic police forces fighting villains in an American city laid waste by a nuclear bomb. It’s hard to tell the good guys from the bad guys because they both wear black and carry guns. When I was growing up, the bad guys had the courtesy to dress in black so we could tell at a glance that they were evil. Then the good guys changed the rules and started dressing like bad guys. Say what you will about bad guys, at least they don’t flout the rules of apparel.
Reading other people’s bucket lists is fun, but I’ve never had the desire to compile one myself. Risk-takers yearn to climb Mount Everest and sail the blue Pacific, but boring people such as I are satisfied spending their days bundled up in an afghan while watching reruns of The Big Bang Theory and eating Double Stuf Oreos.
Over the course of my lifetime, by virtue of sheer discipline, I have acquired a number of skills, chief among them my ability to relax. The average American works 1,778 hours a year, while Germans work 1,409. The hardest workers are South Koreans, who work 2,193 hours each year. We’re almost halfway in between them: not the hardest workers, but not the laziest either.
At the end of the year, when our attention was diverted by Christmas, the new owners of our town’s Dairy Queen bulldozed the restaurant’s storage building, which had begun life in 1852 as a house of worship for the Christian Church. It was a modest structure, the Christians not anticipating a wild burst of growth. After they vacated it in the 1870s, it served as a workshop for the town’s tinsmith, a hatmaker’s space, a candy store, a private home, and finally a plumber’s shop, before Pop Logan opened the Dairy Queen in 1953 and used it for storage.
Some children aren’t satisfied with their names, but I always liked mine: Deborah Lynn Dorman. Or Debra Lynn Dorman—I was never sure, as my birth certificate says “Debra,” and somewhere along the way I decided to use the biblical version because it sounded more romantic. My mother waved away the inconsistency, saying I mattered to her far more than what I was called. Either way, the name had a melodic cadence, and I was proud to say it out loud. And unlike my given name, my surname was certain. Dorman.
Every spring, I take my shoebox full of tax receipts to Steve Blacketer in Plainfield. I met Steve 31 years ago, and he has done my taxes ever since, keeping me out of jail. Besides a bureaucrat or two at the IRS, Steve is the only person who knows how much my wife and I earn each year. People tend to be secretive about their income, and I’ve never understood why. It is a fairly simple matter to look at someone’s home and discern how much they make. I don’t mind telling you I make somewhere between $10,000 and $150,000 a year.
On an overcast day this past autumn, I sat across a table at a downtown sandwich shop with my niece Wendy, sobbing. She was there to provide a shoulder and cajole me into eating the chicken-noodle soup that had become my staple since being diagnosed with early-stage breast cancer a few weeks before.
Have you ever thought about the march of progress? For many millennia, our ancestors lived much the same way. You could die, be brought back to life 10,000 years later, and discover nothing had changed. Food was still wormy and rancid, tools were still made of rocks, folks still walked everywhere, and the Cubs were still losing. Then, a rapid series of developments dramatically increased the rate of human progress: the domestication of animals; the forging of metals; the shift from hunting and gathering to agriculture; the emergence of written language, eventually followed by the printing press, which permitted the dissemination of ideas, which inevitably led to the computer chip, which culminated in our generation’s greatest invention, the battery-powered pepper-grinder.
One of my first writing gigs was a magazine column called “Perspicacity.” Nobody, including me, knew what this meant, although the dictionary defines “perspicacious” as having acute mental vision or discernment. My job was to apply such selectivity as it related to new stores, i.e., discover them and tantalize readers with a sparkling yet reliable description. I don’t know if I came to love shopping because of the column or loved the column because of shopping, but since 1979 I’ve enjoyed the quest.
