Open Doors

An optimist would say that when one door closes, another one opens up.

A New Yorker might say, rather, that when one door closes, I'll just, um ... stay outside, I guess.

Despite there being a row of unlocked, fully functional doors — say, at a subway station or a library — they will stream through the single door that happens to be open. Spending any time in public spaces with New Yorkers, one will undoubtedly recognize this peculiar behavior repeated over and over. Rather than boldly striking out and pulling open a second, third — dare I say it — fourth door, they rely on someone else holding the door for them. Telemarketers are less direct in their opportunism.

And just as certainly, when I throw caution to the wind and open my own door, a stream of commuters falls into line behind me.

Flocks of geese are less stringent in their formation. Hives of bees are less singular in their purpose. Oceanbound bales of hatchling turtles are less predictable.

And how many times, when I am leaving a building and someone else is arriving, will that person slide past me to enter as I open the door to leave — often with the effect of actually obstructing my exit? What is more rude: To assume I have opened the door for them, or to refuse to say thank you.

Feed Me. Now. OK... Now. (No, really. Now!)

The fat one is ruled by that weird little beeping box. It's perfectly ridiculous. Any sensible cat knows when she is hungry from the emptiness inside. But this one waits until that box bleeps every morning before rising to feed me. Despite the plainly stated reminders I gently whisper from across the room in my softly melodious voice.

Sometimes he'll get my hopes up when he stirs. But as I dash toward the door, fervently calling out my thanks over my shoulder, I am often met with a pillow he has sent sailing across the room instead of the reverberating thuds of his footsteps.

The thin one doesn't even move, unless it's to pack his pillow more tightly around his head.

It's enough to drive a self-respecting housecat to hunt. Right. Hunt what, exactly? Dust bunnies? In this dismal prison I have been reduced to such desperate acts as shredding whole rolls of toilet paper, or climbing atop dressers and tables and nudging artfully selected items to the floor.

To add insult to injury, they are also giving me less food these days. If they are not careful, I could lose weight, and we can't have that. I mean, would they dare? Is it possible? In this place they have removed all exercise from my otherwise active and vigorous lifestyle. Sometimes I need to gallop from one wall to another just to produce a heart beat, just to prove I still can. Now I need to take 20 naps a day instead of my customary 18. I am all but forced to sit at the window, looking out into open air — where is the grass, by the way? the trees? — at those pesky, those dirty, those delicious pigeons.

If they don't begin to treat me better, I think I will kill a mouse or a large insect and leave it on their bed.

I could do it, too.

I Want my OED (or "Etymology for Nothing and Web Access for Free")

Video never did kill the radio star, but there may be a very serious casualty in the smackdown between the World Wide Web and what we old timers call the "durable media."

Of all the great crushes in my life — Chris in 5th grade, the subject of my first boy-on-boy dream (complete with, no joke, a roaring fireplace); Justin in 7th grade, who I would surreptitiously photograph at Camp Tamarack; Paul in high school, my little brother's YMCA swimming instructor, who I never missed sight of changing in the locker room — the one that stands out above all others is the one I met in college. An English professor introduced us. I was at once captivated by his plain language and vast knowledge; his masculine, somewhat earthy scent; his perfectly straight spine; his thin, delicate pages; his minuscule, seemingly boundless print.

What hope did I have? How could I possibly resist this true, this pure, this urgent love? I was hopelessly lost from the moment I parted those covers to examine "gun" and "hangnail" and "nickname" and other marvels.

Yet there will come a time when those hardcover multi-volume memories are all I have left. I fear that I will never see the great love of my life — the Oxford English Dictionary — in its third edition in printed form.

Oh, for how long have I dreamed of wrapping myself bodily around its two dozen volumes! Of running my fingers along its stiff, bony edges. Of digging the sharp corners of its perfect, tight binding into my softly pliant flesh! Of inhaling the musky perfumery of inks on thousands upon thousands of translucent leaves!

A recent visit to the OED Web site rudely wrestled me from such dizzying passions. Intending to confirm the third edition's publishing date, I was shocked instead to learn that plans had changed dramatically since my last visit. The FAQ stated unmistakably that the revisions currently underway for the third edition will not be completed until 2037.

Two thousand.

Thirty-seven!

I will turn 61 years old that year.

The OED contains the history of the meaning of every blessed word in the English language, which includes by default a fair number of words from other languages, traced all the way back to their first recorded usage. It is the bible of my sacred tongue. An essential (and significantly large) part of the history of human thought itself. Few have anticipated the Second Coming with as much fervor as I have waited for this edition.

The second edition contains more than 300,000 words. Apparently more than 4,000 words are added every year. The OED will effectively double in size by the time the third edition is complete. There is no dictionary more well-endowed.

But the second edition is riddled with supplements and additions, a Frankenstein's monster of cobbled volumes.

Bugger!

The complete CD-ROM edition is not available for Macintosh.

Bollocks!

And a subscription to the online service, perhaps the most bearable option, is unaffordable. Libraries in the UK and Ireland offer remote access for free, but the New York Public Library does not. (So much for one of the greatest knowledge institutions of the world.)

Rat bastards!

Unthinkably, there may not even be be a printing of the third edition! Can you imagine a 40-volume dictionary? In type too small for my old ass to read? What is the point of literacy? What is the point of living?

The Little Things That Count

Opening up a box of Triscuits to discover that not a single one of them has been broken never fails to fill me with triumphant satisfaction.

Something Fishy Going On

In a Philadelphia Inquirer article about Broadway's The Little Mermaid, the reviewer gushes:

I saw the show with my own Ariel, who's 16, shares the mermaid's name .... I was delighted she wanted to see it with me — not least because of what The Little Mermaid says about women, under the sea or above it.

You have to hand it to Disney, purveyor of the dependent Cinderella, now championing girls who seek to take charge: Pocahontas, Beauty and the Beast's Belle, and Ariel. "Bright young women, sick of swimmin', ready to stand," is how Ariel sings it, and how I hope my Ariel will sing it, too.

Pardon me? Which mermaid is he talking about?

The Ariel I remember abandons her family and friends to chase a pipe dream in a different ecosystem. She may be portrayed as a young woman who refuses to settle for less — whatever "less" is (presumably safety and a home and wealth and her pick of the merman litter!) — but in fact, she stops at nothing to become what she is not. After she rescues the prince from drowning and he sees her face and falls in love with her, she does not insist that he love her for who she is. She wins in the end by transforming herself into something more like other people, to fit in, to abandon herself to appeal to someone else's sensibilities. Maybe the prince would love her as a mermaid. Will she ever know? Does she ever come clean? No: She is a fraud.

She may trade her voice for those legs, but she gets it back in the end — and she gets to keep the legs, too! What has she sacrificed? Not much. She has nothing of the integrity of the original Hans Christian Andersen mermaid, who at least pays a price for her alteration.

For her, getting her legs feels like a sword cutting through her. With every step she takes, it feels like she's walking on sharp knives. The sea witch takes her voice by literally cutting out her tongue! Before she does her magic, the witch even warns the mermaid about all that will happen. She tells the girl she is a fool for going through with it, but the mermaid ignores her.

Despite all the suffering, Andersen's mermaid loses everything. The prince marries another girl, and the mermaid dies and is transformed into sea foam! It is terribly sad. In her losing, Andersen's mermaid becomes a kind of martyr. The story plays like a morality tale. She is portrayed as a mere foolish girl, and she is punished in the end for reaching too far. (How dare she have self determination!) But the lessons from Disney's red-haired Ariel aren't exactly any better.

Andersen's mermaid doesn't simply want the love of a human prince. In the old story, though merfolk can live to be 300, they do not have immortal souls as humans do. It is the prospect of eternal afterlife with her prince, even if her earthly existence is cut down to a human scale, that truly motivates her.

Say what you want about coercive religious subtexts or whatever, this is at least a higher-minded reason to crawl ashore than to find out what a snarfblatt is or how a dinglehopper works.

The quotation above was used in a full-page, full-color ad in this Sunday's New York Times, where I first saw it.

Without doubt The Little Mermaid is a fun movie. In fact, I love it. And I'm sure the Broadway show is equally delightful. But it's bizarre and backwards that parents should put such stock in Ariel as someone for their daughters to mimic. What exactly are these fairy tale movies teaching kids about life? Don't love who you are. Success is only possible if you make irreversible changes to yourself to be more like other people. Being different is wrong, and it must be corrected at any cost.

"You have to hand it to Disney"? As if Ariel is some great improvement on the typical Disney princess? All you have to hand Disney is your money.

Ariel is more free-spirited than Cinderella, true. Bookish Belle improves on the theme by being unafraid of what makes her different from others around her. Belle is actually a far better example: She is compassionate toward the beast and finds something dear in him. And to her credit, she falls in love with him before he turns back into the hottie prince. Jasmine is even more fiery and independent, to the point of being shrewish. But in the end, their happiness all depends on marrying the right guy.

Bad Dye Job

The cleaning woman who comes through our office every day found a damp pair of boxer shorts in my wastebasket yesterday. I put them there. They were mine.

Underpants can end up in all kinds of strange places. I once saw a pair of baby blue shorts dangling from a black wrought-iron fence at my bus stop one morning. Who can imagine the hurry their owner must have been in to have abandoned them so.

My excuse is really very simple. Despite being in a tightly sealed container, which was inside of a sealed Ziploc freezer bag, the beets in my lunch leaked all over the inside of my gym bag. Luckily, my boxers took the brunt of the staining. My brand-new white gym shoes got a dab here and there, but nothing too bad.

I didn't mind tossing out the shorts. They were dark blue but way beyond saving. They were old. And I was not about to wash my shorts in the sink at the office!

I shudder to think what fictions those wet, stained shorts must have ignited in the cleaning lady's imagination when she fished them out of my garbage — with me sitting right there. (No wonder she didn't say hello yesterday!)

An Autograph from Shelley Long

Mom and dad and I were on a roller coaster. It was a sunny and cool summer or spring day. I was my present age, or a little younger (I always feel younger around my parents). They were somewhere in their 50s and still married. And I was dreaming.

I was able to see the coaster from a third-person perspective as well as my own. It was like watching it on TV or in a video game. This allowed me to see the train moving so fast that sometimes there was no track under the wheels. We would be suspended on solid but invisible tracks for a second, like the cars remembered where they were supposed to go, before sections of track would suddenly blink into existence. My in-dream explanation was that the processor in the computer was too slow to keep up with the train. We were spinning and dipping and looping so much that I began to worry my dad would get sick. Plus, I felt bad about sitting with my mom instead of him.

After the coaster stopped, my dad approached the ride operator looking a bit rattled, babbling, shaking all over, with a wild look in his eyes. I assumed he was doing it for comic effect, and that the operator must see people behaving like this all day long. To prevent my dad from embarrassing himself, I took his arm to lead him away — a gesture, I was aware, both arrogant and presumptuous.

When I approached him, I saw that he truly was shaken. Never mind him getting sick to his stomach, it occurred to me for the first time that he might be having a heart attack. In my dream, he'd had one years before. Not so in real life, though we suspect it's what finally killed him. We'll never know for sure.

The next thing I remember is being in a parking lot at night. Maybe at an amusement park, maybe not. Mom was no longer around, and Dad was apparently feeling a little better, sitting in the passenger seat of The Car (any car). He looked over my shoulder and said, mightily impressed, "Huh! Look, there's Shelley Duvall."

The woman walking by had what looked like a short amber-colored perm, and she wore a knee-length beige skirt and jacket with brown piping and a white blouse ruffled at the collar. It didn't look like Shelley Duvall to me. But I followed her as she walked to her car. When she opened the door and turned to enter, I saw that it was in fact Shelley Long.

Dad loves her! I thought. (In the dream he loved her, anyway, and I recalled memories of us watching Cheers together, memories that I now realize may or may not be real.) I thought I might make up for putting him through that roller coaster, cheer him up, by getting him an autograph.

As I approached Shelley Long, I glimpsed a guy crouched at the driver's side rear corner just long enough to wonder what he was doing there, when — flash. "Got it!" he shouted.

Whether he was a paparazzo or a private investigator, Shelley Long seemed unperturbed, but I did not want to be associated with him. So I cleared my throat and began, "Excuse me, Miss... uhm... Long? Hi. Uhm, I have nothing to do with this guy, just so you know. But I was wondering if you could do something for me."

The photographer had the gas cap door open, and he was tucking some money inside. "There," he said.

She looked impatient. Well... and?

"I was hoping I could get your autograph, ma'am," I said.

But I didn't have a pen on me. Or paper. "Do you have any?" I asked, embarrassed at my lack of preparation. Clearly she did not. "Never mind. There's one in my coat. Which is in my car. Just around the corner. I can go run and get it."

"No," she said, sighing loudly. "I may not be here when you get back."

My mind raced. I must have that autograph! "Well, how's about this?" I stammered. "I go run and get my pen, and if you're here, great. And if you're not, at least it's my own stupid fault."

She shrugged: agreement enough for me — or at least not a disagreement.

Then she crawled into her car and curled herself up so her entire body fit into the steering well. It did not look comfortable, as her head was now tilted nearly completely upside down, and her legs were tucked up somewhere behind her body. But she seemed unbothered by the posture. It was as if she were hiding from someone. And she was now in no position to sign anything.

I gave up on the pen. To leave her alone seemed dangerous somehow. Shelley Long was having an emotional crisis of some sort.

Stepped past the photographer, who was just sort of crouching there, I asked her what was wrong, but she said she couldn't tell me. "Of course you can tell me," I said. I fancied it a somewhat heroic gesture on my part. "You need to talk to someone."

If she was worried that I was some kind of gossip reporter, she gave no such indication. I don't remember what we discussed, but once she opened up a crack, it all came spilling out. I worried that the guy with the camera would be taking down every word, but he seemed to have stopped moving — like his wind-up clockwork had stopped running.

And that's all I remember.

Usually my dreams are about ordinary, banal events like making coffee or being at work. Sometimes they're overcomplicated versions of normal things, like trying to find my way through a stranger's house on my hands and knees in a reality somewhere between M.C. Escher and Lewis Carol.

Sometimes they're miniature fantasy scenarios, like talking on a video telephone to Madonna — until she begins to make dubious claims about losing the connection ("You're fading, Eric. You're fading." Roughly translated: "You're boring me. I'm hanging up.")

Sometimes they defy normal physical laws, like the time I drove a car down an ordinary staircase into my uncle's basement.

I find myself every once in a while dreaming about my childhood best friend, who told me to stop coming over to his house after his parents found out I was gay. Clearly an experience like that will leave a mark; I understand why that would be on my mind. But sometimes I remember a real doozy the morning after — like the one where a stained-glass rocking horse emerged from The Ocean (any ocean) to attack The City (any city), throwing immense objects out of its way, such as a radio tower and large pieces of the bridge I happened to be standing on at the time. I have no explanation for dreams like this.

Among those dreams that defy explanation, my favorites are the ones that last long enough to take completely unexpected turns. Like giving Shelley Long a shoulder to cry on. I tend to appreciate them as inexplainable little "art movies" rather than something with a psychological explanation.

I may never understand the apparent potency of an autograph from Shelley Long, but it's not hard to see the value of a few stolen moments with my dad.