Daily Prompt: The Curse of Concern

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

The WordPress Daily Prompt for August 5 asks us to play voyeur in our own lives: “We often capture strangers in photos we take in public. Open your photo library, and stop at the first picture that features a person you don’t know. Now tell the story of that person.”
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I do not know the attractive couple entering the photo above from the left side of the frame, but that is okay, as I did not take the photo, and this is not about them. If I had a steadier hand with the photo editing Clone Stamp tool, they would be an oddly tall bush of purple flowers or a stack of blue Peroni umbrellas or two copies of that bicycle that they are walking towards. My hand is not that steady, so their brief moment together (are they still together?) was spared awkward editing. May the rest of their lives together or apart continue to be free of terrible editing decisions or deletion by a heavy-handed photo perfectionist.

But the photo above sets the scene:

It is May. My beloved and I are eating brunch at the table under the Peroni umbrella that is all the way to the right in the photo above. We are at DePasquale Square on Federal Hill in Providence, Rhode Island, in an outdoors restaurant called Caffe Dolce Vita. After brunch, we walk to about where the above picture was taken, turn around, and she takes this photo of me:

providence riB

Two things: One, with spinal muscular atrophy type 3 or 4, which is what I have, sitting on a hard but rounded surface like the fountain I am sitting on instead feels for me like I am sitting on the edge of a plane sending troops into a war zone and the sarge is about to kick me out even though I do not yet have my parachute strapped on, so I am sitting on my cane for stability; two, that man behind me is strolling along the same fountain as if it is wider than a mere tightrope … with a child in his arms.

I knew I was going to hear a splash before it never happened. You can even almost make out the look of concerned anticipation on the face of the elderly woman sitting closer to the street. (Well, I can, now.) So a fall into the fountain by father and child was inevitable because it was already seen in the eyes of a worried old person, like a curse, the curse of concern. There is no worse curse than that, the curse of anonymous concern, because it is often followed by the worst four-word sequence in the English language: “You should not have … .”

“You should not have” shown your child the sun-dappled fountain up close as if the world was his and he can touch the sun itself in your safe arms.

Perhaps the curse of concern really is a curse only in the idea that you will hear from loved ones and strangers alike—loved ones as if they are strangers: “I didn’t think you could do it,” and strangers as if they are as close as loved ones: “I didn’t think you ought to have tried”—about their ability to foresee your future failure or your imperfect success.

I respect “I told you so” from people more, because, if it is spoken truthfully, perhaps the speaker had indeed offered advice that I had ignored or implemented poorly. “You should not have” is blaming me for your impotence at controlling the most recent past. I bring this up in order to confess that too often, I am that “concerned bystander” about to ex post facto say “Tsk” at someone about something they should not have done, but did do.

So I did not say anything, not anything at all, to the father and child behind me before I used my cane to grab his ankle and trip them into the fountain.

(I might have made up part of this story: I do know the couple in the photo at top.)

Daily Prompt: Shampoo You

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

The WordPress Daily Prompt for August 4 asks the immortal question, “Bacon and chocolate, caramel and cheddar. Is there an unorthodox food pairing you really enjoy? Share with us the weirdest combo you’re willing to admit that you like—and how you discovered it.”
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No brand names will be harmed in the telling of this anecdote.

Many beauty care products have nutrients among their many ingredients, most of which are rendered as unpronounceable chemical compound-names or names of compounds. Not all. There is oatmeal soap, of course, which does a great job moisturizing dry skin and scrubbing off dead skin and is made of oatmeal and various butters and smells like breakfast. I am not going to pour some maple syrup on a bar and “start my day off right” with it, however.

One evening in graduate school, my housemates and I set down a challenge: Find the two products in our house with the least in common but the most in common in their ingredient lists. (How we had time for this and school, I do not know.) The only stipulation was that something like a Snickers bar was ruled out, for reasons of obviousness. The Snickers bar and many similar candy bars are their own examples of this challenge.

I figured we would discover the hidden connections between Ramen noodles and actual food, thus justifying our typical grad school meal plan, or between frozen pizza and a livable diet, but we did not. We could not. The idea that he will someday justify his junk food consumption is the obsession of every grad school student (pg. 30, “More About Junk Food”).

One ingredient list in particular triggered my memory. Looking at a toaster pastry box, I knew I was reading something that I saw every day, but I could not place it. Something about the ingredients for the filling; it was like re-reading a poem I had memorized once but forgotten after taking the final exam.

I retired to the bathroom, where good thinking happens, and there it was: a bottle of shampoo. I had the winner. The filling of a generic toaster pastry—generic, not branded—either had or has (I have not checked until writing this today) a lot in common with generic shampoo. Water. Of course. Certain specific dyes? Absolutely. And the specificity of the dyes creeped me out, well, to this day, actually. Blue number whatever and green letter that. The exact ones. (The fantasy that I had been eating a single strawberry carefully spread with a new and clean knife for each toaster pastry and lovingly placed inside each toaster pastry by a kindly toaster pastry maker with medical benefits and a good retirement plan persisted till very late in life. My naivete is something I fight to forget so I can fight for various causes and then I make sure I re-become naive so I can eat.) Some phosphates. Of course.

My housemates agreed: Either we had been eating shampoo or washing our hair with breakfast goodness. The toaster pastries remained untouched in our kitchen until after we moved out. Once, as a joke, a familiar foil wrapper was placed in the shower, next to the soap.

I am looking at websites of various products while writing this and not finding as much in common on the lists as I did that day, which leads me to three thoughts: One, that the ingredients have been changed; two, that the names have been changed; three, that maybe generic products list their ingredients very bluntly.

I have not had a toaster pastry since the early ’90s because—rightly or wrongly, and mostly wrongly, I naively admit—I believed I was eating a dry cookie with holes in it and shampoo filling.

An Artist of the Surprise Gesture

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

The WordPress Daily Prompt for August 2 requests that one’s post includes three random items. “Write a post about any topic you want, in whatever form or genre, but make sure it features a slice of cake, a pair of flip-flops, and someone old and wise.” I chose to write flash fiction.
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“I don’t know why she makes such a production out of everything,” Aunt Helen said to no one and everyone, shaking her head.

“She likes making the effort,” I offered. She looked directly at me with that. When I continued, “Maybe the reward is in the doing,” it ended as a drifting-off question.

“Not only am I going to look at you like I think you have three heads, I think you have three heads,” the aunt said. She looked out the window. Victoria was digging for something in her car, so far in that her feet were off the ground. “If it’s that far in, shouldn’t she just go around to the other side?”

“I think she is grabbing it by the base.” I hadn’t even walked over to the window to see for myself. It was a Christmas tree, fake, but already decorated with ornaments, and thus unstable no matter which method Victoria employed to retrieve it from the car. She had had her son hold it steady from his position in his car seat.

“Well, if you know what she’s doing, why didn’t you know I just wanted to cook dinner for myself, watch my stories, and go to bed?” Helen’s jowls were in constant motion as she clenched and unclenched her jaw, pursed her lips and forced her mouth to relax. We were bringing her some Christmas on her 89th birthday, and the visit was unannounced. It was unannounced because it was unplanned. Not an hour before, Victoria had remembered that she had a tree “somewhere” and that her aunt did not have a tree anywhere. Thirty minutes later, my legs were the ones off the ground as I grabbed it by its base and attempted to gently remove the tree from its storage box on a forgotten high shelf in the basement. It was still decorated from a Christmas in the ’70s. Fifteen minutes before that, I was failing to find it in a shed behind her house. I awoke that morning to her telling me her plan as if it had already happened, as if it was an anecdote.

Choosing to decide that I indeed hoped that this was an anecdote about something that had already happened—me searching for her childhood Christmas tree and us driving to Aunt Helen’s—I asked “This (story) is from last year?” If the answer was yes, we were then going to make our plans for the rest of the day, plans that I would have been happy to learn included shopping for next summer’s flip-flops or cleaning the house. Anything but one of Victoria’s adventures. Of course, deep down I actually wanted to be a part of one of her adventures, and I knew how to play very well my role of “grudging friend who gets won over.”

Whatever planning that might have been required for the day with her aunt had happened in Victoria’s head during the night before, without her consulting anyone who might be capable of implementing her plan to show love: neither me, the “muscle,” nor Aunt Helen, the recipient. It was up to us to live up to her scheme, a desire to do something so spontaneous and loving and generous that everyone involved would enjoy the spontaneity, embrace the love, and participate in the generosity. But if we failed to live up to the plan in her head, well, life is a challenge with an artist of the surprise gesture.

But something was different about this adventure: Helen was having none of it. “I didn’t ask for a tree! You should have just brought me some cake.” Victoria moved the tree to her kitchen, and while she was out of earshot, Helen whispered something I can not forget: “I don’t know why she tries so hard. It would be easier if she just said ‘I love you.'”