daily prompt | The Gad About Town

Daily Prompt: ‘That Was Random’

Posted on September 8, 2014 by Mark Aldrich

A young woman and a child, a toddler young enough for a stroller but old enough to walk alongside it, entered the elevator my friend and I were already on. The doors shut, and the child looked at me, looked me square in the eyes, and said, “Hi, Mark.” Precisely enunciated. Distinctly direct.

Mark is my name. I had never seen the woman, or boy, before. My friend looked at me and I suppose he saw a shocked look come over my face. When we got off the elevator—not at our floor, but the next available, because I was spooked—he asked, “Do you know them?”

“No. That was random. Did that kid say my name?”

“Yeah. Definitely. As if he was about to tell you something important.”

Every once in a while, I wonder about that encounter. In subsequent years, I have confirmed with my friend that this really happened, both the unmemorable banalities and the one memorable bit. When one describes an event as random, really what one is saying is that something incredibly specific took place with absolutely no context around it and none to be found. “It was like it happened at random.”

This was over 20 years ago. Was the child prescient and have I since become an important person in his life? No 20-something person that I have gotten to know recently has told me that I look familiar or asked if we have already met. How random can random be? Is there a scale to measure random? Is there an ultimate random?

If there is, I may have caught a glimpse of it one glorious day.

I have few specific memories of the event; the fact it was a woman with a boy with a stroller is remembered, but both of their faces have receded into blank, amorphous, generic people-faces. Were they on my right or on my left? If I work on it, I can remember myself facing in either direction. I have said hello to strangers on elevators many times since, and all those people have similarly melted into faceless, generic folks. (If I am ever required to give evidence in a trial, I will be close to useless, as I do not notice specifics like what someone is wearing or what color anything is—which is one more way in which I really would make a terrible new boyfriend if I was single, so I am lucky that my girlfriend accepts me as I am—but I retain quite precisely the things people say. I am now constantly working on remembering details, to be a better boyfriend and a better writer.)

I remember the distinct precision of that anonymous little boy speaking my name, clearly and randomly. That is what remains; the creeped-out and surprised feeling remains ever accessible to me.

It is one of those moments that I feel like I flubbed on my first go at it, and I have lived the 20 years since as if waiting for something similar to happen again, to get it right this time around; I will not leave the elevator in surprise next time.

Of course, the chance of a next time, the possibility that something like this will ever happen again in my life is almost nil; this was a true-life encounter with infinite probability, with something similar to the infinite monkey theorem—you know, the thought that given enough time (infinite time), a chimp pounding randomly on a keyboard will accidentally or coincidentally type out all of “Hamlet.” One will encounter many children who are learning words for things and names of people and how to talk and one of them may blurt a name out and coincidentally it will be yours. It happened to me and I am writing about it two decades later.

I will not leave the elevator in surprise next time. No, I will confirm my name and tell the child who accidentally said it about how rare it is to encounter this moment twice in one’s life—the true random moment—and how moved I am by the opportunity to experience it again. I will tell the child to celebrate the fantastic accidents that make life special, the “fabulous realities,” as one of my teachers used to call them.

And then the mother and child will quickly leave the elevator, before they reach their desired floor, a bit spooked.
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The WordPress Daily Prompt for September 8 asks, “You’re sitting at a café when a stranger approaches you. This person asks what your name is, and, for some reason, you reply. The stranger nods, ‘I’ve been looking for you.’ What happens next?”

Daily Prompt: Humble-Bragging and Secret-Keeping

Posted on September 7, 2014 by Mark Aldrich

The word “humblebrag” has been around long enough that even I have heard of it. (Is that a humblebrag?) A collection of examples has been collected in a book that I have not yet read entitled, “Humblebrag.” The word is common enough that it is even in the Oxford Dictionary, at least in the online edition. For some reason, I only recently learned the term and, egomaniac that I am, I thought that I had come up with the concept years ago. I certainly had not.

The word describes the craft of hiding a brag about oneself inside a seemingly self-deprecating statement. For instance, if and when I name-drop a famous person and simultaneously mention how nice they were to li’l ol’ me, which is something that I certainly have done, that is a pretty standard humblebrag. A humblebragger gets two social rewards for the price of one: a congratulations for the achievement that they are proud of—and perhaps ought to be proud of!—and a verbal pat on the shoulder in recognition of their semi-sincere humbleness. “I met Oprah Winfrey once,” is a minor brag that is almost no brag at all, unless the conversation is not “famous people we have met,” but instead it was your reply to, “Have you decided what you’re getting yet? I’m starving.”

“I was hanging out with Oprah Winfrey the other day,” is a big brag if you merely saw her at O’Hare Airport. We have been taught that people do not like braggarts and that humbleness is a positive attribute to be celebrated.

“I bet Oprah Winfrey tells just about every li’l ol’ barista that they make the best (insert name of coffee concoction here).” That is a humblebrag.

Today’s WordPress Daily Prompt is an invitation for writers to humblebrag about ourselves. It asks, “Can you keep a secret? Have you ever—intentionally or not—spilled the beans (when you should’ve stayed quiet)?” If I were to tell you that I am good at keeping secrets, am I not inviting you to test this self-theory on me? It would probably be a test that we would both somehow fail. Conversely, if I offer up an example of a time I goofed and let the cat out of the bag about a surprise birthday party or whatever, because (shrugs and makes a crinkle-face) I’m just so darn honest, I would be humblebragging.

(In full disclosure, I am not a barista and I have not met or otherwise encountered Oprah Winfrey. I have been in O’Hare Airport.)

If a new acquaintance tells you that he or she is good at keeping secrets, test this and tell them something about yourself that you do not mind becoming public. Or give them one detail that is new and different and memorable from other versions of the story; in this way, when you hear that particular detail get repeated back at you, you will know who broke your confidence.

“I didn’t know you’ve been arrested,” a friend told-asked me one Monday morning. I have not yet been arrested or even ever been inside a police car, but I did know with whom I had planted that particular Easter egg in the video game of my life. Trust is something that can withstand minor tests like that.

As I reflect on it, it seems to me that trust is not something that needs testing to know that it exists in one’s life. “We are only as sick as our secrets,” I have heard, so I do not need to add anyone else’s to my own.

But I can not wait to tell you about the time Sammy Davis, Jr., took me aside and told me in confidence not to tell my friend that I am too modest for a career in show business …

Daily Prompt: Dizzy Foresight

Posted on September 6, 2014 by Mark Aldrich

One of my favorite expressions, one that I used to use frequently but no longer do, is, “This is X-number of minutes I am never getting back.” I would say this after experiencing something incredibly boring and frustrating, like waiting on line only to discover that I was waiting on the wrong line the entire time, or when I was in a traffic jam in which I learned that the hold-up was people gawking at an accident which by itself would not have created the traffic jam.

Today’s WordPress Daily Prompt for September 6 asks, “You’ve been granted the power to predict the future! The catch—each time you use your power, it costs you one day (as in, you’ll live one day less). How would you use this power, if at all?” There are many possible responses. “No,” seems to feature prominently in most of the replies published so far.

Can you hold this thought for a second? Good. A couple things are bothering me. First, there is one typo in the question and one grammatical error. It asks, “How would you use this power, it at all?” Not “if.” I corrected it in my retyping of the question, above. (Check it out here for yourself.)

And then there is this: “You’ll live one day less.” This should say, “fewer.” One day fewer. “Less” is for things that can not be counted, like time, as in, “We spent less time at the shore this summer than last year.” “Fewer” is what we use when you are counting things, as in, “I was given this so-called ‘power to predict the future’ in a speculative writing exercise, and now I will live one fewer day on this green planet we call Earth.”

Here is a refresher course.

I love Jarrett Heather‘s lyric video, especially the legs and feet on the punctuation marks dancing to the rhythm.

(Back to my rant, already in progress.)

The worst, the most empty and useless, four-word sequence in the English language is, “You should have done …” It is hindsight, something no one likes to be accused of using, masquerading as foresight, something everyone likes to be credited with possessing (see the question above). “You should have driven this route instead of the one with the traffic accident-gawking crowd that no one knew was going to show up.” It is really a way of saying, “I knew better.” Those three words are more honest and would be welcomed if they were said more often, but more honest punches might be thrown more frequently as a result.

Each traffic jam that I could foresee and thus avoid in my future would be worth losing several days at the end, because in traffic jams, I am Marcello Mastroianni at the beginning of Fellini’s “8 1/2”:

Simply possessing a low tolerance point for boredom, ennui, la noia, is no reason to desire future sight, however. Again, I have heard myself say, while speaking through hindsight, that minutes just now spent attending to one of life’s boring chores or bad movies (“that’s 90 minutes of my life I can’t get back”) is time lost to me forever. I realize that this is merely me casting the mean gaze of life’s many “You should have dones” on myself. And it is as useless as when some annoying not-so-good-doer offers unsolicited advice, ex post facto. (Someone ahead of me on line at the bank once told me I should have come in earlier or later, and not at prime time, which is when we were both on line. If he had been behind me, this would have made annoying good sense—for him—as it might have encouraged me to leave and move him up one. But in front of me?)

This realization is why I no longer find myself saying, “That’s X-number of minutes I will never get back” any more, as tempting as I find the sarcasm. Annoying and boring moments, tense moments of delay, torturous moments of anticipation in waiting rooms, these are a part of life and I can escape them here and now or choose to be bored. (I will not tell any child of mine that “only boring people are bored.”) Why hurry myself to the end (i.e. lose a day) just to avoid them?

There is a possible loophole to the future sight question, it seems to me. What if I use this fantastic power to predict the future to help me to foresee the day that I will be losing, according to the curse? Then I won’t be losing it. Or, following pure (il)logic, if I hold off using this power until the last day, then I can not ever have a last day since I will lose it, according to the curse, and thus it is always already today and I will live forever.