A Wonderfully Unproductive Day

Jejak PandaSelamat Datang Dan Selamat Membaca
play bandarqOn Halloween we had friends come over for dinner before trick-or-treating. Kim and Tom have three little girls around the same age as our kids. We had a nice night that ended with the five kids sitting on the floor of our living room in their disarrayed costumes, eating their candy, and watching It’s The Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown. I should point out that my six-year-old son shares with his mother a certain Scandinavian, existentialist perspective on life. They like rainy days and Mumintroll books; they loved the new Where the Wild Things Are movie with all its emphasis on the search for a shield to keep away life’s sadness and loneliness. So, as you can imagine, Cormac loves Charlie Brown and feels sincere heartache over every slight that Charlie Brown endures. Cormac also has a strong sense of justice, and expresses strong opinions about what to do to mean people, such as tie them up or lock them in a closet. Watching It’s The Great Pumpkin, Cormac continuously expressed his anger at the mistreatment Charlie Brown receives, and at one point said, “Why is everyone so mean to Charlie Brown? Do you know what I would do if I were Charlie Brown? I’d take all those rocks everyone kept giving me and I’d hit people on the head with them when they were mean to me.” All the adults looked at one another, and then my wife said, “You know, for thirty-nine years I have been watching this film, and it has never occurred to me that Charlie Brown is armed with an arsenal of weapons provided by the very people who persecute him. That’s quite an insight, Cormac.”

Today I had an odd day of poorly timed appointments. I had a late morning doctor’s appointment in Norwich, a make-up following a cancelation on a day my daughter stayed home sick. Then I had to be in Hartford in the middle of the afternoon. I kept finding myself with odd chunks of time between things, spaces of twenty or thirty minutes, too little time to be productive and get anything done, but too much time to fritter away. It was also one of those cool, grey November days that Cormac and my wife love, and I found myself indulging in some of their Nordic pensiveness.

After I got back from the doctor’s office, I had some lunch and threw on some more professional attire for my afternoon meeting, but as I got ready to get into my car I realized that I was leaving way too early. My first instinct was to hurry inside and try to work on something, but instead I walked across my backyard to the stone wall that separates our yard from a large meadow owned by my neighbor. In her field is the remnant of an orchard, a handful of apple trees and one or two peach trees. No one has tended them in years, but they still bear small fruit that’s good for pies or apple sauce. Most of the trees had lost their leaves and stood like solitary sentinels against a wall of larger, darker trees beyond. But one small apple tree still retained its leaves. They were mostly deep red, then orange, then yellow, and still some green at the bottom nearest me, and against the grey-brown distant woods and the yellow grass, the colors of this one tree struck me as beautiful. I sat down on one of the large rocks along the wall and just watched the tree. Autumn birds flitted and sang everywhere as they gathered seeds and chased one another across the steely sky. I sat there for ten, maybe fifteen minutes at most, and just let my thoughts drift rather than obsess about the work to be done today and tomorrow and next week.

At the top of the hour I returned to my car and left for Hartford. The traffic was light, and I arrived there early, with some twenty minutes before my scheduled meeting. So I walked away from the building and out of the parking lot. I walked along Farmington Avenue and admired the architectural detail of the old buildings still standing, and tried to imagine what the neighborhood looked like when it was still residential and the Park River still flowed above ground through the West End. I wandered into a neighborhood I have driven by a thousand times and that I lived near for close to a year right after I moved back to Connecticut from California upon completing graduate school. And I noticed that many of the buildings were marked with National Register of Historic Places faceplates, though I have no idea why these buildings have such significance.

As I spent such a significant amount of my day being wonderfully unproductive, I found myself thinking about the meeting I was at last week for the new Humanities school that will be in Bulkeley High, and how I had written on my draft of the mission statement something to the effect that the Humanities teach us how to be human. But in fact for all my time immersed in language and literature, I get so caught up in all the administrative tasks of my job that I find or make little (or at least insufficient) time for such meaningfulness—like contemplating a beautiful tree, listening to birds singing, or admiring the architectural beauty of an historic neighborhood.

After I was done with my meeting, rather than rush back to my office, I took myself for a cup of coffee at Tisane, up near Prospect Street, and to my pleasant surprise bumped into a friend and colleague who had been at a poetry reading at Saint Joseph College. I was glad to have a reason to sit and talk over coffee rather than just rush off and gulp it down as I drove. I went and got my daughter after that, a little before my time, and thankful for this odd day.