Ever since my return from Benin, I’ve been keeping kind of a running tally of victories and defeats in my ongoing struggle with America. Now, before my blog starts attracting unwonted visitors and I start to hear funny clicks and hisses on my phone line, here is what I mean: either America imposes its will on me, or I impose my will on it. And by America I mean the culture, the system, the force of The Way Things Are. I defeated America when I managed to find women’s shoes in my size. America defeated me when I bought a large drink at Starbucks because it looked appetizing on the sign.
I certainly look defeated at the moment. I have bruises from head to toe (well, sternum to right quadricep) of the odd pointillistic quality that you only get from being repeatedly hit by corners of furniture. My arms are shaking so that I can barely write. And yet, I have my prize! Who won in this encounter? Who were even the combatants? You shall be the judge.
I saw an ad on craigslist for chairs. Now, I’d been keeping an eye out for free or cheap chairs for some time. Piece by laborious piece, I have been turning my basement into a habitation fit to bring guests home to. I got a dining table. I got a couch. Now all I lacked were places for guests to sit around the table. When a “moving” ad popped up on craigslist and mentioned three chairs to be got rid of, it seemed ideal. It was not far from the Columbia Heights metro station. I’d biked there before from my house, the distance didn’t seem so particularly long, certainly not out of the range of a brisk walk.
When I got there, they threw in another chair and a set of kitchenwares. “Sure!” I said, being conditioned to accept whenever someone offers me something. Hmm, four chairs, a set of plates, knives, forks, and spoons, and two baking pans. “So, uh, you walked here?” asked the seller. “Oh yeah,” I said, “it’s not that far.” “You gonna need some help with that?” I stacked the four chairs on top of each other, tucked the kitchenwares into the crevices, and hefted the whole stack, which bristled like a sea creature with legs everywhere.
“Oh yeah,” I said. “This isn’t bad at all.”
It was to my credit, I suppose, that I had barely gone a few blocks before I realized that I was being a moron. Understand! There are three things that I value in myself: creativity, cleverness, and courage, which I take to be not so much boldness as the capacity to endure. As long as I have my two legs to carry me, my two feet on the ground, I can face anything and go anywhere. Dependence is weakness and weakness is shameful, and there’s no actual way I’m carrying these things all the way home, is there. No, I thought not. Pick up the phone and ask for help!
So I did; we were to meet at a place half the distance I had been planning to travel, just down the street practically! With a renewed heart I hefted my stack of chairs, which seemed lighter in my arms for exactly one block.
At Harvard a man stopped and helped me. He took a chair and the bag of dishes for as long as our ways ran together. The relief was marvelous, but my arms shook when I tried to lift the stack once again. “It’s the dishes,” I said. “What was I thinking? I’m in ceramics, I make my own plates. Dust to dust, earthenware to earthenware!” And I left the dishes in the stack of random objects by a public trash can. (I think it’s trash day tomorrow, more’s my luck!)
At U a woman stopped and helped me. She took a chair and the baking pans for as long as our ways ran together. Her presence gave me courage, for by this point I wanted to keep stopping to set down the chairs, and each time they would be harder to pick up. Having someone else there who lent me a hand kept me going, because if I kept lagging like that I would be admitting that I had bitten off too large a task for me, thus either demonstrating stupidity or a shameful reliance on society to bail me out of the mess that I had gotten myself into. But I got rid of the baking pans at the next likely-looking curbside pile.
The night came on. I rolled down my coat cuffs to protect my fingers from the bite of the edge of the chair-rail. I stopped every block and shifted my grip, trying to find some sector of muscle that still had some strength in it, like the last guest in the washroom searching for a dry spot on the towel. I was going to put on the radio to distract myself from my ordeal, but NPR was in the middle of its pledge campaign. And let me tell you, the only thing that Sisyphus lacked, as he toiled with his boulder up the sad and weary slope, was the staff of WAMU 88.5 encouraging him to renew his pledge of support.
I shifted the stack of chairs onto my hip, then onto my back. Only two more blocks to go! Then a block of sidewalk dropped a little too precipitously, I tottered, and the top chair fell of the stack and smashed in half. Fortunately I was beside a corner grocery store, who put up no objection to my disposing of the broken chair in their dumpster. There I was, three chairs, what I had originally bargained for, and now finally at the rendezvous point with the friend who was to bear me the rest of the way home.
Was this a defeat for the stubborn pigheadedness that in my younger days would have refused any help at all? Was this a defeat for the good sense that I keep hoping I’m developing, which should have known better than to try to carry all that on foot? Was this a defeat for the materialistic culture that tells me that convenience trumps all? Was this a defeat for my crunchy hippie independence that says I can live without the help of motorized transport? I don’t know, but it was a victory for you, my friends, because now, when you come over to dinner, there will be a place for you to sit.
