Homeownership: The Beauty and the Beast

This blog post is dedicated to my friends who returned from a dream vacation in Costa Rica last week to discover that the lower level of their home had flooded in their absence. (You know who you are and you have my deepest sympathies.) When I found out what had happened to their house, I told them, “This is why I’m not looking in my basement until the spring.” They thought it was a joke. Homeownership is the cornerstone of living the American Dream, right? Owning your own castle. But the road to happy homing is fraught with pests, flooding, mold, faulty wiring, head-scratching plumbing configurations, diseased trees, missing conduit, and alligators in the basement.

In the interest of scientific research, I invite you to take the following quiz if you own your home. Email me your answers to tabulate.

Question 1. I own my home because

a) I like to grow food and pretty flowers on my property.

b) I want to support my local tree company by paying them $5000 to trim my oak trees so they won’t fall on my house.

Question 2. I own my home because

a) I want to be able to do things my way inside my own house.

b) I crave the adrenal rush of getting electrocuted by surprise amateur wiring that a previous owner thought was a good idea at the time.

Question 3. I own my home because

a) I don’t want to be dependent on a landlord to make needed repairs.

b) I would prefer to replace my roof than go on vacation any time in the next ten years.

Question 4. I own my own home because

a) It’s a wise investment and it makes more financial sense than throwing away money every month on rent.

b) I would rather pour my money into the black hole of home repairs than retire to a small but adorable oceanfront beach rental and write my memoirs.

If you chose answer “a” to any of these questions then congratulations, you either just bought a house a few minutes ago or you have a ridiculously positive glass-half-full outlook on life and I will be right over with a welcome-to-the-suburbs goody basket that includes fresh fruit grown in my yard, a pipe wrench, a coupon for a discount on nontoxic carpet cleaning, a kitten, a box of acorns, a fire extinguisher, a plunger, Benadryl, and a catalogue of garage door openers. As you have probably inferred, the correct answer is “b.”

When you buy a house, it is theoretically functional, habitable, and in working order. It goes downhill from there. The most unbelievable (and expensive) things soon transpire, and they often begin as something so small and benign that it seems deceptively inconsequential. The refrigerator leaves a puddle on the floor every few hours that needs wiping up (in the middle of July); this results in a man from the appliance store carting away the refrigerator and informing me that I need to buy a new one, which is mostly under warranty (not completely) and will take three weeks to arrive. Water drains slowly out of the bathtub and when I get around to calling the plumber, he informs me that I have a plumbing leak in the basement that will require a team of experts flown out from NASA and working round-the-clock for a week to resolve. And while they are resolving the problem, I have to drive to the nearest gas station to use the toilet because the water has been turned off. When I turn the heat on, my house smells vaguely like gas; the heating company comes to take a look and swiftly shuts the furnace down and condemns it for leaking carbon monoxide. They tell me I’m lucky to be alive (news flash), and charge me $1500 to install a new furnace. The phone stops working for a couple of hours during a rainstorm and AT&T reports that the wire is bad from our house all the way to the connection box under the street, more than a hundred feet away. They dig up my yard to lay conduit and I am wading in mud along my fence line for months afterward. (Although I found a cool machete under the oleander bush that one of them forgot.)

Occasionally I am let off the hook when something turns out to not be such a big problem. Like once, when I still lived at the Ranch, our water pump stopped working. I thought we had to replace the pump, which would have been costly, but then we discovered that a mouse had made a nest in the electrical box in the pump house and had been electrocuted, shorting out the system. Fortunately this was one problem that was not expensive to fix, however, the pump house smelled like BBQ rodent for months.

The hidden albatross of owning a home is ongoing house maintenance, which happens even when everything is running smoothly. It’s preventative and I never seem to have what it takes to budget for it. Choice:  trip to SoCal to visit my children or servicing the furnace, cleaning the chimney, and clearing the gutters. No brainer. I think I’m supposed to be washing my lighting fixtures and repainting my walls every few years, but who has the time for such nonsense? What really gets to me is that the service workers who conduct house-related maintenance and repairs make so much money off me. The plumber, exterminator, and appliance repairman charge $100 just to make a service call. Period. Out of the box. The guy who repaired my lawnmower a few years ago charged $96/hour, and he never finished high school. I have a master’s degree for goodness sake and he was making more than I was; so I raised my rates for grant writing to $100/hour after that because it infuriated me that I was charging less for my professional services than a guy with a sign on his counter that said all bills must be pade in full at time of pik-up.  

Nowadays, I am starting to feel like I really don’t want to know. This is why I am quite serious about not looking in my basement until the spring. There is nothing down there but cardboard boxes, but if snakes are living in them then leave me oblivious. I have many questions that will therefore remain unanswered, such as:  Why is my dryer leaking brown water? Is the cat eating something it found in my underwear drawer? What’s that high-pitched screaming noise I hear when I turn on the heat? Did I just see a beak poking out of my closet? Never mind.

The thing that keeps me owning a home is basically my garden. As long as I am still agile enough to do the work in the yard necessary to grow my own food out there, I’m going to stay trapped in homeownership. So pass the duct tape, the socket wrench, and my checkbook. I’m doomed by a passion for standing in my yard eating tomatoes, asparagus, peaches, and blueberries straight off the stem.

This plumber looks friendly, but when he gets done fixing the sink 

he will ask you to give him one of your kidneys in payment.

Riff on the Attack of the Suds

Yesterday my husband performed an impressive trick. He made the washing machine overflow with fluffy suds. I discovered this when I emptied the hamper in our bathroom, wrapped the clothes in a towel, and carried them to the laundry room. Upon arrival, I found the washing machine beeping as frantically as a L.A. commuter, while all of the orange and red alert lights blinked at a level capable of inducing a laundry-related Grand Mal seizure (now that would be hard to explain). I had not yet eaten breakfast and felt ill-prepared to deal with the situation on an empty stomach. But no time is the right time for your washing machine to have a psychotic episode. When I lifted the lid, soap suds bubbled over. A detective hot on the trail, I went in search of my husband (since the cats don’t know how to use the washer and no one else lives with us). I found him contentedly surfing the internet in his man cave (he calls it his office but it’s a man cave, trust me).

“What’s up with the washing machine?” I asked, poking my head in, because all I can really fit in there with all the stuff lying around is my head. “What do you mean?” he replied innocently. “I mean what did you put in it?” I pressed forward intrepidly. “My gym clothes,” he answered, with a baffled expression. “You need to come see this. Your gym clothes are frothing at the mouth,” I informed him. When we arrived at the sea of foam in the laundry room, I asked him what he had poured into the machine to wash his gym clothes with. (Dishwashing liquid? Carpet cleaner? Industrial-strength mighty-foam?) He said that he had added some Dr. Bonners Sal Suds to the wash. This was a departure from using laundry detergent and I thought, how adventurous. Or not. “What possessed you to do that?” I asked. “I was trying to get rid of the chlorine odor from the pool,” he explained. He swore he put hardly any Sal Suds into the load. Perception of what’s “hardly any” may be a fundamental difference between men and women.

It took Ron about twenty minutes to bail the suds out of the machine into the utility sink, clear the control panel, and get the machine functioning again. “I think I’ll go write my blog,” I said as he was bailing. He gave me the don’t-you-dare look, so naturally his epic laundry fail is my topic of discussion for today. It got me remembering back over the many years that we have kept house together. Sharing household chores is one of the defining features of a marriage. Unfortunately for me, I came into the marriage with a handicap, which was that my mother had the notion that I was a lousy housekeeper and that Ron had a greater commitment to and firmer grasp on cleaning house than I did.

My mother was what Jews call a balabusta, which is a Yiddish word that doesn’t translate well into English, but basically means an excellent homemaker (kind of Martha Stewart on steroids only with frizzy hair and a pressure cooker). Mom’s home was always immaculate. She was notorious for stealth cleaning when she visited me (when I was single, when I was married, when I had children, whenever). She would scour my cooking pots and baking dishes until they sparkled so blindingly that I had to wear sunglasses in the kitchen for weeks after she visited. She dusted my tchotchkes (more Yiddish—means knickknacks but I can’t handle all the “k”s in the English version, they make me dizzy) and wiped down my windows with glass cleaner. She washed my stairs, scrubbed my kitchen ceiling, oiled my piano, ironed my napkins, reupholstered my easy chair, braided a rug for the driveway, vacuumed the top of my refrigerator, weeded my carpet, and flossed my cats’ teeth.

Honestly, my house was never that dirty. It just wasn’t up to her standard. She didn’t trip me about it. She just cleaned it. After Ron and I moved in together, whenever Mom came to visit, Ron made a point of speaking the housecleaning lingo with her. He talked such a good game that he convinced Mom that if any cleaning was happening at our house at all then it was because of him. He talked with her about the merits of different types of floor cleaners. He knew which bathroom cleaner would really get the mold out of the caulking (never mind that it was the one that emitted fumes so atrociously toxic that I would hyperventilate for a week and break out in hives when he used it in my bathroom). Ron and Mom talked for hours about vacuum cleaner attachments, how to polish silver, wood furniture finishes, and what kind of long-handled sponge to use to wash the walls. Mom loved him. In fact she loved him so much that she proposed to him. (I am not making this part up.) She asked him to marry her daughter and he accepted and the next thing I knew they were choosing plates together at Macy’s and I had to buy a decent pair of shoes because I was going to be a bride in a wedding.

Mom rarely discussed housecleaning with me, probably  because she didn’t think I had the vocabulary necessary. But I was the one who did the daily chores in our house during our childrearing years (when the children were old enough to help, they were assigned chores). I did the grocery shopping and cooking (except for meat, which Ron had to cook because I’m vegetarian, and inevitably when he cooked meat the smoke detector went off so that the children started calling it the meat detector), I did the laundry, loaded and unloaded the dishwasher (and washed anything by hand that needed it), emptied the kitchen compost (and shoveled it out later to put in the garden), vacuumed, cared for the pets, cleaned the toilets, swept the kitchen floor, knocked down the cobwebs, and all the rest. To his credit, Ron has always done many of the more heinous chores that are not required every day; usually the ones that require muscle. He mops the floor in the house we live in now, which is essential for me because I can’t do it without putting my back out; besides, he’s ex-Navy so he needs to swab the deck fairly often or he is in danger of having lapses in judgment that result in washing machine suds attacks. He has always been the one to scrub the stovetop every week or two. I never really did get the hang of cleaning stoves. He still has an obsession with bathroom mold and douses the shower in various chemicals that make the towels curl. Where was I? Oh, yes, Mom didn’t understand the division of labor in our household.

One time, when I had been married for about twenty years, Mom turned to Ron at the dinner table and offered to “buy him a new vacuum cleaner.” She had apparently attempted to vacuum our goldfish and discovered that our vacuum cleaner sounded like a helicopter landing. I couldn’t let that pass. I thanked Mom for her generous offer and explained to her that Ron rarely vacuumed. My children were teenagers by then and they earned their allowance by doing chores regularly. I told her that one of her grandsons had been vacuuming the house once a week for over a year as one of his chores; and when the children didn’t do it, I did it, not Ron. (I thought, but did not say, that if she wanted to buy Ron a useful housecleaning tool she should get him a gas mask for when he cleaned the bathroom with his noxious mold-fighters.) She seemed surprised and a bit disappointed that Ron didn’t often vacuum, but she heard me. Soon afterward, she bought us a new vacuum cleaner, for which we were truly grateful.

Honestly, thinking back on it now, I find it so touchingly sweet that Mom viewed Ron as a kindred housecleaning soul, that I don’t mind so much that she gave him credit for doing 90% of the cleaning that happened in our house. Now that she’s gone (it’s been more than ten years), I wish I could hear her talk housecleaning with Ron again. They seemed to enjoy it so much. It makes me smile to imagine her looking down on our laundry room debacle yesterday morning from the unfathomable spirit world and seeing her perfect-homemaker son-in-law bailing mounds of cloudy suds out of our washing machine. She would have suggested he use a little white vinegar to get the chlorine smell out of the gym clothes. Or something equally practical and simple. Vinegar would be good. Then he would smell like salad, which is my favorite lunch. 

This is not Ron, it's a stock photo, but so apropos! 

This Is My Brain on Foreign Languages

I am once again trying to learn a new language, which makes my brain hurt. I have never been good at this. I took a full year of beginning Spanish four separate times in my life and I still can’t order enchiladas in Spanish at a Mexican restaurant. To be fair, I eventually did manage to communicate marginally in Spanish the last time I took the classes because I had the opportunity to use the language in my daily life. I worked at Head Start at the time, where nearly half the staff spoke Spanish, and I practiced with them. But when I left Head Start to work from home as a grant writer, the precious little bit of the language I had managed to embed in my brain took the next flight to Bolivia.

This time around I’m trying to learn American Sign Language (ASL), since my hearing is so lousy. Ron is taking the class with me so we can communicate in environments where I can’t hear (such as while I’m running the blender, so I can sign “I’m making a smoothie”) and in general for future use if I lose more hearing. My husband apparently has a more energetic left brain than I do (left brain usually controls foreign language learning) because he remembers the signs for more words than I do. When we came home from our first class, he already knew how to say “I have to go to the toilet” and I didn’t. If I don’t catch up quickly, I will be both deaf and intermittently incontinent. I thought the universal sign for “I have to go to the bathroom” was the I-need-to-pee dance. Not.

My first foray into learning a foreign language occurred when I was six years old and I started Hebrew School. Some of my peers eventually took the AP Hebrew Language Exam in their senior year in high school, but I didn’t have a prayer with this language, and that’s ironic because all the prayers in the prayer book at my synagogue were in Hebrew. I learned to read the prayers, but I couldn’t figure out what they meant. I trust I was praying for world peace all those years and not a pink Cadillac. One root in the Hebrew language can branch into a dozen different words. I couldn’t keep them all straight. The root letters for the word “hear” in Hebrew might also mean spirit, listen, guard, gatepost, deaf as a gatepost, pipe wrench, and please pass the hummus. This is hypothetical. I don’t know how to say “hear” in Hebrew or what the root letters are for this word. I do know how to make hummus. Is anyone else hungry for falafel?

I have often blamed my foreign language learning impairment on the fact that I started learning French in third grade, and that trying to learn both French and Hebrew at such a tender young age ruined my left brain for life. I swiftly became proficient at mixing up words across the languages and speaking Hebrench in both classes. If I did manage a complete sentence all in one language, it usually came out meaning something like “May I eat your boots?” “Please wash my cat,” or “I want to invite you to have a hysterectomy.”

The only language I actually began to master (briefly) was French, which I no longer remember. I studied French steadily for about ten years, continuing with it long after I gave up on Hebrew. By the time I traveled to Paris in 1973, I could navigate passably with my limited language skills. You would think that Paris would be the worst place for a linguistically impaired American to spread her wings, since Parisians are notoriously rude and chauvinistic about their language. Interestingly, to the contrary, most of the Parisians I met were kind and helpful. Many of them humored me and spoke slowly to help me learn. Perhaps they appreciated my earnest desire to improve, but it’s more likely that they simply thought I was hilarious. The biggest obstacle for me in perfecting my French was that I am hopeless at conjugation so even though I had an impressive vocabulary, I could only speak in the present tense. My French cousin, who was a language teacher, nearly cracked a rib laughing when I told her smoothly, “I am an asshole at the Palais Garnier,” which is the French Opera House. (I am not making this up.) The asshole at the opera statement resulted mainly from my abysmal pronunciation. I was trying to tell my cousin about something that happened while I was in the que at the Opera waiting to buy a ticket, and the French word for que is similar to the French word for asshole. Go figure. I don’t even like opera, and I believe it can make an asshole out of anyone if they listen to too much of the stuff.

When I was studying for my master’s degree in English, I was required to complete two foreign language requirements. For one of them, I took a full year of beginning Spanish. For the other I took Old English, which counted as a foreign language in my department. I thought Old English would be vaguely recognizable to me. I had read Canterbury Tales in the original Middle English, and I was pretty good at understanding Shakespeare. So why not Old English? I’ll tell you why not. Old English is a cross between German on an extra-rich vowel diet and Norwegian as spoken by a sailor with a mouthful of mutton. Using my Beowulf-English Dictionary, I got up at dawn three days a week and spent several hours wrestling with Grendel. I never, and I mean never, turned up in class with a viable translation. But I was the most popular student in the class. My classmates waited in high anticipation for my turn to translate a few lines. I described the Geats swimming the English Channel wearing full armor and carrying spears. In my translations, Beowulf solicited sex from all his most ferocious warriors, Grendel crunched the bones of oak trees and drank mead from the shell of a giant beetle (possibly a 1964 VW), and the Geats’ dining hall burned down in a freak outhouse accident involving barley gas, a tiki torch, and a failure to bring a fire extinguisher to an illegal pig roast.

So now, after years of traumatic incidents involving violence against foreign language acquisition, I am back at it again, trying to communicate using someone else’s idea of how to shape the world into words. ASL is particularly unusual because it’s an entirely visual language pronounced using the fingers, hands, face, and arms. This means that I am not only in danger of miscommunicating, but I may also break my wrist or sprain my cheek giving it a try. I hope I don’t poke someone’s eye out in class trying to offer them a tangerine, or break a lighting fixture while attempting to say that a plane flew overhead. I am a serious liability in a visual language learning class, I’m afraid. I could potentially bring the house down, which is similar to being an asshole at the Palais Garnier. But I am determined to persevere. Scientific research confirms that learning a new language increases the size of one’s brain. I’m all in. After a semester of ASL, I hope to be able to wear a bigger hat.

This is the inside of the Palais Garnier (where I was not an asshole).

The Perfect Car

My youngest son is driving a 1999 Honda Civic with bald tires and a trunk full of rainwater. We decided a couple of months ago, even before he discovered the bog in the trunk, that we need to get him into a newer and more reliable vehicle, and I’m happy to help with this. It’s only fair. I helped his older siblings with cars when they were his age. I have one caveat when I help my children with cars:  if you want financial help from me to buy and/or maintain a car then it has to be a Honda. I know and love Hondas. They go for a long time before they need any repairs, and when they do need repairs the cost is reasonable. My daughter once asked me if I would disown her if she bought a car that wasn’t a Honda. I paused to think about that. “Mom?” She sounded worried. Her present car is not a Honda and she is still in the will, but she takes care of the car of course.

While there might be advantages to having a car that can double as a fishing hole, I can’t say that I know what those are. I’m praying that the 1999 will hang in there for us for a few more weeks until we find the perfect used car for my son. I have alerted the local dealership that we are in the market, and have given my saleswoman the parameters:  Honda Civic, Fit, or Accord; 2008 or newer; less than 110,000 miles; $10,000 limit on cost; no mice living under the hood; vague scent of lavender wafting from the dashboard. This is completely doable. The saleswoman called last week to say she had just the vehicle – a 2009 Honda Fit with the scent of lavender. But it’s red. I explained to her that research shows that the police stop red cars far more often than any other color, and the driver of this car will be my precious multiculti son living in Oakland. We don’t want to invite trouble so red is out of the question. New parameter for her notes:  no red cars. Maybe we could find one with a cloak of invisibility. That would be cool, huh?

Every day I go onto Autotrader.com and look at Hondas inhabiting my corner of the universe. Yesterday I found a strong candidate at a dealership in San Rafael. It’s a blue 2007 Honda Fit. I loved this car the instant I saw it on Autotrader.com. I love it because it’s my car; or would be if my car was for sale. I drive a blue 2007 Honda Fit. This caused me to consider if I should give my car to my son and buy myself a new one. The problem with that scenario is that I love my car and I want to drive it forever. Even thinking about giving my car away made me feel like crying. Is this what is meant by “the soul of the machine”? I am one with the soul of my car. I mean, well, for one, they don’t make the Fit in this fantastic electric blue color anymore. When I purchased my Fit, I entered my blue period. I ran out and bought a blue water bottle, blue boots, a blue travel coffee cup, and a blue jacket. When I shopped for clothing, I came home with blue dresses, shirts, socks, and underwear. (Seriously, who buys underpants to match their car?) I have never left my blue period—I’m still there. Blue post-its and stationary. Blue dishes and napkins. Blue breakfast smoothie every morning. Recently, when my husband bought a red bath towel, I demanded that he return it to the store because it clashed. “Really? Clashes with what? What color should I get instead, pray tell?” he asked in frustration. “How about blue?” I suggested; as if I was going to park the car in the bathroom to match.

I emailed a link to the blue Fit I saw online yesterday to my son. I half expect him to email back, “Mom, is that your car?” Is it too weird for a 20-something young man to drive the same kind of car as his mother? What if it’s a super terrific kind of car? Then it’s OK, right? Rest assured he won’t run out and buy blue underwear if he starts driving a blue Fit. (He’s a grown man, so I have no business discussing his underwear, even though I changed his diapers at one time.) I wonder if the obsession with color-coordinating with one’s car is a feature of owning a Fit. Maybe I can get National Science Foundation grant funding to conduct a research study.

I feel confident that we will buy him the perfect car in the near future. I just hope it happens before the 1999 spontaneously combusts, begins growing mushrooms, pops its tires, or starts hatching fish. Salmon would be nice. Except they are not blue.

Attention Span of a Goldfish

So this happened. Microsoft conducted a study on the impact on people of media usage, and concluded that the average attention span of the typical North American media user is eight seconds. This is less than the attention span of a goldfish (at nine seconds), which means that if you are an average media-user, and you try to do a stare-off with a goldfish, you will look away first. This will happen not because the goldfish intimidates you, but because you will be distracted sooner than the goldfish. How does one measure the attention span of a goldfish, anyway? Maybe you see how long the goldfish looks at the treasure chest before it swims over to the castle. And if the scientist has a shorter attention span than the goldfish, then wouldn’t the scientist get distracted before the goldfish swims to the castle? I need to have a seaweed snack.

In some instances, a short attention span might be useful. For instance, it’s probably not a good thing to waste too much time staring at goldfish. On the other hand, having a short attention span makes it difficult to read for an extended period of time, to write or lose oneself in creative pursuits, or to engage in contemplative reflection and deep thought. On this hand, it seems pathetic that a goldfish has a greater ability to read Dostoevsky than a media-savvy human. How many hands is that? I could use a manicure. I just noticed that my right hand looks older than my left hand. What was I saying?

Oh yeah. The study defined attention span as “the amount of concentrated time on task without becoming distracted.” Those studied who were heavy users of multiple devices were unable filter out irrelevant input and were easily distracted by the many media streams bombarding them on electronic devices. This is one of the reasons why I don’t allow advertising on my blog; because, let’s face it, who will actually finish reading the blog if cats, chocolate bars, the trailer for Galaxy Quest, boots, seaweed snacks, Paulownia trees, and the Raiders football team keep hopping and popping in the margins? I definitely must watch Galaxy Quest again. Excuse me for a couple of hours.

The brain is malleable and it adjusts to the work required of it. The brains of people who spend a lot of time on the mobile internet become wired with a poor attention span. The more time people spend reading on the internet and clicking through hyperlinks on an endless trail to nowhere in particular, the shorter their attention span, until they can no longer read a novel, finish eating breakfast, or tie their shoes (hence the invention of Velcro). Personally, I think this contributes to road rage because people have no patience whatsoever. They can’t wait for the guy in front of them to get out of their way so they can get to WalMart five seconds sooner to buy a digital box of Kleenex that they saw advertised on their phone. I confess the irony of this coming from me since I have no patience for waiting in line, but I had no patience for waiting in line long before the internet was invented, so perhaps I possess a sliver of goldfish DNA. (Picture me doing the fish lips thing—boop, boop.) On the other hand, I always bring a large book with me to read while waiting in line, particularly at the post office, since postal workers take longer to sell someone a sheet of stamps than it takes to rescue Matt Damon from Mars. And that was a way cool movie with amazing special effects and gorgeous Mars-scapes. Wait, how did I wind up on Mars? Where am I?

The Microsoft study found significant generational differences in the use of mobile devices, reporting that 77% of people age 18-24 said that when nothing is occupying their attention, the first thing they do is reach for their phone, compared to only 10% of those over 65 who said they reach for their phone when nothing else is occupying their attention. That statistic doesn’t tell us anything useful since most people over 65 generally can’t remember where they put their phone. This means they rarely have “nothing else occupying their attention” because their attention is occupied trying to remember where they put their phone; and their shoes, wallet, keys, coffee, toothbrush, oxygen tank, husband, or refrigerator. Wait, is this my house? Shoot, I guess it’s on me to have the furnace serviced. Where was I going with this?

Online reading, hopping, and following trails of information down a long-and-winding-road physically rewires the brain to process information in a way that destroys pathways that support sustained concentration and thought. This is why young adults in my children’s generation have more and more trouble reading books. Short articles maybe, or blog posts, yes, but a whole novel? Overwhelming. Fortunately the brain can be rewired with some effort. Spending time in nature, unplugged, is one of the best ways to rewire the brain for more sustained activity. When the brain is no longer bombarded with an avalanche of external electronic-generated stimuli, it relaxes. It doesn’t feel compelled to process all that scattershot info-image-input rattling at it. In short, entering a meditative or contemplative state, such as nature provides, allows people to regain control of their thought processes. The brain is an evolving organ and we can control its evolution to a large extent.

If you want to rewire your brain to think for itself and regain the ability to exercise sustained thought, I suggest the following exercises:  pet the cat, make soup, plant a garden, walk among tall trees, spend a day at the ocean, play hide-and-seek with a toddler. Find a terrific edge-of-your-seat book and slowly build up to reading more and more pages each day. I hesitate to recommend meditation simply because it would be hypocritical coming from me, since it does not end well when I try to meditate. To me it feels too much like waiting in line and I don’t have the patience, but it works extremely well for many other people. My friend Rita, a doctor of psychology, has successfully effected extraordinary positive change in public schools by introducing mindfulness meditation. Rita tells me that my daily morning walk is my mindfulness meditation. So maybe I am better at meditating than I think. An image of cheese just popped into my head. Is anyone else hungry?

Which leads me to the self-driving car. Seriously? Do we really need a self-driving car so people can occupy themselves bouncing around on electronic devices while on the road? Are people so incapable of having thoughts while driving? It concerns me that people can’t pay attention, because if we can’t pay attention long enough to read or follow a train of thought, then how can we pay attention to our lives? We are in danger of failing to live deliberately, failing to truly and gloriously dwell in the moment before it slips away, in danger of missing the opportunity to revel in the good things in life. Before I get distracted by answering my email, reading the online news, or watching another Facebook vid of someone’s patio furniture covered in snow during the Great Blizzard of 2016, I want to remind you, to remind us, all of us, to look up from the screen. Look up. Let’s change our minds while we still can.

BOOP