Listing Through Life

I was not having a good morning.  I was in fourth grade, I was in the principal’s office — and so were my parents. They’d been called in because of an incident that had taken place on the playground before the first bell. I had kicked a classmate of mine named Mike in the head.

Mike and I had never gotten along. I can’t remember why, exactly. We just didn’t like each other. He lived about three blocks from my house and about two blocks from school.

It wasn’t a particularly hard or vicious kick, but Mike made the most of it. He went crying home. His parents rushed him back to the school, stormed the principal’s office, and demanded that something be done about the bully — about me.

The principal called my parents. I was dragged out of class. And there we all were.  There was no way this could turn out well.

The principal asked me if I had kicked Mike in the head. I said, “Yes.” She asked me why. I said, softly, “I don’t know.”

My Dad couldn’t figure it out. I was normally the one who got picked on, not the one who did the picking. He asked me why I did it. Again I said, “I don’t know.”

The principal decided to take a new angle. She asked Mike to describe what occurred. He explained that he’d been heading toward the school door when he walked in front of me on the swings.

“Wait a minute,” the principal interrupted. “Roger was on the swings?” Mike confirmed this small detail.

“Roger, were you on the swings?” she asked me. I nodded.

The principal let out a deep sigh. Mike’s parents shook their heads and pulled him into the hallway for a lecture on tattling and being a crybaby and watching where he walked.

The principal apologized to my parents for the inconvenience.

As we left the room, Mom and Dad shook their heads too, but with looks of relief on their faces. Their beloved son wasn’t a thug after all. Dad asked me, “Why didn’t you defend yourself? Why didn’t you say you were on the swings?”

I just shrugged. I had other things on my mind. Like relief that nobody had thought to ask me if I had been swinging at the time.

I will admit right at the start that I went to the opera expecting not to enjoy it. But I was willing to be pleasantly surprised.

Here’s what I saw and heard …

The Marriage of Figaro is a ridiculous story about a valet (Figaro) who is about to marry a maid (Susanna) who serves the Countess. But the Count is, shall we say, passionate about Susanna and won’t let the marriage take place unless Susanna agrees to commit some indiscretions with him. Figaro, Susanna, and the Countess determine to foil the Count’s plans by dressing various people up as various other people and arranging assignations in the garden. There are several other characters complicating the plot. If you want to read more, you can read the summary from the program. (Click to enlarge.)

If you can make any sense out of it, you’re a better man than I am, Gunga Din.

Now take that ridiculous plot and put it to music. Well … sorta to music. Most of it isn’t music in the sense that it has melody or rhythm or any continuity — or at least none that I could pick out. The music is mostly just dialogue that is spoken in a sort of singing called “recitatives,” while the orchestra plays along. Think of an Elvis movie where, instead of the singing breaking out at random, ridiculous moments here and there, it continues all the way through — but in a form that you can’t sing along with.

Then, to all that, perform it in Italian, a language that the vast majority of the audience doesn’t understand.

Of course, there were subtitles on a screen above the stage. But there was much more being said on the stage than was appearing on the screen, so for minutes at a time, I had no idea what was going on.

Our seats were five rows from the back of the highest balcony, so we were, in essence, watching a performance at street level from the sixth floor. From that distance, I couldn’t see the singers mouths moving, so I often had no idea which character was “recitating.” The subtitles gave no clue. If we were closer, this probably wouldn’t have been a problem, or if the words had been in English, I probably could have figured a lot of it out from context. At times, I got the feeling I was watching a puppet show in which the voices weren’t connected to the characters on the stage.

To sum up, The Marriage of Figaro was a story I thought was stupid sung in a style that didn’t appeal to me in a language I didn’t understand in a performance that I found confusing.

One of the characters, Cherubino, was a soldier, who at two points in the opera dresses as a woman. He was very convincing at this because, in fact, the performer playing the role was a woman. She looked very unconvincing when playing Cherubino as the soldier. I thought this was odd casting.

I missed (that’s probably not the word I’m looking for) the second half of the first act because I had a coughing fit and had to leave. I wasn’t allowed back in until the first scene change. A kindly usher gave me a peppermint, and that helped.

The rows behind us were filled with students, I think from high school, who were very dressed up and must have been serving a detention. I am unable to account for their presence otherwise.

I should probably mention one other “adventure” that occurred earlier in the day. My wife and I went downtown early to eat lunch in the city. We had no particular place in mind and ended up at a flatbread sandwich shop called Cosi. The place was packed. When we first walked in, there were no tables available. We were headed back out when a couple got up. My wife sat down to save the table, and I went up to place our order.

My wife wanted a duo — half a sandwich and half a salad. I ordered a roast beef melt. The place was very noisy, and I had to repeat my order twice. I made my way down the line, but before I had gone more than a couple steps, the guy taking the orders stopped me and asked me again what I wanted. I told him a third time. He wrote “roast beef” on an order slip, attached it to a little table stand with a number and gave it to me. I got down to the end of the row where, after a short wait, a woman handed me my wife’s salad and sandwich. I told her I also had ordered a sandwich and showed her the slip. She told me that I should pay at the register, then put the table stand on my table and the sandwich would be brought out to me.

At the register, I showed the lady the order and the slip attached to the stand. She took them both and, after adding my drink order, told me the total. I thought it was surprisingly inexpensive, but didn’t give it much thought. I brought my wife her food, then realized I didn’t have the stand with the number. I went back to the register and asked for it. The cashier gave it to me, and I returned to the table.

As my wife ate, I waited. And waited. Other people were sitting down and getting their food, but my sandwich didn’t come. The guy delivering the food to the tables kept looking at my number as he walked by, but he didn’t bring me my food. My wife was almost done with her lunch. I finally decided to fight my way through the confusion and go ask what was going on. I pulled the receipt out of my pocket and looked at it. That’s when I discovered I hadn’t been charged for my sandwich. The opera was starting in half an hour, and I certainly didn’t want to be late for that. I decided to forget about it — I didn’t feel like giving them another chance to mess things up. I just wanted to leave.

Right about then, a friendly woman stopped by our table and saw my number on the stand. She asked what I was waiting for, and I told her. She said “OK,” and walked behind the counter. And then … nothing. She just started working back there and didn’t come near me again. After another 1o minutes, we left. I stopped by a crowded McDonald’s across the street from the Civic Opera and ordered a grilled chicken sandwich which I wolfed down while standing on the sidewalk outside.

My wife enjoys the opera. If any of you share her taste, let her know. She’ll be looking for someone to go with her in the future.

The dullest place to live in all the world has to be the suburbs. It’s been said that “a bore is someone who deprives you of solitude without providing you with company.” Suburbs are a bore.

I would like to live in a rural area where I could walk on wooded paths and rutted dirt roads. Nothing is so comforting as the solitude of a meadow or the serenity of a lakeshore. I’ve had a taste of country during summers at my parents’ house in Northern Wisconsin.

I’m not all that fond of cities with the noise and crowds and dirt. But cities have this going for them — things happen. Stop almost anywhere in a city and look around. You’ll see a parade of interesting people engaged in strange and interesting activities. I sampled city living during my three years of college in Chicago.

I’ve never experienced small town living. I understand it offers the benefit of community and easy access to the country, but at the price of personal privacy. I’m not sure that’s a trade-off I’d be willing to make.

The suburb where I live is known as a bedroom community. Almost everyone who lives here leaves town every day to work somewhere else. They return only to sleep. My wife and I generally leave town even when we’re only going to the movies or out to eat.

Very few people go out and about in our suburb. It’s not uncommon for me to take a five mile walk and see nobody else on foot. The flower beds are weeded and the lawns are mowed, but everything has an antiseptic feel to it. On very pleasant days in the spring and fall, my wife and I might happen upon another couple or two out strolling during the course of our two-mile loop. But most of the sidewalks and yards are empty. The tendency of our neighbors to stay indoors is highlighted by how well we’ve become acquainted with the few who don’t.

There’s Steve up at the end of the block. He’s a large, friendly man with a strong southern accent who walks a tiny dog about the size of his shoe. There’s Chris, a small, nervous woman three houses down who keeps her yard immaculate and likes to make small talk. And there’s Matt, who’s always wearing sandals, shorts, and a T-shirt and is always in his driveway, futzing with his motorcycle or boat. He rarely rides the motorcycle or takes the boat anywhere, but both are well futzed-with.  Pretty much everybody else stays indoors. Oh … there are two young lads who come out of their holes late at night to break windows and cause other damage, but I regret to say that I’ve never met them.

My suburb makes the occasional half-hearted attempt to be a community, but these events are rather sad. There’s the annual three-day festival in which a sorry carnival sets up in the parking lot of the largest park and attracts every junior-higher in town. Cruisin’ “happens” every Wednesday night during the summer. The same forty people bring their classic cars and park them along Main Street.  Each week has its own theme, so chances are, by the end of summer, every car has won a prize. A few hundred people show up and wander aimlessly back and forth among the Corvettes and GTOs. For the summer concert series in the tiny band shell, we get British Export, a Beatles tribute band that sounds just like the Beatles would have if they were tone-deaf. And every year around Christmas, Santa rides around town on a firetruck, siren wailing.

The liveliest center of life in my suburb is the high school. (Unfortunately, the life of the high school is such that we pulled our daughter out after her freshman year lest she become infected with it.) The Swing Band puts on a concert in the fall that sells out weeks in advance. This past season, the football team won state. The town celebrated with sirens and fireworks. I didn’t go to the festivities, but I could hear them clearly from my house a mile away. I was happy for my town, at least until I discovered that Illinois has a myriad of different divisions of high-school sports, each with its own champion. So being state champion doesn’t mean that you’re the best in the state; just that you beat the teams you happened to play. I’m happy for my town, but I find the honor somewhat unimpressive.

My suburb has a grocery store, two drug stores, several fast-food restaurants, two bars and five or six banks. (Why does a suburb the size of this need a bank every 50 yards?) The “historic” downtown area is occupied by insurance brokers and law offices. The Metra station is in the center of everything and is the main reason most of the people live in the suburb. You can head southeast into the city or northwest into the country. I find it the most interesting spot in town — maybe because it promises life beyond the suburbs.

I’m not sure why we do this to ourselves. Why do we choose boring lives in boring subdivisions? Why is it that I can sit in the rocking chair on my front porch on a sunny weekend afternoon and see nothing of interest whatsoever? I’m not sure.  But I am sure of this — there’s got to be a better way.

I don’t cook often. For one thing, I don’t plan ahead of time to be hungry. I go about my normal life with no thought about my next meal. When the mood to eat strikes, I don’t want to have to plan something — I want to eat.

But there may be other reasons.

I have a simple formula that I use when deciding whether or not to go somewhere. I compute the amount of time it will take to get there and the amount of time it will take to get home. If those two numbers, added together, are greater than amount of time I will actually spend at the destination, I generally don’t go.

I think, subconsciously, I might have been using a similar formula when deciding what to make for lunch. If the time it takes to prepare a meal is longer than the time it takes to eat the meal, I don’t make it.

And since I generally wolf my food down, this has limited me to a very narrow range of meals. Throw a couple pieces of bread in the toaster, cut a few slices of cheese, grab a bit of ham and maybe a banana, pour myself a Pepsi and by that time the bread has popped up and is ready to be buttered. Three minutes and I’m ready to eat. Take a bite of cheese, a bite of ham and a bite of toast and, really, it tastes an awful lot like a sandwich. Six minutes and I’m done — a perfect ratio.

One recent Saturday morning, I saw my wife cooking an omelet for herself. It looked, and smelled, good and I got a hankering for one of my own. But there were two problems: 1) an omelet takes a powerful lot of preparation, and 2) I’ve never made one.  I had a bowl of cereal.

But when lunchtime came around, I still had omelet on my mind. I decided to go for it. I checked the time and began. First I grabbed the frozen mushrooms out of the freezer and warmed a few in a frying pan with a bit of olive oil. I set them on a plate. I then cracked two eggs in a bowl and stirred them up and dumped them in the pan. While the eggs were cooking, I grabbed a slice of cheese and a piece of ham and put them with the mushrooms. Then I popped two pieces of rye bread in the toaster and peeled an orange.

When I thought enough time had gone by for the eggs to cook, I dumped in the mushrooms, cheese and ham and folded everything over. I buttered the toast. I checked the omelet and scraped it off the bottom of the pan and put in on my plate. I noticed it had a decidedly different texture than the one my wife had made — more like a flaky sponge, somehow (which is the third reason I don’t cook often). I checked the time. The meal preparation had taken 14 minutes.

Although it looks rather pathetic (my wife said I probably needed to stir eggs more — but that would mean even more preparation time), it didn’t taste awful.

Oh, and the time? It took me 10 minutes to eat everything on the plate, four minutes less than it took to prepare.  This may be an insurmountable problem.