Things that make me happy

(An antidote to the telephone frustrations)

These are things that have been in my life this past week that make me happy:

1. A Ugandan's accent - and his laughter - heard in a radio interview.

2. A son who says, "They're not Arabs, mom. They're Persians." (This would be the same son who says, "Not 'the Orient,' mom. Asia. We don't orient our maps like we did in the old days." --- Sometimes I wonder if I've unleashed something terrible out into the world, but I can't be sorry. This sort of thinking makes me really really happy.)

3. This conversation we had with our two huge young men: (As we're handing over another check.) Dad: "You two need to rebel against your parents' values. Go find jobs that make a lot of money." Son: "How much do high school music teachers make?" (Mom's mental happy dance goes here.)

4. A cool breeze that has ended the ten-days siege of heat in our "temperate zone." A local radio DJ called it "being microwaved." I quite agree.

5. The smell of summer, coming in through the car windows as I entered the woods on Hwy 14 on the way home in the evening. Columbia River making the air soft to the touch. Warm blackberry brambles sweetening everything and conifer cones and needles lying on the ground to give the scent of sun-dried forest. The rocks of a creek bed making the taste of minerals, suggesting splashing water to the person breathing it all in. I don't loathe summer when I smell the woods.

I have a suggestion

I have just spent a few more minutes of my life (minutes I will never get back) talking to the phone company about our business lines. Figuring out what the charges will be with the various options ... and figuring it out on the fly, over the phone, verbally and aurally, is an exercise is such high levels of frustration that the participants should all be entitled to free hypnosis or downers or a month of yoga or something. UGH.

The reason it doesn't work is because the kind of information being relayed is of two kind - a basic and static charge (according to the "plan" one chooses) and the variables that may be added to it. It's base pay plus commission. It's the prix fixe menu with the wine still a question of price and value. The customer chooses a base among bases, and then adds to it in a nearly infinite number of ways, depending on the "features" the customer wants.

And this is exactly the same problem with purchasing:

--insurance

--satellite and cable television

--and, in some ways, higher education. It's like a school schedule and the finances attached to it.

Too many moving parts, but some immovable parts. (And then there's the taxes according to your location.)

grrrrrr!

So I have a suggestion. All the insurance companies, television providers, and telephone service providers need websites with charts of products, and a web calculator so that the customer can play with the options and order from that. Wouldn't that make life easier?

The health insurance companies should also include the customer's out-of-pocket charges if that customer decides to do what the doctor recommends and have a "test" to "confirm" the "results" of a recent "procedure." That way, the patient/customer will not get a completely unexpected bill for hundreds of dollars for a "test" that has been "approved" by the insurance company.

(See why I live in my head? The rest of the world is too aggravating.)

The problem with writers

"I am perhaps trying to write my Gone With the Wind. I am Margaret Mitchell. But I give a damn. And that is the problem with writers. They give a damn. They can't walk away from it."

David Kaiza, Ugandan literary critic and author

(I heard him say this in an interview on NPR. And I am so pleased to have heard his voice. One of our dearest friends from seminary days in California was a man from Uganda. There is something about the Ugandan accent that makes the tension go out of the work of listening to another human speak.)

Am I the only one?

I just wondered.

Am I the only person who thinks that the word "embarq" is silly?

How about the fact that phone companies staff their customer service lines with people whose first language is not English? Face-to-face, I have absolutely no trouble with accents - over the phone, the accents are difficult. If they're difficult for me, they're difficult for everyone, and I just think that help lines ought to be staffed by people who are nearly accent-free in the language of the callers. Of course, that means I assume that callers to our domestic phone companies will have American accents and language skills. But still. It drives me nuts.

And then there's this.

If I weren't already pretty irritated at the wait and the runaround, I'd probably think it was ... um ... ill-advised, maybe? I'm on hold, waiting for the phone company to pick up the phone, and there is an easy listening guitar cover of "Goodbye Doesn't Mean Forever."

(postscript: I take it back about the accents. An extraordinarily helpful, knowledgeable and useful man with an Hispanic accent just solved all my problems. Apparently, the problem was the sleepy and clueless Embarq employees (regardless of original language) - the MCI guy was great!)

Shelved life

Do you think books are alive? I think I kinda do.

I've just finished reading the new espionage novel Jericho's Fall, by Stephen L. Clark, and I have some things to say about it, but there's this paragraph near the end of the story that I could relate to. I could relate to it so strongly that for a few minutes I forgot about the fact that I am ignoring all ordinary responsibilities this morning so that I can finish the book. It's really a good story. But there's this:

"One of the wide windows to the living room had burst, and embers were flaking in through the mesh. Soon the books would catch, and then the house would start. Beck ached, unexpectedly, for the loss of Jericho's vast library, but there was nothing to be done."

I read that, and then all at once I was no longer thinking about the story - despite the fact that my heroine needed to get out of there or be incinerated along with the books. I, too, was aching for the fictional loss of the fictional character's fictional and unnamed books. Sheesh! It didn't bother me when other stuff got destroyed in this story. It didn't even bother me too much when some of the characters got mangled - or killed. (But that, I think, is because this is a very plot-driven book and not a character-driven or relationship-driven one. Interesting to read, but also emotionally safe, involving no necessity of kleenex.)

So, do you think books are living beings? When I think about my own library, I get a bit maternal - the books are not just things for me. I like most of the things I've chosen to be in my household. I like my flatware pattern and my plates, for instance. But I have only the fluffiest of sentimental attachment to them, really. Replacing them would be kind of fun. (And if any more forks go missing, the fun will be a home-making imperative.) The stuff like bed linens and bathroom towels - that's just fabric. There's lots more where that came from, and a zillion patterns, color combinations, and textures, and it's just the same thing as pots of paints. But the books? Each one is a kind of a person somehow.

Only, they're not all of equal value - people are. Books are more or less alive, more or less full of an ability to talk to the bones and heart and imagination of the reader, more or less connected to the incarnate ideas that walk about and eat and vote and couple and hope. And some books get adopted - personally. It's funny to me to watch, but all three of my kids choose books that way. They find volumes to adopt. They stand at the shelves of Powell's, and sort through the volumes available in the title they're looking for, and choose the one volume they want to adopt. (Often, it's an abandoned and marked-down orphan, previously owned by someone obviously too calloused to care for it.)

I don't know what I'd do if embers began to flake in through burst windows in this house. I would lament over losses like my piano - we've been friends and co-conspirators in music and childhood, and then adulthood, parenting, Christmas decorating and household atmosphere for so long that losing the heavily carved wood and sounding board would be losing a friend. I would weep over the loss of photos, too - but the people they captured are alive and real and in possession of immortal souls. Photos are just stuff.

But the books! My library. My husband's library. The books left behind by our kids, boxed up and ready for the next round of, "Have you seen ...?" And the books left behind by the childhoods in this family - the hopes and dreams and ideas and imagination passed to sleepy children at night, and gobbled up by wide-awake, energetic kids in the middles of countless days. Just thinking about it makes my heart push against its edges and makes it hard to breathe.

It would be horrible if this little ramshackle, inherited and constant remodeling project (aka, my house) went up in flames, but knowing that the books were in there would probably kill me in ways other deaths could not. I think it's because most of the books we have in this house are alive.