Remember When the Affordable Care Act Wasn’t In the News Every Day?

The Director knew it was time for a staff meeting.

“All right, everyone. The deadline’s almost here. The President’s promised a smoothly functioning healthcare website by tomorrow. Now, I know everyone’s been working hard. Visits to non-work-related websites like Facebook and Above the Law dropped by 40% in November. I’m proud of that figure and will make sure that New York Times knows about it. But the fact remains that despite our intense efforts the website is, in a word, still not working. So we’re down to our last option – paper applications.”

The following day, when millions of Americans visited the federal government’s healthcare website to see who won the bet, they were confronted with a perfectly functioning, non-glitch riddled single webpage, with no links or forms or fields or even photographs, but one toll-free telephone number.

When the number was called, the caller would be put in touch with someone who took their information and then read back to them the different health policies that were available to the caller and the price. It was clear from the very beginning that the “qualified healthcare agents” that took the calls had been greatly influenced by technology and faced challenges adjusting to world run by humans.

“Thank you for calling healthcare.gov,” the agents would say in their best cheerful machine-voice. “Press 1 if you are calling about individual policies. Press 2 if you are calling about family policies. Press 3 if you have experience building large websites.” When they realized they couldn’t tell which number had been pressed, they would say, “Why don’t you just tell me what you are calling about?”

After a day the telephone lines were hopelessly congested. The Director had to call another meeting.
“Okay,” said the Director at another staff meeting, “the telephones aren’t working out so hot, either. The average wait-time has grown so long that people are complaining about the hold music. And here I thought people liked Lawrence Welk. All right, well, we’ve got to go back to the drawing board. What’s a drawing board? I don’t know. Look it up on Wikipedia.”

The only thing left to do was to have people sign up in person. People were annoyed at having to drive all the way to Washington, D.C. just to shop for medical insurance, but the complaints subsided a bit when the President issued Executive Order 94029 which authorized valet parking.

The wait time to see an agent was still very long. And the long journey made it even longer, since people figured, “Well, if we came all this way and waited all this time, we may as well ask as many stupid questions as possible.”
The wait time to meet with a federal healthcare agent became so long that people were practically living in the lobby. They had to miss appointment, including doctors’ appointments. The government had to arrange for doctors to visit the lobby and examine the people waiting in line. The convenience more than made up for the lack of privacy.

The people in line started liking the lobby doctors so much that they lost their interest in procuring health insurance that would require them to find a new doctor. They started letting others go ahead of them in line, hoping to extend their stay. “Oh, you go on ahead of us,” people would say. “We haven’t decided what we want yet.”

The lobby grew ever more crowded, and eventually some members of Congress introduced a bill to expand the lobby and the number of doctors that serviced it. The bill won bipartisan support, largely on the strength of a rider that increased the Netflix subsidies for senators and their staff. The Affordable Care Act Sign-Up in Person Waiting Lobbies proliferated around the United States, so that whenever people had to see the doctor they would just go to one of these lobbies, get in line, and wait for the doctor to come around with the stethoscope and little rubber hammer.

A cottage industry of lobby-care grew, and almost overnight people started seeing everything from examination tables on wheels to mobile MRI apps for smartphones. Around the time that they started adding operating tables to the lobbies, the website was finally fixed. No bugs, no glitches, no crashes. But no one bothered signing up. The millions of Americans waiting in line already liked the plan they had, and wanted to keep it.

Posted on 30 November 2013 by Mark Kaplowitz 4

Remember When the Government Wasn’t Shut Down?

Wow. This blog is three years old.

“Okay everyone,” the tour guide said to the travelers on the bus. “I know that our itinerary says that we’re supposed to see the Lincoln Memorial today. But unfortunately the federal government is shut down and the Lincoln Memorial is closed.”

“What about the Jefferson Memorial?”

“Um, that’s closed too.”

“What about the Washington Monument?”

“Yes, that too.”

“What about the American Battle Monuments Commission?”

“Yes, that’s closed.”

“And the Library of Congress?”

“Yes. Everything is closed.”

“What about the Vietnam Veterans Memorial?”

“Yes, that too is closed. All the federal monuments are closed.”

“What about the mouse laboratory at the National Institutes of Health?”

“What did I just say? All of the major tourist sites are closed! The Smithsonian, the National Gallery, the Congressional Barbershop – everything! But I know you all paid for this trip to Washington, D.C., and, doggone it, we aren’t about to take your money and not give you a hanging-from-the-chandelier bus tour. We have two choices: Denny’s and Five Guys Burgers and Fries. Who wants to go to Denny’s?”

Half the people on the bus raised their hands.

“And who wants to go to Five Guys?”

The other half of the people on the bus raised their hands.

“Well, we can’t go to both places. Half of you are going to have to switch your vote. Or, I guess since we’re in Washington, majority rules, right? Heh, heh.” No one joined his laughter. “Anyway, so let’s vote again.” But the vote was the same.

“Well folks, we appear to be at a stalemate. You’re going to have to come to some kind of an agreement.”

The talks between the tourists went on for the better part of the morning. At noon, the tourists who were in favor of Denny’s reported that while the talks had been productive, no deal had been reached. Then the tourists who were in favor of Five Guys reported that the Denny’s tourists weren’t willing to negotiate.

“What’s to negotiate?” the Denny’s tourists asked. “We want to go to Denny’s.”

The stalemate dragged on. Nothing else could happen on the trip. In the morning the tourists would leave the hotel and board the bus, sit there for eight hours, report that no progress had been made, and rush back into the hotel in time for the complimentary oatmeal cookies.

After a week the tourists were out of clean clothes. The Five Guys tourists asked the tour guide if the bus could make a short trip to the laundromat.

“Sorry,” the tour guide said. “Only if you can agree.”

The Five Guys tourists asked the Denny’s tourists if they wanted to go to do laundry. The Denny’s tourists certainly needed clean clothes, but after a brief closed meeting in the back of the bus, the Denny’s tourists reported that they wouldn’t go anywhere until the Five Guys tourists agreed to go to Denny’s. “Once you agree to go to Denny’s, we can go anywhere you want, including the laundromat.”

Then the Five Guys tourists squeezed past the Denny’s tourists in the narrow aisle of the bus and had their own closed meeting.

“We will not negotiate under the threat of Denny’s,” the Five Guys tourists concluded. “We will not stand for these ‘my way or the highway’ tactics.”

Halfway through the second week the bus tourists were all wearing dirty clothes, and although none of the other hotel guests wanted to be rude, the clothespins on their noses were hard to ignore.

The bus tourists would board the idle bus each morning with the results of polls they had taken of the hotel guests. The poll numbers conflicted, and both sides respectively declared, “We’re winning!”

By the end of the second week one of the Five Guys tourists could no longer stand wearing the same shirt, and ran away under stealth of night.

“We have the majority!” the Denny’s tourists shouted. “Tour guide, call the tourists for a vote.”

“Actually, I’ve just received word that the government shutdown is over. All the monuments are open again! So where does everyone want to go?”

Posted on 11 October 2013 by Mark Kaplowitz 8

The Yom Kippur Post

When I was a kid I was in awe of my parents and grandparents who had the privilege of fasting on Yom Kippur.

“Believe me,” said my grandfather, “it’s no privilege.”

But I knew he was just being modest. To me, fasting was an activity that adults got to do, like driving or going to work instead of school. I remember how my grandmother used to prepare for a whole day of atonement. “I bring a sweater to shul. You always feel cold when your stomach is empty.” My mother would also have only the highest reverence for Yom Kippur, and every year would deny herself her morning honey cake. “But the coffee is not negotiable,” she would say. “I don’t want to get a headache.” And my father would always say, “I feel better when I don’t eat,” a statement that always won him a lot of friends when he repeated it in the crowded temple throughout the day.

Then I turned 13 and at last had the privilege of fasting on Yom Kippur.

“Make sure you don’t eat too much the day before,” my father said to me. “You’ll get an enlarged stomach. It’ll think more food is coming on Yom Kippur and then you’ll get sick.”

Knowing that part of being a teenager was ignoring your parents’ advice, I stayed true to my age and the day before Yom Kippur I gorged myself on three times my usual diet of cereal, bread, and cookies. I figured that if a gluttony could get a hibernating bear through the winter, the same approach could get me through the Day of Atonement. And I had plenty of time to reflect on that logic while I was dry heaving in the mens’ room, my prayer shawl hanging on a hook in the hallway, while upstairs someone chanted the story of Jonah being swallowed by a whale that obviously did not have the privilege of fasting that day.

The following year I was smarter. I did not gorge myself the day before, but ate sparingly so that my stomach would shrink. I sat through the whole Yom Kippur service, allowing the lightheadedness to enhance the spirituality and bring the fast-breaking buffet that much more quickly.

“Be careful when you break the fast,” my father said. “Take little bites and see how each one goes before taking another. Your stomach is too small to handle the usual portions.”

Knowing that my father was just kidding, as soon the sun went down and I was inscribed in, as it turned out, the Book of Life, I raced home and inhaled two blintzes and a bagel before I even one arm out of my high holiday jacket. And as I took the other arm out I was racing upstairs to the bathroom where I got a second look at the blintzes and bagel.

The following Erev Yom Kippur I didn’t gorge myself and I didn’t starve myself. I ate my normal diet and went to temple and focused my full attention on atoning for my sins of the previous year and how I was going to be a better person in the coming year. So immersed was I in God’s glory that I did not think of food at all. And at a certain point in the service, I looked over to my mother, and made a signal, and without a word we went outside, and got in the car, and drove to a bagel shop that was out of the way so that we would not run into anyone from the temple. My mother stopped the car in the front, let me out, and then she drove around again, giving me enough time to scope out the bagel shop out and see if there was anyone from the temple before they could see me.

“Coast looks clear,” I said when she came around again. We confirmed with the proprietor that there was a back door exit, and then took a table near the front so that we could see who was coming in before they could see us.

And when we were done we returned to the temple, checked our teeth in the vanity mirror, and took our seats among the congregation praying fervently for forgiveness.

Posted on 14 September 2013 by Mark Kaplowitz 5

Remember When You Could Twerk and Not Cause a Worldwide Scandal?

I was setting the table, trying to decide whether to fold the napkins in the shape of a rectangle or a triangle, when my wife came home from work.

“Hi honey!” I said. “What do you think? Rectangle or triangle?” I asked, holding up an example of each.

“Did you hear about Miley Cyrus’s performance at the MTV Video Music Awards?”

“No, I didn’t. What happened?”

“You didn’t hear about it! Do you live under a rock? All over the news, all over the internet, all over Facebook, it’s all anyone is talking about.”

“Really? There wasn’t anything in the Times about it.”

She rolled her eyes, and I made a mental note to never again come to dinner unprepared. There is certainly no lack of coverage of the event. Here are just some of the recent headlines:

“Miley Cyrus’s twerking routine was cultural appropriation at its worst” (The Guardian)

“Miley Cyrus, twerking, and the ‘sexual hazing’ of American pop stars” (Christian Science Monitor)

“Justin Timberlake Is Cool With Miley Cyrus Twerking” (Vibe)

“Miley Cyrus to Lead US Attack on Iran” (Bayard & Holmes)

Young people have always used dancing to meet other young people. I remember the dance scene from the 1987 film Can’t Buy Me Love, where Patrick Dempsey thinks he’s doing the latest dance from American Bandstand. He doesn’t know that he was watching some educational program instead of American Bandstand, and that it was the African Anteater ritual he was learning, and when he performs the ritual at his high school, all the other students think it’s just the latest dance that all the cool kids are doing, and soon they are all doing the African Anteater ritual. Miley Cyrus should have done that at the Video Music Awards.

When I was in middle school I learned something called the Chicken Dance. First you held your hands out in front of you and clapped your fingers and thumb together, like you had lobster claws. Next you tucked each fist into the adjacent armpit and flapped your elbows, like you had chicken wings and were trying to fly. Then you crouched down a little while simultaneously moving your rear end from side to side. Finally, you stood straight up and clapped your hands four times. There was a song that went with it so that you knew when to do the moves.

The venerable Oxford English Dictionary is apparently going to add “twerk” to its list, defining it as a verb meaning to “dance to popular music in a sexually provocative manner involving thrusting hip movements and a low, squatting stance.” Based on my years of experience, I am comfortable saying that the third movement of the Chicken Dance qualifies as a kind of proto-twerk.

But when I think of dances that involve hip movements and squatting stances, the kind of dances that, pretty much, anyone can do, I think most fondly of the Macarena, which rocked the world around the year 1996. Like the Chicken Dance, the Macarena also involved a repetitive series of dance moves that progressed from putting the hands out, to placing the hands on the body, to rotating the hips with twerk-like elements, and then ending with a clap. But the Macarena, which was named after the song that inspired the well-structured, was far more complex than the Chicken Dance, and represented a great leap forward in the evolution of dignified group-dancing.

Like scientists seeking a purer form of a metal, the twerkers have stripped dancing of the unnecessary hand and arm movements and unduly formalistic sequences, and distilled what was really its essence all along. So when you watch Miley Cyrus again, squatting and thrusting and unfurling her tongue, know that you are not watching a garish display of celebrity sexuality in cable television’s race to the bottom, but natural selection at its finest.

Posted on 28 August 2013 by Mark Kaplowitz 10

Remember When Restaurant Service in France Was Gruff?

Paris is apparently making an effort to make its restaurant staff more polite. It reminded me of the trip my wife and I took to Paris last year. For those of you contemplating a similar trip and who want the inside story from an experienced traveler who was there for nearly five days, here are a few tips for dining in the City of Light:

1. “Cheval” means horse.

2. Every member of the waitstaff I met was very polite and spoke fluent English. I didn’t even try to speak French. One restaurant even had an American server that was assigned to any American patrons that walked in the door. She reminded me of one of my classmates from high school.

3. Despite the pervasive English fluency, if you ask for grog, and you don’t pronounce the “r” with a proper guttural roll, they won’t know what you’re talking about. Practice in front of a mirror before you leave, maybe while you’re waiting in the airport.

4. Believe the hype about the croissants. No matter how lost you get or what other frustrations you meet along the way, the croissants in Paris will take you to another dimension.

5. There were many cafes but nothing that had what I would count as coffee. I’m not talking about espresso or some other smidgen of brown liquid shoved into a cup from a dollhouse tea set, but a coffee that can bring me back to life every morning. The kind of coffee I drink every day before work, and as soon as I get to work, and after lunch so that I don’t pass out at my desk. They have something called “Cafe Americain” but it must be an inside joke. There was even a Starbucks across the street from our hotel. From the length of the line and the price of the coffee and the kilos of cardboard and plastic that clothed each serving, I said to myself, “Well, this must be authentic American coffee!” But I drank it and I still fell asleep on the train to Versailles. What the croissants giveth, the coffee taketh away.

And those are my tips for dining in Paris. Bon appetit!

Posted on 26 August 2013 by Mark Kaplowitz 2

The Private Universe of Shopping Carts

Did you ever notice how a shopping cart in any place other than a supermarket or a supermarket parking lot looks extremely out of place and even a little disturbing? I saw one during my morning commute a few weeks ago. It was so near the road that I almost clipped it. It was there the next morning. And the next. And the next.

The evening commute takes me on a slightly different path that did not go past the shopping cart, and so I only saw the shopping cart in the morning. I did not the shopping at all until I passed it, and when I did, I would be reminded of all previous encounters. At first I was disturbed just by the sight of the shopping cart, but after a few days I became disturbed more by the fact that I only thought about the shopping cart when I passed it in the morning, and wouldn’t think about it again until the next encounter the following morning. It was like the shopping cart and I shared a universe for a few brief seconds and then separated into distinct realities.

Did the shopping cart feel the same way about me? “Every morning a car with Mark Kaplowitz inside drives by,” the shopping cart says to itself, “but I don’t see the car in the afternoon, and I don’t think about it until the next morning when it passes by again.” Did the shopping cart find the routine as unsettling as I did? I began think the shopping cart was looking at me when I passed it. I began to feel self-conscious during that stretch of road.

Then, a few mornings ago, as I approached the shopping cart spot and started anticipating its presence and steely gaze, I saw that the shopping cart was gone. Then I saw that it wasn’t gone, but merely pushed over on its side. Someone must have had the same feeling I had, and finally could no longer stand the stare of the shopping cart. It must have been dangerous to stop a car in the middle of a road to push over a shopping cart. Maybe it was done late at night when traffic was light.

Whatever the circumstances, the spell was broken. I can now think about the shopping cart at any time of the day. And I do. I picture it lying there, among the tall grass, enjoying the precious last days of summer.

Posted on 25 August 2013 by Mark Kaplowitz 5

Remember When Stores Couldn’t Track You Within the Store?

I met a traveler from an antique land who said, “I read an article in the New York Times about how stores are now using their unwitting customers’ cell phone signals to track their movements within the store.”

I can picture it now. A major retailer is having its mid-July meeting, and the Director of Sales is going over old and new business.

“All right, let’s see where we are. Winston, are all the school supplies on the shelves?”

“Yes sir. As of 11:59 on the night of July 4th we started putting out the pens and pencils and notebooks of every size, shape, and cover material.”

“Good. And when is the Christmas merchandise going out?”

“We’re aiming for middle of next week, sir.”

“Excellent. Okay. Now, on to new business. I believe you were going to prepare a presentation for us on the new technology that allows us to track customers through the store using their cell phone signals.”

“Yes, sir. If you’ll direct your attention to the screen here, you’ll note the squiggly neon lines winding around the screen.”

“Yes, I see,” says the Director. “It looks like my kid drawing with crayons on the kitchen tile.”

“That’s an excellent analogy, sir. Now, each squiggly line represents a customer.”

“But I don’t understand. We’ve been using cameras to monitor the customers for years. How is this cell phone thing different?”

“Well, sir, a camera allows you watch the customer, but unless you are very attentive and don’t take any coffee or Facebook breaks you won’t know all of the products the customer looked at or for how long the customer looked. This technology bridges the gap. The customer’s odyssey through our aisles is tracked, and the longer a customer stays in one spot, the darker the line becomes at that point.”

“What is that customer doing over there?”

“Looking at platinum bound notebooks.”

“Oh, those are a hot new item. Wait! Where is the customer going now?”

“Looks like the customer is heading over to the cheaper notebooks.”

“Did he, she or it take a platinum notebook?”

“Let me check out the video camera. No, it looks like her arms are empty.”

“We have to redirect her back to the more expensive notebooks. Captain Riker!”

“Yes, sir.”

“Use those things we bought from The Hunger Games auction to help our customer back to the overpriced school supplies.”

Captain Riker pushes a button, and suddenly the customer is met with a wall of fireballs heading directly towards her. She turns around and runs to the exit of the store, but then is met with a swarm of bees whose stingers dispense hallucinogenic poison. The customer runs from aisle to aisle. The Director watches the whole thing from a screen mounted next to the Keurig coffee dispenser. Eventually the customer finds refuge in the aisle with the platinum notebooks.

“Ex-cel-lent,” the Director says, blowing on his coffee. “Now she has no choice but to—wait, what is she doing?”

The screen shows the customer tying four of the notebooks together to create a platinum shield. Holding the shield squarely in front of her, she runs right through the wall of fireballs to the notebooks bound with soft cardboard, retailing at $1.29 apiece. She grabs a few and, still holding her shield aloft, runs to the checkout line while the fire behind her consumes erasable markers and glittered index cards and fish-shaped wastepaper baskets.

“I can’t believe she did that!” the Director screams. “Now how are we going to control the customers?”

“Well, sir,” says Winston, “did you ever see Inception?”

Posted on 18 July 2013 by Mark Kaplowitz 11

Remember When You Needed a Cell Phone to Record Someone in Public?

The good folks over at Google have invented something truly spectacular—a pair of eyeglasses with a small computer screen mounted on one of the lenses so that the user can have all the advantages of a smartphone without the inconvenience of having to take it out of a pocket and tap a touchscreen. It is called the Glass. At last we can search for cat videos while windsurfing.

Photo by tedeytan via flickr — Photo by Ted Eytan via Flickr

As I save my nickels against the expected $1,500 price tag, I note with not a small amount of incredulity that not everyone is looking forward to the Google Glass. The product is still months away from being released to the general public, but already has been banned from a Seattle bar and the roadways of Virginia, on concerns of privacy and distraction, respectively.

Privacy? Distraction?

Think about how wonderful it will be when you can photograph someone in a supermarket without having to pretend to make a phone call, putting the silent phone to your ear and turning sideways, estimating where the lens is focusing, faking your end of a conversation (“Yeah, I know…This is now two weeks they don’t have shredded cabbage”), checking if the photograph was too blurry or if you missed the target, and repeating as necessary without blowing your cover. A person should not have to go through so much work.

With the Google Glass, you can just look at someone and take a photograph. When you see someone wearing white after Labor Day, your friends won’t have to take your word for it. When you’ve sculpted your mashed potatoes into a likeness of Karl Marx, you can take a memento without looking weird in front of the other diners.

And why does the media always emphasize the negative aspects of distraction? Until Google Glass is in stores, if someone is telling you a boring story, you have to pretend to listen by concentrating on the space between their eyebrows or on the way their mouth moves. When you’ve got Google Glass on your eyes, you can read Moby-Dick and when you laugh at the funny parts, the person will think you’re enjoying their story.

Of course establishments that don’t see these advantages and are so obsessed with antiquated notions like privacy will prohibit people from wearing the Google Glass on the premises. The inventors will be forced to conceal the Glass in a better place, like in a person’s hair, or in their nostrils where the Glass could be loaded with a Flonase app during allergy season. Workers will wonder why some patrons are always tilting their heads back and scanning the room with their nostrils, and perhaps think it some new neck exercise.

And when new barriers to the Glass arise, such as hair and nostril searches, or people who are bald or who can’t stop sneezing, Google will have no choice but to locate the Glass where it should have been all along—resting up against our eyes like contact lenses. Everyone will be able to walk around, without any electronics showing, but with a data screen in their field of vision. Like the Terminator.

To take a photograph you’ll need only scratch the side of your face, and a video will start recording at a mere throat clearing. Internet searches can be triggered by just asking a rhetorical question, like “What is gluten anyway?”

And as the photographs and videos and data are uploaded, humanity will finally have what it has been working towards since people started making wedge-like shapes in clay tablets thousands of years ago: One shared brain, under Google, with liberty and justice for all.

Posted on 10 May 2013 by Mark Kaplowitz 18

Remember When You Didn’t Have to Create a Profile Everywhere You Go?

There is a support group for people who sign up for too many online profiles. The group meets once a week in the basement of an old church. I went to last week’s meeting.

The group is led by a woman who at one point held profiles from 157 different websites. “Each account had a unique password with at least one uppercase letter, one number, and one symbol,” she said to me as she introduced herself. “This was a great source of pride to me.” Then one day she couldn’t remember one of the passwords, and she had a nervous breakdown, and had to spend some time in an institution, where she was heavily medicated and had to re-learn how to say her own name without numbers or underscores. She eventually became rehabilitated enough to go into a group home and now her responsibilities are leading the weekly meetings and refilling the reservoir on the Keurig coffee dispenser.

We sat in a circle and one of the attendees, a young man, began to speak.

“I had a Google account and a Facebook account and a Twitter account. Then I joined LinkedIn, even though I didn’t have a job, and I had to borrow a coat and tie and pressed shirt from a friend for the profile photo, and because the t-shirt was mine you could still see the dinosaur design through the white shirt I borrowed.

“And then I joined Pinterest even though I had nothing to pin, and Goodreads even though I haven’t read a book in years. Frankly, I had thought they stopped making books.

“Then there was a site that advertised free music, and a site that counted calories.” He tapped his abdomen as he says this. “I had to pick a username and password for all these accounts, and I always picked the same password: RoseBud. I thought I was being smart. Turned out I wasn’t so smart, because it was the same username and password that I use for my online banking, and my identity was stolen. Luckily, I didn’t have any money. So I deleted all these accounts and now I’m much happier. I even tried to buy a book, but I had deleted my Amazon account.”

Next a young woman spoke. “I was on all those sites and apps that he was on, and more. Except I used a different username and password for each one. I was like a secret agent, walking the Earth with a stack of drivers’ licenses, trying to keep track of multiple identities. I didn’t know who I was. I created a document in Microsoft Word to keep track of all my usernames and passwords, but then I got worried that a hacker would be able to find the document. So I encrypted the usernames and passwords with a code of my own making. But I had to keep the code somewhere, and I was afraid to keep it on my computer. So I wrote the code with a pen and paper and hid it inside of a box of Cracklin’ Oat Bran.”

Suddenly all the eyes were on me. It was time to share my story. But I didn’t know what to say. I clearly didn’t have a problem. I was in attendance only because I needed a topic for my blog, a blog that I access with a password that I change every week because I’m worried that someone will hack my account and start posting unfunny blog posts. These people were the crazy ones. Not me. So I finished my cup of coffee and said that I wasn’t ready to talk about myself. And they smiled, and thanked me, and said to keep coming.

Posted on 30 April 2013 by Mark Kaplowitz 14

Remember Spring?

“Ah, spring!” I said as I swung my legs out of bed, opened the window, and was hit with a blast of bitter arctic air in the face, exacerbating the dryness about my nose and mouth.

As a rolling stone gathers no moss, I quickly donned my parka, my bomber’s cap with fake rabbit fur, and my Gore-Tex boots that take two men and a crowbar to lace up, and filled up the mower with gasoline. In high school chemistry we learned that gasoline’s freezing point is far below that of water and fingertips, and so I was not surprised when the gasoline gushed out all over the lawnmower engine and onto my boots and the garage floor just as it always did, while the layer of snow on our garbage bins remained as pristine as it was when I brought them in from the curb three days ago.

I had often wondered if a lawnmower could blow snow off the lawn as snow blower blows snow off a driveway. Well let me tell you: it doesn’t. I had to shut off my poor confused mower while I shoveled the lawn for an hour, revealing the grayish-green grass that resembled the frozen spinach I pick up from the store when it’s my turn to cook dinner. I don’t think the mower blade could reach the mashed-down grass but the tracks of the mower wheels were just as satisfying to me as on a Sunday afternoon in July.

July…the very word is like a bell. I go into the backyard, shovel in hand, to hunt for the buried sprinkler that I forgot to recoil somewhere around Labor Day. After another hour of shoveling I’ve found the sprinkler along with a few mammoth bones and the cork to a champagne bottle that I popped when McDonald’s announced that the McRib was back.

The sprinkler head was fine but I had to take an electric blanket to the hose to unfreeze the water that clogged its passageway. The hose was fifty feet long but the electric blanket only a foot and half, so I could only do a small section at a time, moving on down the length of the hose, ignoring the strange looks of my neighbors’ kids whose school had evidently remained closed for the day. But when they saw me turn on the sprinkler they smiled, and went and got their ice skates.

I grabbed a trowel from the garage and began digging in the flower beds. I’d lent my ice pick out to someone for a Halloween party last year, so I had to hammer the butt of the trowel to drive the metal point into the flower beds so that I could expose enough frozen earth to dig. After an hour I had two holes dug out, but my hands were so cold and numb that when I tried to open the little paper bag of seeds I jerked it and sent the seeds flying in a cloud of hope over my newly cut frozen spinach lawn.

My work done for the day, I looked up and down my street, at the pockets of snow on the tree branches, and the dirty ice and slush shoved up against the curb, and tendrils of smoke from the chimneys, and the icicles hanging from the gutters. And somewhere, in the frozen stillness of March, as the snowflakes began to fall again, I heard a little bird begin to sing.

Posted on 22 March 2013 by Mark Kaplowitz 11