Friday, November 11, 2005
A Confession
I’ve been in a confessional mood lately, probably because I’ve been thinking too much about death during my birth month, and a confession is, after all, an interruption, an act of pausing in anticipation of the end, and also a delaying tactic, because it suddenly feels as though death could interrupt any action except a confession.
Confession can be a good thing, even when it doesn’t give rise to forgiveness. If you’re like me, you could start almost anywhere, and right away you’d get the sense that you could go on forever. For instance, I’m prepared to own up to the fact that I’ve not been an exemplary neighbor. My neighbors will tell you that I regularly let our weed-clotted grass grow too tall and our bushes get too bushy. In late autumn, the leaves pile up in my yard and blow away down the street onto other people’s freshly raked lawns, people who will then carefully rake them up and bag them, perhaps cursing me all the while. Weeks later, I’ll walk onto my lawn and rake up the stragglers.
Likewise, although I do brush and floss and bathe as often as you do, I don’t always remember to shave. Just like grass, whiskers continue to grow, harmlessly, without purpose. Once I’ve bothered to take action, I’m as surprised as anyone to see my clean cheeks again, or my lawn suddenly uniformly flattened by the mower blade. Suddenly I feel virtuous. But it all grows back, becoming unruly again. I’m never prepared for that. As much as a man might hope to, he can’t mow the lawn once and for all. And even if a man owns one of those ambitious razors with four parallel blades, he would still need to shave every day to maintain that clean, beardless look. And then he’s in a losing battle with nature, and it’s shocking to think that he does it again and again, regardless, the little man returning to push the round boulder up the steep slope. I’d almost prefer to leave the boulder right in the middle of the road, at the low point. I’d prefer to watch the grass grow.
Maybe this isn’t a confession, after all. A notorious tendency of inveterate sinners is to be proud of their sins. How easily a confession can descend into bragging!
Until last month the very symbol of my communal errancy was my car, a rusted-out 1984 burgundy Honda Accord hatchback, its paint faded and peeling. Both bumpers sat askew, giving the car a reeling drunken appearance on the road. My car was an affront to my SUV-pampering neighbors, but I loved it. Whenever a kid would egg it, I’d wash the egg off. The engine was fine. And every day I had the comfort of knowing I was, in my own small way, “sticking it to the man.” Listen to this. I paid $2800 for it in 1993, I drove it for 149 months, and so my cost averaged a low-low $18.79 per month. Not often in life do you get to be your own hero, but in that car I felt triumphant. I actually felt superior to all of you fancy car owners. Compared to new car payments, it was like I was being paid three or four-hundred dollars a month to drive my old Honda. It was a legal scam.
When the scheme seemed finished and I was buying a new car at last, my moment of transcendent glory arrived. I had wangled a small discount on the trade-in, and I returned home to get the car, and when I drove it onto the sales lot, I had the pleasure of seeing several sharply dressed salesmen glance up and visibly wince. That was the knife slipping in. I refrained from twisting the blade. I didn’t leave the Honda out front, next to the new BMWs. I concealed it in the back lot.
Now my neat new car sits in the driveway, an image pleasing to my neighbors, I imagine. To me it looks like a rental car. I can’t quite own it. It’s a small car, as pert and tidy as a carefully poisoned and cropped lawn bordered by trimmed and rounded shrubs, and I know that once I have fully accepted its existence, I may also need to trim the bushes, take care of the edging, repaint our front door, repair the doorbell, maybe put in a border of tulips, fly a flag, and then I would need to police the lawn, chasing off the kids and their dogs, and buy an insurance policy and prepare my will, and then I’m not sure I would be in the mood anymore to make my confession.