Yes, this is a picture of a rock. But it is no ordinary rock. Okay, that’s not precisely true. It is a gray metamorphic rock roughly square in shape with numerous flecks of white and a white strip along the top. As rocks go, it probably couldn’t be more ordinary, more rocky in its soul. But, as with all things in this life, the importance and true meaning lies in the context. This is a pocket rock. It spent a quarter of a century riding around in my pants pocket. I have held it in my hand millions of times.
The Rowan Community Center, seen in this picture I used for the cover of Magical Miss Morgan, is the last part of the old Rowan school still standing.
In 1980, my Great Grandma Hinckley died. That was also the year my folks had to move to Texas because of the transfer my Dad’s seedcorn company gave him to its cotton seed division. It was one year before I got my teaching degree. And it was the year they tore down the building where I went to school for grades 1 through 6. That summer, as I walked around the demolition site, I found the homely gray rock that was nearly as square as I was, and because I was already feeling homesick before I actually left home, I picked it up and stuck it in my pocket. It was a little square piece of home.
That rock went with me to college. It went with me to both Disneyland and Walt Disney World in Florida. It has been to Washington D.C. It has been in the depths of caves in Kentucky and Missouri and Texas. It has been high in the sky in my pocket in an airplane. It has been to beaches on both the Atlantic and Pacific sides of the U.S. It has visited both Mexico and Canada. It his been to Las Vegas. And it even rode in the subways of New York City.
And possibly the most interesting part of this pocket rock’s career happened in Texas schools. It was with me in my pocket constantly from 1980 to 2004. I finally took it out of my pocket and placed it in an old cigar box that once belonged to my grandfather and I have kept keepsakes in since I was a kid.
And I have thought a lot about this ordinary rock that isn’t really ordinary on closer inspection. At one point or another I thought about using it as a skipping stone at both the Atlantic and the Pacific. In 2004 when I was considering the pocket watch broken by it and the car key accidentally bent against it, it almost wound up in Lake Superior. I put in my cigar box and it has remained exiled there since. Will I have it buried with me, in my pocket? No, probably not. My wife plans to have me cremated. Hopefully, though, not until I am already dead. This rock has pretty much been a symbol of my soul, travelling with me, teaching with me, jingling the pocket change when I walk… And it will continue to exist when the thinking and writing parts of Mickey are gone.
But even rocks are not immortal. Sometime in the future something will happen to it. It will end up someplace unexpected or changed by grinding, melting, or chemical reaction into some other form. But no matter what happens to it ultimately, the meaning of it, the context, the places it has been and the things that it has done will still be true, still have happened to it. And, ultimately, it will still be just like me.
Canto 29 – Games with Bread and Cheese
The 13th Sense
I know that you are probably thinking, “What the heck are you thinking, Mickey? There are really only five senses!”
And I am probably thinking, (ignoring the fact that I should know for certain what thinking is present at least in my own stupid head), “Oh, I think you are probably wrong about that,” considering carefully that I should only think this and not say it out loud, because people get mad when you suggest that you are smarter than they are.”
Besides the five senses we all claim of sight, hearing, touch, taste, and smell, there is also that one people often refer to as “the sixth sense”, and by that phrase they don’t necessarily mean that you “see dead people who don’t know they are dead”. Instead, that sense is kinda like a sense of intuition. A feeling that you simply know what is about to occur, or you know something about something that you could only really know if you have ESP… Or if you are Spiderman, it is your “Spider Sense”… wiggly lines radiating from your comic-book head.
And what about the sense of hot and cold? Or the sense that you can’t breathe the air in the same room with your cigar-smoking Republican uncle? You know, the one with all the toxic opinions you are forced to listen to too often? And there’s a sense of contentment. Or the sense of happiness. A sense of dread. There are all kinds of senses that your magnificent stupid-old brain constantly responds to that you really haven’t been counting.
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Of course, I am not writing about any of those today. I am writing about that old “Sense Number Thirteen”, the sense of certainty that every pessimist lives by, the sense that your natural daily bad luck won’t kill you today, but only because it would all be over and prevent more suffering tomorrow if it did.
Yes, it is Sense Number Thirteen that makes you prepare yourself for the worst, because you simply have the sense that it is destined to happen. I dread going to the mailbox. I know I will hate what I find there. This week I found a letter from the IRS, who has already accepted my 2017 return and the first installment of my tax payment, suggesting that they may reopen my case in order to determine if I owe them more money. And I got the hospital bill that I have been dreading because I cannot afford to pay it.
I dread walking the dog also because there are two pickup trucks, one black and one silver, that routinely roar through the 30-mile-an-hour neighborhood doing sixty or seventy. One of them is going to run over my dog while she has me on the leash, or maybe even run over one of neighbor Frank’s grandchildren. Anyway, we are preparing by organizing a neighborhood petition and complaining to the police. The Thirteenth Sense really screws with my life. But it forces me to prepare.
The hospital payment department told me that they are going to send paperwork that will help me pay the debt by forgiving part of it since I am already bankrupt over medical bills. I was taken pleasantly by surprise by that. I have so far successfully avoided thinking about the IRS. Those jack-booted shock troops apparently aren’t going to show up at my door until next week. And the police cruiser has been on our street twice already since I last talked to Frank, and they put out one of those speed limit signs that shows you in bright red lights how much over the speed limit you are going.
So, there’s the saving grace. A pessimist gets to be happier in the long run than the optimist. By preparing for the worst, the pessimist is ready for the bad thing to happen, and either deals with it as it comes, or is pleasantly surprised at an outcome devoid of extra suffering. A pessimist is never taken by surprise for the worse. I’m glad I have a 13th Sense. It helps me be a HAPPY stupid old pessimist.
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Filed under angry rant, commentary, feeling sorry for myself, goofy thoughts, humor, Paffooney, pessimism