welcome to the hotel minnesota: part i

amybiancolli family 3 Comments

minneosta sign - smaller AND cropped

There we were, driving from the Minnesota boundary waters to the Duluth International Airport early one Friday morning, and somehow, somewhere south of Grand Marais — PLEASE don’t ask where and how, because we STILL HAVE NO FREAKING IDEA — my brother Nils and I got kind of maybe totally and pathetically lost.

I want you to be impressed by this. Because this is not easy to do. In fact, it is extremely difficult to do! You have to really apply yourself! No one in the history of driving has ever gotten lost driving from the boundary waters to Duluth. The trip involves going roughly a million miles on roughly one road, and to get lost, you either have to have the world’s single most abysmally deficient sense of direction or you have to be a space of cosmic dumbassic proportions. Either that, or you have to sit next to someone who is.

That would be me. Not Nils. Me. But Nils, bless his soul, was sitting next to me, having just spent several days hiking and fishing in the Minnesota wilderness with the dumbassic moi and our dad and brothers. A kind and generous and beneficent person, Nils had chivalrously agreed to drive me to the Duluth airport while the rest of the gang left to catch their flights in Minneapolis. And so we gabbed and laughed for the first 60 or 70 or whatever miles, blah-blah-blah-ing and ha-ha-ha-ing without a care in the world.

Early on I pulled up Google Maps for directions, but who needed directions, ha ha ha? It was roughly a million miles on roughly one road, right?? Piece o’ cake, kids! Blah blah blah! Ha ha ha! Every now and then our dad called or shot us a text — just wanted to be sure we were on track — and we responded with with teasing texts back. Isn’t that funny! He’s keeping tabs on us! As though we’re hopeless dumbassic space cases! Ha ha ha! Blah blah blah!

Then we pulled over to get gas and a couple of sad breakfast sandwiches. And then we pulled out again, still talking and laughing our endless streams of blahs and ha’s.

And then, for no reason we could discern then or decipher later on, we came to a T.

And Nils was like: a T?
And I was like: a T?
And we were like: What the f— is a T doing here? There isn’t supposed to be a T.
And then we were like: Where the f— are we?
And then I was like: What the f— road are we on?
And then Nils was like: What does Google Maps say?
And I was like: Umm, there is no Google Maps.
And Nils was like: What?
And I was like: What what?
And Nils was like: Oh, shit, no cell service out here?
And I was like: Oh, shit, no.
And Nils was like: Oh, shit, we don’t have a map.
And I was like: Oh, shit, oh, shit.
And Nils was like: Oh, shit, we’re lost.
And I was like: Oh, shit! Oh, shit!
And we were both like: Oh, shit! Oh shit! Oh shit!

At this point, I must tell you we did the rational thing. We looked for road signs pointing to Duluth. Shouldn’t there be road signs at a T pointing to the nearest major metropolis? There should be road signs at a T pointing to the nearest major metropolis. But there weren’t. There was nothing that said, THIS WAY FOR DULUTH or THAT WAY FOR DULUTH, or NORTH THIS WAY or SOUTH THAT WAY, or even YOU CLUELESS DUMBASSIC TOURISTS, YOU HAVE NO IDEA WHERE YOU ARE, DO YOU? HUHHHHH? DUHHHHHH?

But people don’t say such things in Minnesota, because people in Minnesota are nice. Even the “no trespassing” signs bend over backwards to be polite; where a typical New York sign says, KEEP OUT PRIVATE PROPERTY VIOLATORS WILL BE PROSECUTED AND BY THE WAY GET THE F— OFF OUR LAND, an equivalent sign in the boundary waters says, THANK YOU FOR TRESPASSING AND HAVE A NICE DAY. Or something like that.

Anyway. Back to the T. Nils and I had no idea which way to turn. So we turned right. But that felt wrong. So after a few miles, we turned around and headed in the opposite direction. But that felt wrong, too.

So Nils said: Hmmmmm.
And I said: We should ask someone.
And Nils said, more or less: But there isn’t anyone to ask.
And I said: Shit. Let’s flag someone down.

And just then, we saw a lone car barreling toward us. But it was too late for us to pull over and get out and wave our arms.

So I said: Let’s wave our arms right now! While we drive!
And Nils said: Yeah! Okay!
And I said: Yeah! Real crazy-like!
And Nils said: Yeah! This’ll get their attention!
And I said: Yeah!

And so, while driving along, we waved our arms real crazy-like through the windshield, and the man and the woman in the other car gave us a baffled look at that said, WHAT THE HUH? WHY ARE THESE CRAZY PEOPLE WAVING THEIR ARMS AT US?

And then they did a very nice, Minnesotan sort of thing to do. They pulled over and rolled down their windows. (If this were the Empire State, they would have given us a baffled look that said, GET THE HELL AWAY FROM US, CRAZY PEOPLE)

TO BE CONTINUED. . . .

happy trails

amybiancolli family, Uncategorized 5 Comments

magnetic rock pic
It was my last day in northern Minnesota’s boundary waters region, and I and my three brothers — Danny, Randy and Nils — decided to cram in one last hike. We probably shouldn’t have. Our dad wanted to take us out to dinner, and it was already pushing five. But the pamphlet described an easy 3-mile round-trip hike called Magnetic Rock Trail that promised — you’ll be shocked by this revelation — a giant magnetic rock. And who wouldn’t want to see a giant magnetic rock? Doesn’t it sound too cool pass up? Could you have passed it up? Didn’t think so. Off we went.

The hike took longer than expected, not because it was any more arduous than advertised, but because the landscape hurled us into a state of awed and rampant photobuggery. We couldn’t walk 100 feet without snapping photos of trees, blackened by fire and all but branchless; of wide, pinkish rock sheets striated and crossed like broken checkerboards; of all the life springing up amid the fire-damaged vista, the deep green of the bushes, the light green of the tall and scratchy grasses, the purple bells of delicate wildflowers easing between the cracks of rock and charred wood.

It had the dreamscape feel of post-apocalyptic fiction and film: Were it not for the sunny day and sprouting leaves, we might have been trekking along Cormac McCarthy’s “The Road.” Pausing along the trail, Nils looked out at the stubborn upward thrust of nature through all that devastation. “It’s so scarred,” he said, right then and again later on, “but look at all the life just pushing up around it.” We talked about this for a bit. The landscape seemed like a metaphor to both of us, an expression of the willful and verdant optimism that propels our movement through this world and gives us hope and light in the wake of blackening conflagration. One way or the other, worming through cracks of daylight we can’t see, life prevails.

My brothers are proof of this: I only met them at age 13 because my mother had to go to work when my father quit his job a month before earning a pension and then, over time, became depressed and incapacitated and finally suicidal. She needed to earn a paycheck. She earned it at the small girls school where I befriended a noisy, loving family who liked to laugh and seemed happy to do it with me. Years later, when my mother and father and sister died, Danny gave me his parents — just like that, in a beautiful little email that I can picture as it flickered on an early-90s monitor — and the shoots of new life started popping through the ashes.

When the bunch of us finally reached the end of the trail last week, we found the giant magnetic rock as advertised: 30 feet tall, shaped like an obelisk or some forbidding alien temple, with a pull that did a number on Danny’s compass. We snapped pictures. We snapped more pictures. We joked about pagan rituals and dancing around the base slathered in Deet. And as the sun slid behind this massive hunk of glacial debris, telling us in no uncertain terms that it was time to go back and snarf dinner with with our hungry, waiting dad, I felt grateful for all that had brought me there: the trail, the brothers, the trauma that led me to them and made of us a family. Life will out.
wildflowers pic

hurry hurry

amybiancolli Uncategorized 1 Comment

God doesn’t like being rushed. I haven’t discussed this with the Almighty, but I’m certain of it. Why? Two reasons. First, because no one likes being rushed; have you ever seen that brief flicker of annoyance on a wait-person’s face when you express dismay, even politely soft-pedaled dismay, that your plate of kimchi has taken 38 minutes to arrive (and counting)? I’ll bet you have, even if you’ve never eaten kimchi.

The second reason I’m certain that God doesn’t like to be rushed: because nothing worthwhile in my life has ever happened overnight. If God were in a hurry, I would have been pregnant for 48 hours per baby, not a whole nine months, which I’m here to tell you IS A VERY LONG TIME, especially when you’re so freakin’ huge that total freakin’ strangers come up and ask about your triplets, then laugh uncomfortably when you swear up and down it’s only one freakin’ baby (no really ha ha ha ha ha no way how many babies is it really ha ha ha) . I couldn’t even see my feet after the eighth month. No. Seriously. It’s worth repeating: I couldn’t see my feet.

One of the more fascinating aspects to getting older is my new relationship with time. I’m just as impatient with life, just as flummoxed by God’s propensity for lolly-gagging, just as hungry for good things to happen Now Right Away Last Week Stat Chop-Chop Toot-Sweet Snap To It. But I’m also profoundly more aware that I don’t have as much of it left in the bottom of the corn flakes box as I did a decade or two ago, and I’m determined — at least, in the infinitesimally small portion of my left cerebral hemisphere that dictates rational thought — to savor every bite.

I wish I’d savored every other one more. All of those spoonfuls I choked back in a hurry; why didn’t I slow down, chew 20 times, swish the feel and flavor around my mouth a little longer? I think about my children. Everyone’s children. When they’re born, people tell you: “Enjoy it! They grow up so fast.” But of course you’re too sleep-deprived, and too absorbed in the blitzed-out ecstasy of new parenthood, to hear (much less believe) anything anyone tells you. And when your kids are babies, it’s impossible to believe they’ll ever grow up and talk back and run out the door and away into their own lives.

My youngest is about to start high school. My middle child is about to start college. My oldest is about to spend a semester abroad. If I close my eyes and venture back a day or two — not my days, but God’s — I can hear their little voices chirruping in the bathtub, I can see their little diapered bums waddling across the floor. If I venture back another day or two, I can feel them kicking and socking my ribs; I can put my hand on my taut enormous belly and feel the rise of an elbow or a heel as it dents my stomach wall and leaves, I’m sure of it, a footprint.

I shouldn’t have been in a hurry then. I’m glad God wasn’t.

summer does its nails

amybiancolli Uncategorized 3 Comments

As I write this, I’m sweating sheets in my attic. But I am not going to complain about the heat. I am not. This is summer. And not long ago I spent way too much time complaining about Not Summer, otherwise known as the Longest, Snowiest and Most Pissily Irritating Winter of Recent Memory, to grant myself the freedom to now complain about its opposite. I cleared so much bleepety-bleeping snow this winter that I actually broke my shovel. No. I’m not kidding. Just like that. Snap.

As I said to coworkers today, anyone who hears me gripe about the weather this summer is encouraged to just walk up and punch me. Except of course I don’t really mean that; I don’t want to be punched. I am speaking figuratively, which is the opposite of literally, which most people no longer use literally, preferring to abuse and distort this poor, maltreated, misunderstood morsel of English verbiage until it resembles one of those dirty pink splats of bubble gum on a New York subway platform.

This is what I mean literally: I love the four seasons, and when I say I love the four seasons, I mean I love not just the poetic aspects so oft and softly celebrated by more sensitive souls than I (the passage of the days! the crinkling of the leaves! the cyclical nature of life in this evolving cosmos!), but I love especially the way time behaves in the throes of each. It halts in the middle and just sits, sits, sits, squatting with an emery board to buff its nails, la-dee-dah-dah, while the rest of us flap our mouths to complain about it. WINTER, GET UP OFF YOUR ASS, YOU ARE TOO DAMNED COLD, we howl in frustration. Or WHAT THE HELL, SUMMER, MY HEAD JUST MELTED OFF MY NECK.

But then the wackiest thing happens. Time speeds up. The season doesn’t just change; it gets up in a hurry, drops its manicure kit in the middle of the road and bolts all bananas-like to the opposite end of town. And in its place comes the next season, plopping itself down and making itself comfy for a nice, long, leisurely stretch while we bitch and moan about its presence.

But not me. Not this time. I’m not going to fight it. I’m not going to kvetch. Instead I’m determined to just be in the summer, to surrender to the warmth, to drop down next to it and into it and jostle its elbows and smear sunblock on its back and maybe, if I’m feeling adventurous, lick the salt off the back of its hand. So long as I’m not shoveling anything, I’ll be happy. I’ll shout it to the heavens. I’ll kick up my heels and dance the Cha Cha naked with my hair on fire. And no, I don’t mean that literally.

life, death, goldfish

amybiancolli Uncategorized 7 Comments

image
At work the other day, a message flashed on my phone. I happened to see it. I don’t always; I turn off the chime while laboring away in the newsroom and only check now and then to be sure my offspring aren’t in distress somewhere, incapable of phoning but still, somehow, able to whip out their thumbs and compose pithy tele-communiques with or without the aid of autocorrect. They could be floating down the Hudson in a cereal box, and I’d get a text that says “headin downstrm to NYC love you.”

But the other day. I checked my phone, and there it was: a text from my son announcing the death of our goldfish. You might not remember our goldfish, and even if you do remember it, you might not care, scratch the “might,” but this is the sad orange small finny creature who remained anonymous on a shelf in our kitchen until, back in December, I ran a poll asking readers to name the poor thing. And then they (THEY means YOU, and YOU KNOW WHO YOU ARE) named it Sushi. Which is clever. Which is also kind of sick. Which is why my children summarily rejected it. I am sorry to say this, or maybe I’m not sorry, you’ll have to guess which, but no one ever, ever, ever called him “Sushi.” We preferred “Jesús.”

In any case, he’s dead. This is not happy news, but the text? The text is a beauty — trenchant, informative and compassionate, its five words
conveying all the necessary intel and profound emotional depth. “The fish is dead. Sorry.” Seriously, what else can be said? About this small death? About any?

My response isn’t worth discussing. But his reply to that text was, in its way, an equally crisp and composed metaphysical discourse on life and death, on the brevity of one and the inevitability of the other: “He lived for like 5 years. INSANE.” It took seven words to say it instead of five this time, but still. It’s a feat of reflective and incisive spiritual commentary, and not merely on the lifespan of the Carassius auratus auratus. This should be our response to every birth, every life, every gift in between: Life is always INSANE, a crazy boon and boodle no matter how long it lasts. When it ends — whenever that may be — we should count up our blessings like pirates with a stash of plunder. And we should be doing that all along.

My son the philosopher! Give him a long white beard, and watch him scratch his chin!

As for Jesús, may he rest in peace. He was a good fish. Sorry.

this is not a bucket list

amybiancolli random philosophizing 5 Comments

There are places I want to go, things I want to do, before I die. Not that I plan on dying anytime soon; that’s not on the agenda. But it’ll happen someday, I suspect. And before it does, I would like to visit Russia. And Asia. Africa, too. I would like to see the pyramids. I would like to hike the Appalachian trail and all 46 Adirondack High Peaks. I want to study French, brush up on my German, go back-country skiing at Tuckerman’s Ravine with my brother Danny, take a swing at ballroom dancing, clean up my string crossings on the violin and learn to play jazz so well that it oozes out my pores. I want to take a class in auto mechanics.

I’d like to re-read all the Faulkner I read in college, just to see if I admire it as much and understand it more. I need to consume Joseph Conrad to correct the failings of my youth; my late father loved him, and I’ve long regretted never sitting with him at the kitchen table and discussing his favorite books. Too late for that, now. And too late to learn Neapolitan, Daddy’s first language, because it’s one of those tongues you learn as a kid or not at all — and I didn’t.

But that’s okay. And the other stuff I never got around to and never will: that’s okay, too. A lot of my dreams, like memorizing chromatic scales or learning to fix my brakes, are perfectly doable. Why, I could do them now. I probably should do them now. But it’s likely I’ll get around to doing them eventually, assuming I don’t dip my toe into the wrong Albany intersection and croak next week. But the rest of it, the things I might not do and places I might not visit — that’s all right. I don’t care, because I’ll wind up doing other things instead. It’s not as though, excuse me, either I accomplish all these prearranged tasks or my life is a pathetic waste; life will unfold, events will occur, locations will be visited, in a manner neither defined nor predicted by me. And thank God for that. I’m terrible at planning things. I’m much better at winging it.

And by winging it, I open myself to unpremeditated miracles: the person I didn’t plan on meeting, the place I didn’t plan on going, the experience I didn’t plan on having. This fruitful spontaneity is the single greatest joy in being alive, because it allows for the intrusion of a divine and cosmic happenstance; we can set our goals and cover our bases and hatch our schemes and work like hell to realize them, but in the end, it’s the shit we can’t predict that blows our minds. Have you ever been pregnant? You, or someone you’re married to? Then you know what it’s like to have a baby. You spend nine months readying for a tiny, threshing, drooling stranger, and then, boom: the most beautiful and singular person in the world propels from the dark and arrives in your arms, and you’ve known that child for 10,000 years. Could you have predicted that? Could you have scribbled it on a bucket list?

So no bucket lists for me, folks. If I can, I’ll visit Russia. If I can’t, I’ll live until I drop. And then it won’t matter anyway.

UPDATE: win yer own copy of my book!

amybiancolli Figuring Shit Out (the book) 38 Comments

 

fso arcs - cropped

UPDATE: The contest is now closed, and we have our winners. The mushy mystical powers of www.random.org have selected three. They’ve all been contacted. Unless they change their minds, and tell me to beat myself about the head with my own book, I’ll be shipping their copies out to them posthaste. To all three I say: Congratulations! Or possibly: Condolences! God only knows how badly they’ll be traumatized by reading it.

And to everyone who kicked in a comment I say: Thank you! What marvelously scatological suggestions, one and all. I’m grateful to have so many fellow travelers on the path of F.S.O.

ORIGINAL POST:

OK, guess what! The Advance Reader Copies of Figuring Shit Out (due for release Oct. 7) have arrived, and I’d like to give away a few in my first faint stab at promoting my own book. I am not good at promoting my own things. I’m not sure why. Maybe because I’m not good at owning things in general. Maybe in some past life I was a Byzantine monk who lived in the desert and ate sand.

Anyways. So. My book. It concerns my husband’s suicide and the life my kids and managed to live in its wake —  the first year or so, in all its tears, snot and moments of blessed levity. The subtitle is Love, Laughter, Suicide, and Survival. The length is short. Very short. About 200 pages. Small pages. You could read the whole thing, maybe twice, on a plane to Oxnard, even though I have never heard of anyone flying to Oxnard (I checked; it has an airport). I only used Oxnard as an example because the word sounds like some kind of weird soup or geographic formation (“the glacial oxnard can be found in the outwash of sandy topography occupied by monks”).

Another thing to recommend my memoir: I make an idiot out of myself. I really really do. In fact, I make such an idiot out of myself that anyone who wants to read this book must sign a legally binding form promising not to look at me funny or stop talking to me entirely afterwards, whether you do your perusing at home, at the beach or on the plane to Oxnard. I want to be sure you understand this. It’s important, because I don’t want anyone to stop talking to me, even people whose conversation I don’t actually enjoy, although it’s possible I might begin to regret that someday. I chose to make an idiot out of myself; it was an act of empowerment. So be with me. Talk to me. Please.

With that in mind, if you want a chance to win an an early, uncorrected ARC of Figuring Shit Out: Love, Laughter, Suicide, and Survival, answer this question in the comments below: What should I title the sequel? Of course, this assumes I’m going write a sequel, and I hope I don’t, because I’m greatly looking forward to a tragedy-free life from this point on. A boring few decades for me, folks! NO MORE MEMOIR FODDER FROM THIS POINT ON! HURRAY! But in the event I do write some deadly dull follow-up, my son suggested We Get Rid of It For A Reason as a title, which I rather like.

What do you think? What would you call it? Comment below by 5 p.m. Wednesday. I will NOT be judging these responses on their literary merit; instead, I’ll assign numbers based on the order of posting and then use www.random.org to pick three winners.

Answer away!

gotta hand it to me

amybiancolli Uncategorized 6 Comments

hand
I write shit on my paw. Left one. Reminders. To-do lists, when I don’t trust whatever pathetic crumpled scrap I’m bound to lose. I have written shit on my paw for as long as I can remember, and for this I blame my late mother, because she wrote shit on her paw the whole time I knew her and presumably decades before. When I was too small to write shit on my paw myself, I remember Mama writing it on hers, although she did so with much neater and more artful Depression-era-perfecto handwriting than I ever managed with my late-late-late-Boomer indecipherable dying-chicken scratch.

When I was a kid, fretful adults suggested I might get “ink poisoning” through my skin, and even then I knew enough about dermatology and simple animal biology to realize that skin wasn’t actually that porous or we would all bloat into giant, flesh-colored, distantly hominid-shaped water balloons each and every time we took a bath or walked through a sprinkler or something. So I tended to discount this as a possibility.

Most days, the real estate between my thumb and index finger is littered with such quotidian directives as: SHOP and CLEAN (which I ignore) and GO TO BANK (which I can’t afford to ignore), as well as reminders to CALL THIS PERSON and CALL THAT PERSON and PAY THIS BILL and PAY THAT BILL, plus the more all-encompassing, borderline-hysterical PAY BILLS!!!!! (with an implied, unstated DUMBASS!!!!!). Occasionally I scribble something down that’s a bit too vague or telegrammatic to be truly helpful, such as the urgent SHIFT!! I penned on my hand one afternoon last week. I’d intended it as a reminder to sign up for a weekend news rotation at work, but all I could do, the morning after, was to stare at it blankly and ask: What what? Which gear?

The idea behind all this auto-graphical list-making is to help me remember things I forget, which is a challenging and also somewhat hilarious prospect, because I forget EVERYTHING. I am not exaggerating. If my hand were big enough to accommodate all the shit I might lose track of on a daily basis, I would have no room on my body for anything else. Think about that for a minute. No, wait. Don’t.

the lullaby

amybiancolli beauty 8 Comments

I had a moment, last night, of feeling cradled.

It happened at Albany High. My daughter Jeanne is a senior there and sings in assorted ensembles. I was in the auditorium for the third and last of the school’s year-capping spring concerts when choir director Brendan Hoffman — “Hoff,” as the kids affectionately call him — asked everyone in the wings to move into the middle. Just one song, he promised. The students are going to surround you. Then everyone can move back.

I dutifully dislodged and parked myself in the center. As promised, the kids lined up around us. There were 80 or so of them, of every background, bent, ethnicity — the world sprawled beautifully across their faces. Hoff stood in the aisle, poised at that moment of rapt inaction before the hands snapped into motion and the music began.

And then he moved. And then they sang: Eric Whitacre’s “Allelulia,” a gorgeous piece that repeats and distends the one word, over and over and over, with layers of ecstatic harmony and solos spiked with airy dissonance. It isn’t an easy thing by any stretch. But it’s exquisite.

And we in the audience sat there, awed. It wasn’t just the song that awed us, or the enduring power of art, or the gift of an inspiring teacher — or even the miracle, and that is not too strong a word, of a publicly funded music program that feeds so many kids.

There was something else going on. Something maybe we felt but didn’t quite pinpoint, not till later. I know it didn’t hit me until late last night as I was lying in bed, my brain skittering fitfully through the day. I realized belatedly that we in the crowd — the proud parents of girls and boys so lately become women and men — had been serenaded by our own babies. Circling us in that big hall, embracing us in song, their young, strong voices hushed and held us as our own long-ago voices had once hushed and held them with lullabies.

We were cradled, in that middle strip of auditorium, by our own children. They gave us a song, a thing of beauty, a timeless snatch of enveloping love and joy. From the moment of birth, every parent anticipates a day when the tables are turned, when the son becomes the father, when the daughter spoons pudding into her mother’s soft and pliant mouth. That day will come, whether I’m aware of its arrival or not. What I never expected was last night’s gift, this sense of being soothed and nurtured by the child to whom I sang at bedtime not so long ago.

Maybe this is the power of art, after all: music that gives and gives, moments that stretch and stretch, children who grow up and sing to their parents, transformed.

oh, why not

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I’m pulling into the Price Chopper on Madison Avenue, right? And it’s Saturday evening, right? And I’m just planning to bolt inside, buy a couple bags of Empire apples (accept no substitutes, my friends) and a few other critical items, right? And then head home to the chillenz. So there I am, nosing the car into the P-Chopper lot, when I see this guy crossing in front of me on the sidewalk: heavy-set, maybe 60-65, with a labored gait and distracted expression, wearing a baggy black t-shirt that shrieks one word, billion-point type, all caps:

WHY?

I am so startled by this question that I almost roll down the window and shout after him: WHY WHAT, SIR? Something prevents me from doing this. Maybe I’m in a hurry; maybe I’m not in a mood to engage with strangers; maybe it’s the look on his face of intense interior dialogue, which suggests he’s got enough on his plate without some weirdo random lady grilling him about his choice of frock. But I instantly regret not asking him, because he and his loudly inquisitive t-shirt haunt me into the supermarket, down the produce aisle, past the cans of crushed tomatoes and all the way into the bakery.

What’s he asking, exactly? Is he positing some philosophical conundrum? WHY ARE WE HERE? Is he pondering imponderables sages have pondered since the dawn of time, such as WHY DO MEN SPIT IN PUBLIC? and WHY DO FOOLS FALL IN LOVE? Or is he challenging the souls with whom he crosses paths to question their own beliefs, choices, preferences, foibles, prejudices? WHY do you believe it’s okay to run red lights? WHY do you insist on eating marmalade when everyone else considers it slimy and noxious? WHY do you care so much about celebrity break-ups? Most importantly, WHY is there a booger dangling from your nose?

The funniest thing about this t-shirt, aside from the dead-serious expression of the fellow wearing it, is that I had decided I was all done with WHYs. I was so totally over ’em. Having grappled with the damned squirmy things for the last few years, I had decided — by the time I put the quadrillionth obsessive “final and I mean that (ha ha ha)” edit on my book — that we’re well and truly better off without the suckers, at least when they’re not challenging the behavior of certain elected officials. (WHY can’t Congress get its shit together?)

As a way of coping in the aftermath of life events, WHYs get us nowhere. They keep us stuck in the past. They only spin the wheels inside our aching squeaky crania, keeping our minds fretful and inward-oriented when re-orienting outward is our best salvation. True, we can sit barefoot in our kitchens, sobbing pathetically into our marmalade, but we’re always better off heading outside and talking to strangers — even the distracted ones loping past Price Chopper in cotton loungewear.

And then we’ll be tempted to ask: WHY are you wearing that meddlesome t-shirt? I only wish I had.