Average Day

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Okay. Here's how you go about determining which day is "Average Day" for you and your significant other (SO) or whole family. And by "family" I mean nuclear, extended, blended, or circle of intimate friends.

Let's say your birthday is May 12, the 132nd day of the year. And let's say your SO's is October 25, the 298th day of the year. Add these day-of-the-year numbers together and you get 430. Now divide by how many of you there are (duh, two). The result is 215, and the 215th day of the year, August 3, is therefore Average Day for you and your SO.

Done and done! You've got yourselves a fresh and eminently eligible excuse to party—and plenty of time (usually) to create a richly detailed plan of outlandish celebratory attack. Just muster the unmitigated gall to have an unmitigated ball; and be sure to rename it something besides "Average Day," because it's going to be anything but, yo! An anagram of your names might be a good place to start.

Blended families can benefit especially from celebrating Average Day. Each member's day-of-the-year number (DOYN) plays an equal role in the equation, and the unique and proprietary nature of the resulting date can help foster a sense of unity and belonging.

The only thing to remember is to round up should you wind up with an Average Day DOYN like 199.3; the decimal simply means it's the following morning, afternoon, or evening: in other words, the 200th day of the year.

Give figuring out your family's Average Day a try right now. I said, right now—unless you want my daughter Thea to cut you.

If you don't have a calendar that shows DOYNs, click here for a table created by some guy named Coletti.

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My dog just doesn't get my fixed-rate, 30-year mortgage

I am about to present a rather substantive quote from the February 20, 2009, issue of THE WEEK, a magazine among whose charter subscribers I am proud to number myself. I'd also like to attest, wholly voluntarily and free of compensation, to the accuracy of the ambitious claim made by THE WEEK's masthead:

ALL YOU NEED TO KNOW ABOUT EVERYTHING THAT MATTERS

I provide this up-front endorsement as a preemptive measure, because I have not obtained THE WEEK's permission to reproduce the passage below, and am hoping no one there will get pissed off with me once they see how heavily I'm trying to promote the rag gratis.

Now to the substantive quote:

It's hardly Star Trek, but scientists have taken one small step toward the process of teleportation, says The New York Times. Utilizing the almost-magical properties of quantum physics, scientists at the Joint Quantum Institute in Maryland were able to transport information instantly across several feet of space, from one atom to another. With a microwave pulse, scientists "wrote" quantum information onto one atom. They induced both atoms to become "entangled." Entanglement is a mind-boggling quantum phenomenon in which two bits of matter somehow instantly affect the other across space, as if they shared a single identity. After the entanglement, the second atom had the same information that was written on the first atom, even though no information had traveled between them.

Did you get that "entanglement" business? Me neither. Stuff like that is why theoretical physicists and logicians go bonkers at a disproportionate rate.

Now, a lot of people think I'm Godless. They just don't know me well enough to know I'm not. Sure, maybe everything, including Darwinian evolution, got rolling with the Big Bang; but I firmly believe something or someone had to have been swinging the granddaddy of all mallets that day, and it's perfectly fine by me if we call the swinger "God."

But the gnawing thing for me about God is, I'm not sure the human brain is ever going to develop enough to fully understand what he or she or it had or has in mind. Not when a mind of that grandeur can whip up concepts like "entanglement" as a warm-up for the complex stuff.

In truth, I think the ultimate truths about God and the universe will probably forever elude human grasp. They'll remain as inherently and intractably incomprehensible to our pea brains as "30," "year," and "mortgage" will to my dog's.

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On saying it all

In her lavishly inventive second novel, Hotel World, Ali Smith says it all in nine syllables. ...

you
must
live

you
must
love

you
must
leave

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Lula Wheeler

Pictures can lie in both directions: They can make us look better than we do and worse than we do, and the truth dwells somewhere in-between.

We do not actually look as godawful as we think we look in those snapshots that make us cringe. Nor do we look quite as appealing as we think we look in the shots we'd happily display, a hundred feet tall, in Times Square.

Good or bad, it's serendipitous at any rate.

Everything depends on what's going on in the hundredth, thousandth, ten-thousandth of a second after the button is pressed. Light can flatter us or flatten us and fatten us. Too swiftly for the naked eye, our faces can zip through umpteen fleeting stages of goofy while shifting from one expression to the next—and only the camera can freeze them for lingering scrutiny and long-term humiliation.

But when everything really falls into place in that instant the shutter's released, when the light's a touch more than right, and every facial feature has paused precisely at Perfecto! before an eyelash steps out of line, you can wind up with a photo as celestially exceptional as the portrait of Lula Wheeler. That small, literally stunning (it stunned me) senior portrait I saw one time at Farmington High.

Maybe it wasn't serendipity in her case. Maybe she actually was so otherworldly sublime all of the time. If so, my sincerest sympathies to the boys of the charter class of Farmington (Mich.) High School—the class of 1921. They must have suffered an unremitting torment of longing from September to June.

Though rendered in black and white and shades of gray, Lula Wheeler peered past my shoulder and toward her future with eyes of luminous blue. She had the hint of a dimple in her right cheek, the suggestion of a cleft in her chin, and lips indubitably shaped by Nature to snare young men's souls with the slightest smile.

Let's just say, "Oh ... my ... God" and leave it there.

But here's the thing about all this: It wasn't just that Lula Wheeler's excruciating beauty burrowed into my brain like an ethereal projectile. It was the mind-blowing, satori-like realization that—by that moment, and as if within the milliseconds it took for the notion to lay siege on my noggin—child goddess Lula Wheeler had already lived out every bit of whatever thrilling future lay before her on portrait day '21. Had savored its every joy, suffered its every sorrow, and superseded the portrait before me with innumerable succeeding portraits marking the benign or malign passage of time.

Had already, presumably, waxed wizened and withered, or, more likely, returned to dust.

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Let's look it up in the dictionary

The moral of this story is to own more than one dictionary. Preferably several of increasing size. It's not like wearing two watches and then never being certain what time it is. It's more like never getting stuck with something like this:

res • o • nance (rez-uh-nuhns) n. The quality or condition of being resonant.

res • o • nant (rez-uh-nuhnt) adj. Of, pertaining to, or exhibiting resonance.

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From an e-mail to a friend dated June 7, 2007

My father-in-law is 81. He is dying of congestive heart failure. His kidneys are just about shot and it's just a matter of days. My mother-in-law took him to the hospice yesterday. His last trip to anywhere.

This man has been an object of scorn for me as long as I've known him. He treated Susan and her brother badly after marrying their mother when Susan was twelve. Needless to say, he was the model of prospective-stepparent perfection prior to tying the knot. Then he kicked Susan out of the house when she was just seventeen.

He'd promised Susan's mom he'd support her, that she could quit her job. Also needless to say, neither of those things ever happened; in fact, he retired a good dozen years before she did—from part-time self-employment mowing lawns. It was she who supported him, for the most part, from their wedding day forward.

And the band just played on and on and on.

Now he's teetering at the edge of oblivion, Will, and I find that I no longer harbor so much as a shred of rancor toward him within my amply larded breast. I am glad of that, and at the same time I feel sorry that I have resented him for my wife's sake for so many years—especially since Susan (a better human being than I can ever hope to be) has never, ever, ever treated him with less than the courtesy and consideration that every father considers his due. Her goodness indicts my humanity, mocks my pretensions of decency, makes me feel ashamed.

Last evening, at dinner, she told me something so piercingly poignant that it brought me almost to tears for Hank—a thing I never would have imagined possible.

She told me that her mother drove Hank home from the hospital yesterday afternoon to collect a few things before taking him to the hospice, where his medications would be discontinued and his exit from this earth eased in all ways possible. But as they were about to leave the house, Hank told Nancy he wanted to complete the nearly finished jigsaw puzzle he'd been working on for weeks.

And then he sat down at the table and put the handful of remaining pieces into place before getting back in the car.

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How I found out about "truthiness"

When my stepfather was at the peak of his popularity as a small-time television personality in Detroit, some folks from a weekly magazine covering the movements and minutiae of local celebrities showed up at our home to ferret some facts and snap some snapshots for a spread about "Cowboy Colt."

Even at seven or eight I could feel what I then did not know was moral outrage welling within my childish breast as the photographer started staging the first of many phony-baloney shots. For instance ...

~ My mother, younger brother, and I huddling next to the Cowboy on the couch, pretending to listen to the Cowboy reading aloud, our faces fixin' to explode from smilin' so hard, our necks about to snap from gazing upwards at him adoringly. (Never happened and could not have happened in a million years.)

~ My brother and I racing down the front walk, pretending to greet the Cowboy with squeals of potentially lethal glee, as the Cowboy pretended to emerge from the car in triumphant return from yet another butt-busting two-hour workday. (See "million years" above.)

And if the phony-baloney photos weren't egregious enough, there were the putative facts in the story itself.

I learned, for example, that performing rope tricks topped my personal inventory of fun things to do, buckaroo. I queried my mom about this reeking blob of bull pucky using the 1950s equivalent of "Yo! What's up with this?" In those days, the only good use I could think of for rope was binding my brat brother's hands and feet.

She explained, matter-of-factly, that juicing the truth was a common and innocuous practice in the world of magazine journalism. I registered the explanation, but it did not satisfy. As far as my little-kid mind was concerned, the truth, juiced, was just a stinkin' lie.

(How did you find out about "truthiness"? Please comment here or drop me a line.)

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