Random acts of appreciation

When my tenth-grade English teacher took maternity leave midway through the school year, she was replaced with an eager, fresh-out-of-college sub named Miss Cizek, whom I think of as Stephanie now, having virtually caught up with her in age.

Miss Cizek bore a striking resemblance to movie actress Juliet Prowse, so we boys naturally hung on her every word, typically to the point of forgetting to swallow.

As it turned out, listening closely to young Stephanie Cizek wound up having a life-altering effect on me. Because, out of the clear blue sky one morning, she launched into an aside containing possibly the most profound advice I've ever received from a teacher or anyone.

She said we should never fail to compliment people to their faces whenever we notice something admirable about them. Strangers included. "Don't be afraid to speak up," she said. "You could make a huge difference in how that person is feeling right then. And they'll never know you're thinking something good about them unless you tell them."

(This, from a 22-year-old.)

I've never forgotten Miss Cizek's words, and have put them into practice countless times—frequently receiving in return the rich reward of a startled expression of acute gratitude from the recipient of one of my impromptu compliments.

Beyond the warm-and-fuzzy feeling that comes from making a fellow human being feel good about herself or himself, I've benefited from Miss Cizek's advice from a sharpened awareness occasioned by dozens of years of simply paying a little more attention to others.

So, if you're not already incorporating random acts of verbal appreciation into your daily routine, I urgently recommend getting in on the program immediately. Start startling others—with compliments—today.

And now to give credit where due: This post was inspired by Three Cheers for Compliments, posted yesterday at a lovely blog I follow called "Finding Happy." Check it out by clicking here.

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At the ballet on Saturday night ...

I saw a middle-aged couple in the lobby. The lady wore a black floral print skirt, charcoal hose, and a cream-colored sleeveless top. Her hair, a blond dye job, was arranged in a loose French twist, and her skin looked leathery and lightly tanned. The man was about six inches taller than she. His left hand and wrist were encased in a funky elastic bandage resembling a fingerless glove, and he was wearing horn-rimmed glasses, grayish-brown slacks, and a cranberry polo shirt. His straight brown hair was shiny-slick with some kind of preparation. After a short while, the woman and man turned to move elsewhere; in doing this, he grabbed her arm and jerked her toward the direction he had in mind, as one might roughly redirect a child who'd already been scolded twice that evening.

At the ballet on Saturday night ...

someone sitting near me was broadcasting the camphoraceous smell of moth balls.

At the ballet on Saturday night ...

the heavy velvet curtain continued lowering long after touching the stage, its vertical pleats forming a chorus-line of red and wrinkled elephants' legs.

At the ballet on Saturday night ...

I saw a teenage couple in the lobby. The young man wore a gray shirt with button-down collars and a striped tie. He had a floppy mop of sandy hair and a meager mustache and goatee. The glowing young woman clinging to him had tawny skin, darting eyes, and shimmering shoulder-length hair the color of Godiva chocolate. Her spaghetti-strapped crimson sheath plunged deep below her waist in back and confirmed the absence of panties with form-hugging chutzpah. Turning toward Susan, I nodded in their direction and said, "That boy doesn't have a chance."

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Try not to dangle your modifier

Speaking as someone who began writing for pay in 1980, I am frequently appalled by the gross grammatical errors being committed at what seems like a growing rate by other people who write for pay. If they don't know not to say "Send the shipment to Sally and I" how in heaven's name will young people ever learn it's supposed to be "me"? (For a whimsical take on this mounting problem, see my February post entitled The death of me.)

It's bad enough that text messaging is doing everything in its prodigious power to eradicate the art of writing during what's left of my lifetime; I don't need paid copywriters accelerating the destruction.

If you don't write for a living you're forgiven in advance for not knowing that all those supermarket signs should say "10 Items or Fewer." You're also forgiven in advance for not knowing (a) what a dangling modifier is and (b) how to fix one.

A dangling modifier is a modifier that's left hanging, that doesn't have anything to modify. Here's an example I happened upon recently in a publication sure to surprise you (it sure surprised me):

Standing before a fawning crowd at a private fundraiser in San Francisco last April, Senator Barack Obama's usually finely calibrated rhetoric loosened up.

Who was doing the standing? The finely calibrated rhetoric? See what I mean? The opening participial phrase is a dangling modifier because there's nothing for it to modify. The writer got lost or changed her mind midway through her sentence.

To fix this problem the sentence would have to be rewritten more or less as follows:

Standing before a fawning crowd at a private fundraiser in San Francisco last April, Senator Barack Obama loosened up his usually finely calibrated rhetoric.

Ah. That's more like it. Now we've got someone capable of standing.

Maybe the writer wrote the sentence my way in the first place, then thought it would flow better the way it wound up in the magazine, not noticing the resulting dangling modifier. Whatever.

The really surprising thing for me is where I found it: in the opening sentence, rendered in extra-large type, of an essay appearing in the Columbia Journalism Review. Which pretty much gives you and me (not I) a free pass on dangling modifiers until the end of time.

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The Zen poems written right before our eyes

This Zen poem about geese flying over a lake had a revelatory effect on me when I first read it at 17:

The wild geese do not intend to cast their reflection.
The water has no mind to receive their image.

And yet the reflection happens, and the to-gasp-for beauty is there for the beholding. Like frosting, in other words, on life's cake, courtesy of physics and physiology.

I'm constantly being figuratively stopped in my tracks by similar visions of inordinate beauty that randomly occur before my very eyes. For instance, I was walking down a long hallway in an office building one day, and ...

That lean Indian woman striding purposefully past me: Can she possibly comprehend her hair? A single waist-length braid swinging with every step like a black satin pendulum, completing every sweep with a fetching flick.

And if that lovely sight in itself were not enough, the hallway's overhead pot lights ...

took turns forming bands of sheen that slowly descended from the crown of her head to the nape of her neck as she passed from light to light.

You don't have to be "baked" to tune into this stuff. All you have to do is look.

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Why nobody wrote the colonel

I saw something on TV that made me sheepishly realize I've been expecting far too much in expecting others to answer my e-mails.

You know, I've heard stories about people routinely abandoning people like me who've been laid off and can't land new work. People like me make people like them uncomfortable. On the other hand, I'm old-fashioned enough to find not answering e-mails despicably discourteous; as rude as blowing off a friendly hello in the hall.

But what do I know?

Not much, evidently, according to what I saw on ABC's What Would You Do? last week. The show's producers conducted a hidden-camera test in broad daylight in New Jersey. They had an actor disguised as a homeless man collapse and lie motionless on a busy city sidewalk, to see how long he'd have to lie there before someone at least whipped out a cell phone.

Sure, the empty beer can in the actor's hand might explain why 88 people walked right by as though a fallen man wasn't there. But how about this: The 89th person, a limping African-American woman who later told What Would You Do? she'd been homeless herself on occasion, not only stopped to check on the apparently unconscious man, but stood there begging passersby to please call 9-1-1. She even removed the built-in beer-can turn-off. A total of 26 people ignored her pleas before another compassionate woman deigned to make the call.

What the heck.

But there's more. As a preamble to the foregoing, the show aired surveillance-camera footage of a real-life incident in which a woman fell to the floor and lay motionless for 45 minutes in the waiting room of a New York hospital, ignored not only by everyone else in that waiting room but even by several members of the hospital staff who looked at her and kept going. She died where she lay, mis amigos. Dead right there.

I'm not trying to blow my own horn when I say I know for certain I would have helped both those people lying motionless on the ground; it would not have occurred to me not to.

And on that basis I reckon the fault lies with me for believing others should answer my e-mails.

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Fasten your seatbelts. It's going to be a bumpy ride.

I'm not an atheist. I used to be a Catholic, but couldn't hang with it once I started thinking for myself; Catholicism did not compute, and I've always been of the "in for a penny, in for a pound" mentality, so cafeteria Catholicism was never an option.

Once I rejected Catholicism, I drifted around but couldn't stick to much of anything but Eastern philosophy. Eventually, Tom Paine talked me into deism. If anything, I'm a deist—someone who, as my dictionary puts it, believes that "God created the world and its natural laws, but takes no further part in its functioning [as evidenced by the flies crawling on starving babies' eyes in Ethiopia]." I added the latter bit in case you were wondering.

That said, I invite you to consider this. ...

So there was this program on one of the God channels recently, about the Rood and Christ's crucifixion thereon, and one of the talking heads with a turned-around collar was saying how God harbored so much love and compassion for mankind that he allowed his only son to become a man in order that his only son could then be offered up to him as the blood sacrifice necessary to appease his otherwise eternally and fatally implacable anger toward mankind.

He didn't say that exactly, but that's exactly what he was saying; and the thing that curdled my blood (besides the Manson-like arrangement of his facial features) was that he obviously saw nothing illogical or unconscionable or reprehensible or grotesquely pagan—or even mildly disappointing—in the "rationale" he was spouting.

I mean, it's so perfectly reasonable. ...

GOD: I am mad at all of mankind for something just two of them did. I will therefore allow malicious, sadistic men to beat the bejesus out of my only begotten son, and then cruelly and slowly murder him in order to make me feel better. See? See how much I love mankind after all?

I'm sorry, but if that makes sense, so do thousand-dollar Hannah Montana tickets.

Seriously. Are you seriously going to tell me that the only way God could feel mollified, could stop feeling so goddamned hateful toward human beings, was through the grisly slaughter of his own son? That's insupportable. Couldn't God, being God, have just simmered down? More to the point, couldn't God, being God, have just not hated the imperfect beings he himself created in the first place?

Forgive me, please, but I like to give God credit for having more, um, humanity than that. Speaking of which ...

Sometimes I think there's just no hope for humankind; that this is still the Planet of the Apes. Bonobo chimps seem more rational to me than we. Ditto for whales, elephants, dolphins, dogs, and assorted farm animals.

And sometimes the malevolence that seems to underlie the general insanity of human existence makes me literally shudder.

Don't throw any Bibles at me for this one. I've already read both Testaments. I've also read Thomas Paine's The Age of Reason, and wish more people would do the same.

For further reading:
Inquisitive minds want to know ...
Phew! So grateful I didn't make altar boy after all ...
And for your penance, ten years in the laundry, missy ...
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Why I believe in a sweet hereafter

First, there's the near-death experience (NDE) described in encouragingly consistent forms by throngs of returners from the brink of doom. The NDE, more than anything, including that song by Blue Oyster Cult, persuades me not to fear the Reaper.

Thanks to the NDE, I fully expect to ...

• Hover overhead after drawing my final breath, personally witnessing and profoundly moved by the heroic measures being applied in vain to retain me in the here-and-now, as well as the inconsolable grieving of those inconsolably aggrieved by my demise
  

• Float through a long tunnel toward a brilliant light
  

• Encounter, on emerging, not only every loved one who's gone before me but a spirit-being from whose side I shall never wish to stray

• Make really good use of the Ultimate Magic 8 Ball® *

And don't go trying to rain on my parade with your battery of physiological explanations for the NDE. I will shut my eyes, plug my ears, and loudly chant gibberish until you go away.

Second, there are these reassuring and compelling passages from Thomas Paine's The Age of Reason:

The most beautiful parts of the creation to our eye are the winged insects, and they are not so originally. They acquire that form and that inimitable brilliancy by progressive changes. The slow and creeping caterpillar-worm of today passes in a few days to a torpid figure and a state resembling death; and in the next change comes forth in all the miniature magnificence of life, a splendid butterfly. No resemblance of the former creature remains; everything is changed; all his powers are new, and life is to him another thing. [If] we cannot conceive that the consciousness of existence is not the same in this state of the animal as before, why then must I believe that the resurrection of the same body is necessary to continue to me the consciousness of existence hereafter?

... [T]he belief of a future state is a rational belief, founded upon facts visible in the creation; for it is not more difficult to believe that we shall exist hereafter in a better state and form than at present, than that a worm should become a butterfly, and quit the dunghill for the atmosphere, if we did not know it as a fact.

Just imagine: Maybe all those dreams we've had of soaring high above the world below are, in truth, visions of what's to come once we have "quit the dunghill." Visions benevolently bestowed by a kind and caring God.

For further reading:
Life After Life, by Raymond A. Moody Jr.
The Age of Reason, by Thomas Paine

* See February post entitled My idea of heaven
Magic 8 Ball is a registered trademark of Mattel Inc.

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