Improving With Age

Having spent my childhood in Texas I can tell you one thing with absolute certainty: ice cream melts if you don’t eat it right away. To me, the phrase ‘delayed gratification’ is a euphemism for wasted opportunities, dull predictability and soggy sugar cones. I’m in good company here in my house where having to wait for anything results in either full-on hysteria or barely contained panic. Seed balls, salmon tid-bits, the bed by the heat vent, Gail Ambrosius’ chocolate truffles, an overpriced bottle of Willamette Valley Pinot -- all examples of desires requiring immediate dispatch.

Pets and children too young to control their own bowel movements are exempt from even trying to enjoy later what a bit of whining or a temper tantrum could get for them right now. Not so for the rest of us. As adults, we’re expected to be ants, not grasshoppers. Sara, with her Midwestern sensibilities, seems to discipline herself without hesitation. No matter the temptation, her default answer is ‘no,’ at least initially, which could possibly, with encouragement, edge toward, ‘maybe later,’ whereas mine is consistently ‘hell yea,’ making me a lot like the Bug, except he’s much more entertaining when he says ‘yes’ (his only really solid party trick). He draws out the word so far it snaps and separates into two syllables – a break made all the more clear by his slow head bob right in the middle of it. “Yyee-esss.” “Yyee (head bob down)-(head bob up)esss.” “Yyee-esss.” He’ll repeat it as many times as I do. Who wouldn’t like such an agreeable feathered fellow?

About five years ago, long before my little green yes man showed up, I was wasting my days working in a dusty, sunless warehouse moving pallets of wine from one tall shelf to another with a forklift. It was sort of like playing Tetris over and over again with a modified bumper car from a carnival.

I knew I shouldn't have taken the job, but it was a desperate measure designed to get me out of a crappy job, as had been taking the crappy job I was leaving. No doubt about it, every step I took was going down.

The first moment I walked into the airplane hangar sized, climate-controlled building, the voice in my head exploded with an Edvard Munch type psychic scream so loud, so clear, that the echo of it lurked around the boxes of champagne and chardonnay for months. I should have taken my own advice and run fast, screaming like the guy on the bridge, snagging a bottle of Veuve Cliquot on my way out. But four weeks of vacation and a deep discount on really good wine was enough to sell out my own brain. I am so fucking cheap.

At first I contented myself with the notion that it’s not what you do, it’s who you do it with; a mental trick that worked well enough to get me out of bed and into my steel-toed boots every day for about six weeks, which is how long it took me to realize that the guys I worked with were total dickheads and I was pretty sure they had a corresponding term for me.

Bob, the boss, when in a good mood, had a habit of driving the forklift as fast as it would go, weaving through the aisles and at the top of his lungs quacking duck-like: “Fuuuck….fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck, fuck fuck!” and then laughing like he was auditioning for the part of mad scientist. Initially, I thought he was a speed freak, but I later discovered he was just drunk.

When he was in a bad mood he’d mutter to himself while rearranging wine we’d just rearranged and take really long lunches. He was drunk then too. Either way, he ignored me, having decided that I was a stuck up bitch. And maybe I was.

The other guys had their quirks too. Jim, a 35 year old 6’7” redhead spoke with the speed of an amphetamine addict, his verbal firehose on full blast, without pause or breath, revealing a stream of conscious dialogue mundane in meaning and fascinating in delivery. As we’d hoist boxes of cheap plonk up onto a shelf above my head (eye-level for him), he’d launch into one of his monologues, often about food. “I stopped at Pick ‘N’ Save you know Pick ‘N’ Flick yesterday because I wanted peanut butter I really love peanut butter don’t you love peanut butter (not really a question – no pause) but I only had $3 so I couldn’t get any bread only the peanut butter so I got the peanut butter but not the bread.” The words would just tumble out, one on top of another, too rapid to easily understand and too trivial to make the effort. Instead of listening to him I often found myself fixated on counting the seconds between breaths (one Mississippi, two Mississippi, three Mississippi…..).

Then there was Ted, a fellow history major who also considered the warehouse job to be only temporary – a minor stop on the way to a bigger and better occupation. He had been there for five years. I thought we’d identify with one another, but instead our common circumstance proved repulsive, like looking in a mirror and seeing ‘loser' written across your forehead. So instead of commraderie we built our own private Maginot Lines; mine of morose silence and snobbery; his of crude male humor and silly flamboyance. He wore Hawaiian shirts and shorts all year long, which is completely nuts because we live in Wisconsin, a place where global warming is welcome. When I asked him about the shorts in February, he grinned and told me, “I like to let the boys air out.”

For some stupid reason I think I have to keep a job for at least a year, no matter how shitty, but before a year was up, doing doughnuts in a forklift on the smooth cement had lost all its appeal and I was taking advantage of my wine discount to an unhealthy extreme.

After scouting around for another job it was clear that my jumbled work history still had me on a speedy escalator to nowhere so I did what every middle-class person crushed of creativity would do: I went back to school to study accounting. It wasn’t entirely unpremeditated. I’d made a deal with myself while in my mid 30’s that if I hit 40 and still had no real career I’d force myself to do the dullest thing I could think of, which was, of course, bean counting. With a threat like that hanging over one’s head, who wouldn’t get their shit together? Answer: me.

I resisted. It meant giving up evenings and weekends for two years and then even more time to complete a series of exams. Could I force myself to do that? A friend pushed me over the edge by summing it up like this: “Yea, work now, get what you want later --think of it like a frequent flyer program. So you have to go to Scranton a bunch of times for business but when you rack up enough points you get to go to Tahiti.” Tahiti, I thought: snorkeling, warm sand and those fruity drinks with umbrellas. I liked the Idea of Tahiti. And, I had made a promise to myself. No matter that the decision was made after a birthday pub crawl. I stand by my word, no matter how slurred.

School sucked. I hated almost every second of class, of homework and especially of fucking group projects. I spent hours and hours dinking around with the debits and credits of theoretical widget factories. Despite my distaste, I kicked ass as a student, unlike my pathetic performance almost 20 years before. Back in 1987 I was a lazy, smart-ass kid who hung on to just enough gpa to graduate. In fact, The University of Texas probably let me slide a little just to get rid of me and my Flock of Seagulls haircut. I felt like I was making up for it this time and most importantly I was determined to see it through to the end even though it was nearly as soul sucking as one of Harry Potter’s dementors. I had made myself a shit sandwich and I was damn well going to eat it. With onions and bleu cheese.

Since the prospect of a job in accounting wasn't exciting to me, yet I'm so amazingly stubborn that I wouldn't change my course, I needed to do something to inject some gratification in my delayed gratification plan. I had to have something, some dangling carrot, so I bought myself a really, really good bottle of wine to stash away. I got it at an auction and gave more for it than I paid for the first car I bought. On-line wine sellers had it valued at double that price which made me giddy with anticipation. That’s how I remember it anyway. Sara has a different version of the story in which I was a little tipsy on free beer (she might actually go further than that), opened the bidding on a bottle I didn’t know much about and although it quickly jumped out of our price range, just kept going, eventually topping the last bid with a ridiculous offer. And here’s her favorite part of the story: she ended up paying for it. Truth is so subjective.

I squirreled my prize away in the cellar (basement, whatever), and for the next four years fantasized about the day I would finally deserve to open it – when I’d finished all my classes and passed all four grueling exams. I pictured me and Sara, (me 20 pounds thinner, Sara in a beautiful velvety dress) the wine surreally red in the decanter, both of us relaxed and jovial, sitting close on the couch, faithful Taiko at my feet, Sweet William chattering away, and finally, finally, raising the glass and reveling in the subtle magnificence of the alchemy of superb wine. Of note, an accounting job does not figure into this daydream.

It took me three tries to pass the last exam. Each time the pain and stress of studying was like giving a kidney, which left me one kidney in the hole. When I finally passed, I wept out of relief, and then went right back to work. I was completely buried in spreadsheets and other accounting goop. The ’97 Cab stayed in the basement. Er, uh, cellar.

On November 4, 2008, the time had come. Oddly enough, I was about 20 pounds lighter. The weight loss (due to stress) came mostly off my ass which didn’t really need to shrink, leaving the life preserver around my middle intact. Also, I’d just had the worst haircut of my life. I had been shorn so brutally that you could see my scalp in places. But Sara looked lovely. We ordered a pizza and camped out in front of the tv, caught in the collective excitement of the election. The decanter glimmered, all promise and possibility. The first taste told me that I’d jumped the gun. A wine of such stature needed more time to breathe. As the evening progressed Barack Obama’s success became more and more certain as he racked up the electoral votes. The wine’s ranking never improved. It just kept sucking.

As President Elect Obama gave his speech in Chicago I sat in my living room and studied the wine through the glass, brick red in the center and almost clear around the edge. I had waited so long for it, and it would never improve. If this had all been about delayed gratification, I would have cried, but all I could do was laugh. I laughed from deep down, kidney deep. I had the extreme privilege of being a part of one of the most significant moments in American history and on top of that I’d done what I said I’d do, requiring every strand of discipline I could scrounge. Not a bad evening at all. Before going to bed I got on-line and after a quick search discovered that the wine’s value had plummeted to $30 a bottle. Had I been reading up on this all along, I would have seen that this particular wine peaked 2 years before, and should have been drunk then. Had I not confused success with sacrifice I would have known that.

As I poured this very expensive bottle of unpalatable wine down the kitchen sink I realized that it was not wasted. I’ve learned a hell of a lot in the past four years, most importantly that everything – and I mean everything – is a metaphor.