Week 13: Another take on Smoke.

Smoke, the movie, 1995

I am not a smoker but I can imagine this scene, the act of smoking, the smoke swirling into the air, thin grayish fingers, completely weightless until it is gone and all that is left is a small mound of ashes in the ash tray and a hint of smell in the air to remind us of what was.

This is how I feel every time I watch this movie. I go through a whole slew of contracting emotions; from slight boredom at the movie slow progression to a growing  interest  in this group of people revolving around a Brooklyn cigar shop,  and the various complications of their life ending with deep satisfaction during the last scene; Auggie’s Christmas story. And then it is over and aside from that lingering sense of “feeling good”, there is nothing left.  

Trying to capture this elusive movie on paper is difficult.  If it wouldn’t sound corny I would say that it’s like trying to hold smoke in one’s clenched fist.

Let’s start with what it is not. Don't look for special effects, explosions, car chases or gun fights here; this is a movie with an emphasis on dialogue, ambiance, and characterization. The film has been perceived by many as too literate for its own good and it may seem, at times, needlessly stylistic.

And did I mention, slow? The minimalist conceits of Adam Holender's camerawork and the mood invoked by director Wayne Wang's leisurely pacing of scenes might seem to those who disagree with the film's meandering style as lazy, but the film surely is not.

Author Paul Auster and director Wayne Wang (The Joy Luck Club) worked on the story for years before it reached the screen. Paul Auster based the script for Smoke on a 1990 short story he wrote for "The New York Times." He also wrote and directed the film's sequel (of sorts), Blue in the Face (1995).

Williamsburg, Brooklyn, including the "J" train as it slowly creeps up the track towards the Williamsburg Bridge, and the old Williamsburg Bank in the foreground is the opening shot. A beautiful shot of that part of Brooklyn; close enough to hear the train but far enough to keep the other city noises in the background, it is also a good start and a fitting introduction to the smoke store and Auggie.

A Brooklyn cigar shop is the setting for this drama, director Wayne Wang interweaves the stories of several characters that have fractured family relationships in common. Harvey Keitel is Auggie Wren, poetic owner of the Brooklyn Cigar Company, a store that he considers the center of the world -- a place where all of humanity eventually parades through. Other characters include Paul (William Hurt) a grief-stricken novelist; Ruby (Stockard Channing), Auggie's long-ago girlfriend; and Rashid (Harold Perrineau Jr.), a teenager who is befriended by Paul after saving his life and seeks his estranged father (Forest Whitaker).

 “What is the weight of smoke?” asks novelists Paul Benjamin in the beginning of the film.

 Not much but so much. Like the pictures that Augie takes of the same spot in his corner street. He shoots them every morning at the exact same time and while they appear to be the same, a closer look while taking the time to examine them closely, reveals how different they really are. Each picture captures less than a moment  but this moment can mean a life time like the one which shows Paul Benjamin’s’ wife seconds before she was shot.  What is the weight of one Corner Street in New York and the life of few people who might not be very important at all, but yet they are.

Paul Auster is a brilliant writer, the acting is superb, and the script is excellent. Smoke is a funny, sometimes poignant, slice-of-life film with a whole lot of heart. The story is like a colorful quilt, patches of individual stories touching and separating and the end result is like a warm enveloping blanket one can be submerged in.  

So what is the weight of smoke?  We actually get the answer based on an old story. If you smoke the cigar and then weight the residue and subtract from the weight of the unsmoked cigar what is left is the weight of smoke. And in the case of this movie, good storytelling, and that “feel good” lingering feeling we are left with, that is the weight of smoke.

Week 13: appreciation/depreciation; the review/2

Smoke, the movie, 1995

I am not a smoker but I can imagine this scene, the act of smoking, the smoke swirling into the air, thin grayish fingers, completely weightless until it is gone and all that is left is a small mound of ashes in the ash tray and a hint of smell in the air to remind us of what was.

This is how I feel every time I watch this movie. I go through a whole slew of contracting emotions; from slight boredom at the movie slow progression to a growing  interest  in this group of people revolving around a Brooklyn cigar shop,  and the various complications of their life ending with deep satisfaction during the last scene; Auggie’s Christmas story. And then it is over and aside from that lingering sense of “feeling good”, there is nothing left.  

Trying to capture this elusive movie on paper is difficult.  If it wouldn’t sound corny I would say that it’s like trying to hold smoke in one’s clenched fist.

Let’s start with what it is not. Don't look for special effects, explosions, car chases or gun fights here; this is a movie with an emphasis on dialogue, ambiance, and characterization. The film has been perceived by many as too literate for its own good and it may seem, at times, needlessly stylistic.

And did I mention, slow? The minimalist conceits of Adam Holender's camerawork and the mood invoked by director Wayne Wang's leisurely pacing of scenes might seem to those who disagree with the film's meandering style as lazy, but the film surely is not.

Author Paul Auster and director Wayne Wang (The Joy Luck Club) worked on the story for years before it reached the screen. Paul Auster based the script for Smoke on a 1990 short story he wrote for "The New York Times." He also wrote and directed the film's sequel (of sorts), Blue in the Face (1995).

A Brooklyn cigar shop is the setting for this drama, director Wayne Wang interweaves the stories of several characters that have fractured family relationships in common. Harvey Keitel is Auggie Wren, poetic owner of the Brooklyn Cigar Company, a store that he considers the center of the world -- a place where all of humanity eventually parades through. Other characters include Paul (William Hurt) a grief-stricken novelist; Ruby (Stockard Channing), Auggie's long-ago girlfriend; and Rashid (Harold Perrineau Jr.), a teenager who is befriended by Paul after saving his life and seeks his estranged father (Forest Whitaker).

 “What is the weight of smoke?” asks novelists Paul Benjamin in the beginning of the film.

 Not much but so much. Like the pictures that Augie takes of the same spot in his corner street. He shoots them every morning at the exact same time and while they appear to be the same, a closer look and taking the time to examine them closely, reveals how different they really are.  What is the weight of one Corner Street in New York and the life of few people who might not be very important at all, but yet they are.

Williamsburg, Brooklyn, including the "J" train as it slowly creeps up the track towards the Williamsburg Bridge, and the old Williamsburg Bank in the foreground is the opening shot. A beautiful shot of that part of Brooklyn; close enough to hear the train but far enough to keep the other city noises in the background, it is also a good start and a fitting introduction to the smoke store and Auggie.

Auggie Wren is an enigma; at first sight one sees a rugged man worn out by the day-to-day routine. Those who know him better, like widower novelist Paul Benjamin (William Hurt), find a keen philosophical spark behind the skewed demeanor of a cigar shop proprietor.

The scene where Keitel and Hurt are sitting inside the cigar shop looking at Keitel's photo album and the latter identifies his murdered wife in one of them, is one of the most moving and provocative scenes and so is the entire last fifteen minute segment, essaying "Auggie Wren's Christmas Story", a distinctive piece that originally appeared in the New York Times in Christmas 1990. The film's closing dialogue perhaps sums the whole idea in the best possible way. 

 “Wren: If you can't share your secrets with your friends then what kind of friend are you? Benjamin: Exactly...then life just wouldn't be worth living.”

This is also the most unexpected moment in Smoke, Auggie's Christmas story. It’s sad, touching and funny all at the same time. It’s filmed once in color and again in black and white, while the closing titles are projected on the screen. In the story, a younger Auggie is returning a lost wallet to an elderly lady living in the New York’s Projects. The wallet was dropped by her grandson in a robbery attempt of Auggies’ smoke store. It’s Christmas day and these two lonely people; Auggie and the elderly lady share an unexpected Christmas meal at the end of which she falls asleep and he sneaks out of her apartment with a stolen camera, he picked from a pile of many others, stolen ones, he found in the apartment. And so this story takes us a full circle to the beginning of the movie and we get to have a slightly different view of Auggies’ love of photography.

Paul Auster is a brilliant writer, the acting is superb, and the script is excellent. Smoke is a funny, sometimes poignant, slice-of-life film with a whole lot of heart. The story is like a colorful quilt, patches of individual stories touching and separating and the end result is like a warm enveloping blanket one can be submerged in.  

So what is the weight of smoke?  We actually get the answer based on an old story. If you smoke the cigar and then weight the residue and subtract from the weight of the unsmoked cigar what is left is the weight of smoke. And in the case of this movie, good storytelling, and that “feel good” lingering feeling we are left with, that is the weight of smoke.

Week 13: appreciation/depreciation; the review

A desert concert

The yearly song festival hosted by my home town in Israel is now a long gone history but then, almost fifteen years ago it was still alive and kicking. The jewel in the crown of the many excellent concerts performed for three straight days was always the sunrise concert at the bottom of Massada.

Massada, an ancient Herodian compound of palaces and fortifications on top of an isolated rock plateau, is best known for being the scene of the last rebellion against the Roman army in 73 CE.  It sits on the eastern edge of the Judean Desert overlooking the Dead Sea. On the west side of the mountain in a natural drop in the ground a big amphitheater was created, using the natural slope and lined with stone benches facing the  Roman ramp. The huge artificial slope, leaning against the mountain was created by Roman ingenuity from tons of rocks and sand as a way of reaching the rebels at the top. 

The Concert starts few hours before sunrise. So shortly after midnight, a long line of private cars and buses descended from Arad, few hundred meters above the Dead Sea, into the dark desert. Armed with sleeping bags against the desert chill and the hard benches, and plenty of food to last for the many hours ahead, we settled on one of the benches ready to be entertained.

This was not going to be a usual type of a concert, more like a combination of poem reading and songs performed intermittently. The reading was to be performed by Yonatan Gefen a very popular song writer known mostly for his children poems. Those poems were read in my home for years and each of my daughters had her favorites and so did I. “Gal is the daughter of the sea...The most beautiful girl in  kindergarten...It’s not pleasant to see a locked kindergarten...I always wanted a dog...The wrong Dragon... “and many more. We could cite them, hum them, and remembered them years later with that bitter sweet longing people often sense reminiscing their childhood.  

 And the singer, let’s not forget him, just returning from a year abroad, was David Broza another favorite figure and a remarkable guitar player. Critics have labeled Broza as "a post-modern Leonard Cohen" and the "Stevie Ray Vaughan of rock”. He has also been compared to Bruce Springsteen as well as Gordon Lightfoot and Jackson Browne. Broza's American debut album, Away From Home, was praised by The New York Times as one of the best pop albums of the year. Time of Trains, his second American release, gained him recognition as one of the most important artists on the international music scene.

So I knew it was going to be a good one, still I did not expect it to be such a unique experience. The concert started on time and for the next three hours it was a continuous dialogue between these two performers and the huge crowd. It is hard to comment on the musical or literary quality since the crowed did most of the work. Everyone was singing along with the singer and narrating the words to every poem without missing a beat.

At some point I looked around at this unusual mixture of older couples twice my age, gruff young soldiers holding their weapons on one their side and hugging their girlfriends, cynical high school youngsters, all humming  along and reciting. All completely immersed in the chemistry created by the location, the velvety desert night and the two men on the stage.

As the sun rose over the Dead Sea, it climbed slowly behind the plateau and its rays created a perfect halo that softens the sharp lines of the mountain and broken ancient walls. Then as it climbed even higher it painted the ramp with shimmering whites and yellows reflecting the glow of the desert sand. And yet the crowed did not move, everyone continued with no signs of tiring. On and on the concert kept on going and the sun was getting higher and higher in the sky. The sunrise concert was turning into a late morning soon to be noon.

I’ve been to many concerts since, some were very good but none had that kind of magnetic energy created by good performers an enthusiastic crowd and almost two thousand years of history all combined. 

12:Intro

Don’t Panic

What makes you choose a specific book to accompany you over the years is still a mystery to me. Or, maybe I can ask  what’s make a book choose you and stick with you as it is being packed, time after time in dusty jam-packed boxes, move from one side of the country to the other, being placed on different book shelves or thrown into a pile, almost forgotten for long periods of time.

This one is my Hebrew version of the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.  A paperback edition, quiet ripped with the years it fits its name so well, a tired traveler hitching a ride with many different readers most of them my family members. We all read it, at least once, at one time or another and most of us more than once. It bears the marks on it; crumpled pages, some torn and taped back in, other folded at the corners to show where the last reader, even though I stressed time and time again it annoys me, marked where he stopped.  Any one of us can randomly cite any line from it and the others will immediately fill in or in a heartbeat “get it” and laugh. Cues like “42”, “yellow”, “don’t forget to pack a towel”, “behind a locked door with a sign; beware, tiger”, will grant me a nod of approval from my daughters and a round of laughs.

Because that what it is, smart with a humorous spin that carries the totally bizarre story to the far end of the unknown Galaxy. Reading it I am freed from all constrains of reality. Its’ quirkiness is focusing the light on the ridiculous and amusing. Douglas Adams is being so accurate in pointing out, with a surgeon like precision where we as humans are lost not only in the vast boundaryless galaxy but on our own planet. He sticks the knife in and then with the utmost pleasure turns it on and on.

My youngest is the most devoted admirer of the book and used, from a very young age to read it aloud when we were together in the car on long trips. At the beginning she did not like it at all; the opening chapter in which the earth is being wiped out to make room for a galactic freeway scared her as she took it at face value. Over the years she learned to appreciate the bizarre scene, one of my favorites, in which Arthur Dent, the earthling and one of the books’ main characters, is going to a great trouble trying to save his house from being demolished by his town officials. All this time, his friend, Ford Perfect, an outer space researcher for the revised edition of the Hitchhiker’s Guide and a seasoned space traveler, is trying to lure him away from his house and the doomed earth, about to be destroyed in a matter of minutes. 

Part of the book’s charm is that I can open it at any page, and it does not make a difference which one, and just start reading. Like a really good friend that even if you haven’ seen each other for years, you can immediately resume the communication, I feel the same. Beginning, middle, towards the end, I open the book and within seconds I am back in, as if I never left. Some people might sneer at this and see it as just another proof that the story line is lacking, the logic shaky, and all in all I let myself fall for a cheap cult culture.  Being blinded and carried away by a popularity wave of flashy words and clever phrasing wrongly seeing it as real literature. To those critics I say; in the words of the Hitchhiker’s Guide: 

“…for though it has many omissions and contains much that is apocryphal, or at least wildly inaccurate, it scores over the older (Encyclopaedia Galactica) more pedestrian work in two important respects. First, it is slightly cheaper; and secondly it has the words DON'T PANIC inscribed in large friendly letters on its cover.”

Week 12: Intro

Speaker for the Dead (again) 

I love sci-fi tales, they satisfy both the traveler in me and the mystic. They make me stop breathing with tension, but the good kind not the repulsive and vile kind of horror stories. Not the terrifying one of the apocalyptic ones where I always sense a grain of true fear that the grim predictions can actually become a reality. The kind of science fiction that I like is set so far out in other galaxies and times that I can enjoy it with no reservations. And if it is also a good story with complex characters it’s a pure joy. Perhaps a modern legend will be a good way of approaching this genre; with villains and good people and bizarre occurrences and foreign landscapes.

Speaker for the Dead by Orson Scott Card is all of that, most everyone likes it for the science fiction richness and complexity but I liked Speaker for the Dead for a completely different reason. I often wondered if I am the only one who saw this side of the story. Perhaps as it is so often happens to me I did not understand it at all, maybe I was sidetracked by a minor point and got lost in my own wilderness. I liked the book for its name and the notion it presents that someone should speak for the dead.

This could stem from me being  second generation to a Holocaust surviving populace growing up to learn about millions who  were lost without even a name left to help remembering their life. “Each of us has a name given by God and given by our parents, each of us has a name given by the sea and given by our death. …” Is a poem I heard over and over again, every year, on that gloomy memorial day we call Holocaust day. I still can hear the lists of name being read on the radio all day, names and more names and more. Yad Vashem, just around the corner from where I grew up is a huge complex of buildings shrouding lists and lists of names. I spent the last few years reconstructing parts of my family’s history from bits and pieces. Speak for the dead, these words swallow me, consume me and maybe touch a universal fear we all have of being forgotten and our life meaningless.

I might be carried away here, after all this is science fiction we are talking about. Ander Wiggin, a fallen hero, who grew up and turned from a whiz kid who with the power of technology and his hands destroyed a whole species to a somewhat sad and wise young man. A man who understands the magnitude of what he did and the tremendous second chance he got to mend the wrongs.  With renewed sensitivity and deep understanding of human nature he realizes what it means to meet the “other” how to relate to what we perceive as different and possibly threatening. But what I personally take from his experience and mine as a reader is why is it so important to mention the dead and give them a voice that will carry them over the generations.

I have read many different books over the years but only few stayed with me over time. I am not sure that Speaker for the Dead is one of the best literary works I read, probably not, but it strikes a chord in my heart and that is I believe what makes a book, any book, become a friend.

Week 12: book intro

Speaker for the Dead & The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

I love sci-fi tales, they make me happy, they satisfy both the traveler in me and the mystic. They make me stop breathing with tension, but the good kind not the repulsive and vile kind of horror stories. Not the terrifying one of the apocalyptic ones where I always sense a grain of true fear that the grim predictions can actually become a reality. The kind of science fiction that I like is set so far out in other galaxies and times that I can enjoy it with no reservations. And if it is also a good story with complex characters it’s a pure joy. Perhaps a modern legend will be a good way of approaching this genre; with villains and good people and bizarre occurrences and foreign landscapes.

Two of my favorite books of this class of books are Speaker for the Dead by Orson Scott Card and the Hitchhiker Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams.

These are very different stories by two writers that are as different from each other as the day from the night still they represent two sides of the same genre; the deep spiritual Card and the quirky, smart and funny Adams.

I liked Speaker for the Dead for a completely different reason than most anyone else seems to and often wondered if I am the only one who saw this side of the story. Perhaps as it is so often happens to me I did not understand it at all, was sidetracked by a minor point and got lost in my own wilderness. I liked the book for its name and the notion he presents that someone should speak for the dead.

This could stem from me being  second generation to a Holocaust surviving populace growing up to learn about millions who lost without even a name left to help remembering their life. “Each of us has a name given by God and given by our parents, each of us has a name given by the sea and given by our death. …” Is a poem I heard over and over again, every year, on that gloomy day of memory we call Holocaust day. I still can hear the lists of names being read on the radio all day, names and more names and more. Yad Vashem, just around the corner from where I grew up is a huge complex of buildings shrouding lists and lists of names. I spent the last few years reconstructing parts of my family’s history from bits and pieces. Speak for the dead, these words swallow me, consume me and maybe touch a universal fear we all have of being forgotten and our life meaningless.

I might be carried away here, after all this is science fiction we are talking about. Ander Wiggin, a fallen hero, who grew up and turned from a whiz kid who with the power of technology and his hands destroyed a whole species to a somewhat sad and wise young man. A man who understands the magnitude of what he did and the tremendous second chance he got to mend the wrongs.  With renewed sensitivity and deep understanding of human nature he realizes why is it so important to mention the dead and to give them a voice that will carry them over the generations.

Now the Hitchhiker, just as smart, put the humorous spin in and carries the totally bizarre story to the far end of the unknown Galaxy. Reading it I am freed from all constrains of reality. No more sad reflections on humanity, wiped out cultures, meeting strangers face-to-face or my own roll in the big scheme of things. Its quirkiness is focusing the light on the ridiculous and amusing. Douglas is just as accurate in pointing out with a sergeant like precision where we as humans are lost not only in the vast boundaryless galaxy but on our own planet. He sticks the knife in and then with the utmost pleasure turns it on and on.

Yes, we get it, it’s funny, it’s bizarre, and it’s crazy, it is us.

Week 11: expertise, authority

"Hit 'em where they ain't!"

Sometimes you are forced into it. You find yourself in a situation where everything you try backfires and while reconsidering your actions you realize you went about it in the wrong way, you did what was expected of you, you played by the rules, their rules. And out of desperation you gather the courage to break those rules and declare a different game. That it when you realize how much of your power you surrendered willingly all this time and how the game looks when you reclaim it.

***

We had to do it when we pulled our daughter out of school in the middle of her 6^th grade and attempted to enroll her in a different, private school. It was against the rules, we were told.

Pulling a student out of school in the middle of the year without permission is not an option; even if it is your own child and you observe a real problem.  She should go back to school and bear with it while the parents jump through the necessary hoops.

We said “no way” and at that moment we realized what was so obvious to others before us.

“The rules “in any game including the game of life are powerful only to the extent that everyone is willing to accept them and play along. They can be changed,"Hit 'em where they ain't!" is what we chose to do.

***

It might sound strange but if you give it a serious thought you’ll be impressed with the logic. Instead of spending days looking for answers in all the obvious places, where they are likely to be or easy to be found, in close proximity or in well lighted spots, do the unexpected and it will take you to places you did not even dream of.

***

Some call it second degree change, referring to the fact that most people develop over time a set way of doing things, an established view of the world they use every time to assess situations and plan actions. If you do not fall for that, for the obvious and expected, if you realize that in every life situation there is at least one more layer, the one less predictable, the surprising, the angle not often seen, if you’ll use this knowledge to change the rules, create new ones or just refuse to play along you will always have the upper hand.

***

And so we did the unexpected and took our feud to the public in a form of a newspaper paid add. Not an open letter or letter to the editor, since those are accessible for the other side to respond to, just few lines written by our daughter, questioning how for over a month she was forced to sit home with no solution in sight. Public opinion is a forceful power and by stepping into the public eye we stopped being victims of a stiff birocratic system. What dragged on for over a month was resolved in less than twenty four hours.

***

I strongly believe that our private experience, since that what it is, goes way beyond that. Like a visual illusion, once someone helps you see beyond it no one can take the new acquired sight away from you. Each story told about an alternate way used to resolve a situation facilitates the ability to change. The tactics we used were not ours,  being an avid reader I often borrow ideas from books and I owe the one I told you about to the two books you’ll find being referenced below. I feel it’s my obligation to pass this knowledge forward.

***

You can spend considerable time trying to define change and find that it is an impossible task taking into account how varied and multifaceted it can be. Most dictionaries come up with a long list of optional definitions trying to cover the many options and variables. So at the end all we come out with is rather vague and amorphous. And yet change is very real to all of us, it is part of our life and a source of many sleepless nights and hours of debate with ourselves and others. It’s an intriguing concept; like a light at the end of a long tunnel some search for it all their life, but like the bluebird of happiness it is often in our back yard just waiting to be found.

***

Change: Principles of Problem Formation and Problem Resolution by Paul Watzlawick, John H. Weakland, Richard Fisch and Milton H. Erickson (Apr 17, 1974)

The partner: John Grisham

Dell; 1ST edition (January 7, 1998)

Week 11: expertise

The mom-and-pop motel

On the face of it, it seems like an excellent idea. Become your own boss, run your own business, meet lots' of new people, live in a nice place, in short have fun while making a living. How much better can it gets? It gets even more appealing with age and after many years of working for others, having to comply by their whims and mood changes, put up with rules that seem arbitrary and random, counting the days to that magic date, retirement.

The Mom-and -pop motel seems like the whole package wrapped nicely. Compact enough to make it manageable yet sufficiently varied to keep it exciting. Other people with no prior experience have done it and survived so how hard can it be?

And so people  often dive in without doing their homework, not realizing what it actually means mislead by their own misconception and wishful thinking. It might seem simple, just a mom-and-pop operation run and managed as its name implies by two people. But small does not necessarily means simple and a motel is not like any other small home business.

Let’s start by shaking the small equals’ simple equation. Whether small or big a business is a business is a business. If it does not generate sufficient income, if it is not managed professionally, if it does not grow and develop it is merely a hobby no more. Regardless of its size it has to deal on a daily basis with the same type of issues; staffing, advertising, training, cost, prices, inventory and clientele. Actually a larger scale business might handle all these complex issues by hiring special people to handle different facets while in a small business often the same two or three people have to be the ones to do it all.

When adding to the framework that was just presented above (staffing, advertising, cost etc...)  the unique qualities of a mom and pop motel versus any other home business the complexity becomes even more apparent.

A motel is either closed or open, it cannot be partially open which means that for twenty four hours, seven days a week, all through the year if the lights are on and the sign at the entrance is lit, prospected guests can drive to the front door and demand to be served. There is not a moment of total privacy unless someone else is at the desk. If they do not knock on the door people will call and ask questions; from relevant ones about prices and availability to what the weather will be six month into the future and when that lobster restaurant will open and by the way is it good? How to arrive from the airport and maybe I can get a ride? If they are polite they will thank you, if they are not they will hang the phone on you, but it does not really matter, as each one of them can become a paying guest they all have to be treated professionally with respect and patience.

As if working twenty four hours a day is not taxing enough try adding to the mixture spending those hours with your life partner, working together. Every buzzer claiming danger should be buzzing now foreseeing the abnormality of such arrangement. Almost like stepping on broken glass every step have to be carefully calculated so that there will be no blood. Fights and hard feelings cannot be taken home for an understanding partner to sooth; domestic feuds cannot be allowed to interfere with business decisions and vice versa. No one can bang the door behind and leave or go on a strike. Living together is hard, working together is demanding, living and working together for twenty four hours with no intermissions is heroic.

The now or never type of this operation can throw every sane person into an extra loop. This is the utmost bonus one gets for running a motel. Every phone conversation with an anonymous person is potentially a sell. Every person that walks into the lobby can be a customer and while this might be true for any other business what is unique here is that the room that was not sold today is gone forever. Dramatic, perhaps but true. Tonight’s rooms cannot be sold tomorrow, this income is lost. Something to remember while answering questions relevant or not, while showing a room in the middle of a snow storm, while opening the door after closing hours, while contemplating giving someone a ride from the airport.

 When every room is crucial, when one good season does not guarantee another, rain or shine or snow, in health or in sickness, the show must go on in order to keep on going. That is the nature of this business in a nutshell. No wonder then that the burnout rate is rather fast and small motels change hands so often. The mom-and –pop motel is not for the weak at heart.

Week 10 ; Enlisting the reader

Committed to Non-Commitment.

I have strong opinion on people with opinions and it is one of the few I hold on to.  People with strong, set in stone opinions terrify me, people who always know how things should be done annoy me, people who are always willing to enlighten me on the last inventions or bring me up to date on the recent political or social or cultural developments, grind on my nerves. All I want to do is to scream at the top of my lungs “Go away, just go away.”

  I refrain from reading newspapers which is a constant feud between me and my husband who is an avid reader of news and articles of all sorts and every once in awhile will try to engage me in a debate on this issue or another. Seeing my blank face he sighs and gives up.

On the rare occasions that I do look at the daily paper, delivered to my front porch every morning, I will start from the last page; look at the weather, some classified ads, pass a quick glance at the first page and toss it to the fireplace as a fire starter where it is usually proving to be pretty useless.

I never read the editorials, letter to the editor, or any other form of writing people use to express what is wrong in the world and how we should fix our torn and tortured planet.

It is not because I don’t care about the last disaster in Japan, or the wide use of nuclear power, or the people of Libya fighting for their freedom, or the sad state of public education in general and in Maine or the disappearing of the Aral sea in the hands of dense birocrates, or the slow and painful death of democracy in Israel.

It is not because I don’t see the pain and suffering all around or the abuse of the systems we put together to help those who are suffering. I do believe that animals should be spare the cruelty some go through in the hands their humans but question the point where an animal life take precedence to human life. I think that every human being has the right to safe and loving environment and that no child should be left behind.

And yes, I heard the phrase “let there be peace and let it begin with me” but I tend to shrug the responsibility and leave it in the hands of those who have opinions on how to go about it.

People with opinions are daunting. I agree, before we even argue, so don’t push it in my face, some of them definitely move the world forward and make it a better place to live. To name just few, Martin Luther King, Gandhi, Mama Theresa, but just as many, if not more, bring disaster in their wake.

While non commitment can be easily seen as non-caring, plain ignorance or even worse, laziness, I see it as a form of sanity. Someone should be unsure, ask questions, doubt the presentation, and simply refuse to tag along just because without the need to offer an explanation, justification, well versed commentary.

Someone should balance the scale and be the keeper of the equilibrium.

So I’d rather keep my firm opinion on people with opinions and my non-committed disposition about matters of the world; let those with opinions duel each other for their spot in the sun and the history books and I promise to do my best to stay out of their way.