Love that well which won't last long

The Column: 07.02.23

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I’m an octogenarian from the days of the party-line telephone, back when we loved singing murder ballads in the third grade and were proud of our cursive writing but I come back to reality by reading Elizabeth Kolbert who writes scary nonfiction about the future.

She’s an excellent writer — The Sixth Extinction, Under a White Sky: The Nature of the Future — and her current piece in The New Yorker,“How Plastics Are Poisoning Us,” is one that Exxon and Shell and Coca-Cola and Nestlé are praying you won’t read and doing their best to extinguish any meaningful measures in Congress, meanwhile science is trying to send us a message: plastic is everywhere, the sea is full of it, it’s found in human placentas, Americans go through some 500 pounds of it per person per year, it is not really recyclable, some of it is known to be carcinogenic, according to objective scholarly peer-reviewed data assembled by those nerdy kids who sat in the front of the chemistry classroom and did all the assignments.

I remember Grandma’s farm back when I was a kid, we used an outhouse, she cooked over a woodstove, the milk from the Holsteins in the barn and the eggs from her chickens who ran free, the vegetables came out of the garden nurtured by manure, and I don’t recall any plastic at all, just some waxed paper.

I don’t see us returning to that way of life but when I read Elizabeth Kolbert I look around the apartment and feel like a war criminal and the war I’m complicit in is a war against our grandchildren and their progeny.

As Grandma got older she appreciated the vacuum cleaner, the radio, the flush toilet, the plastic Tupperware bowl. She was born in 1880 and lived into the nuclear age when our idea of apocalypse was thermonuclear war, though I don’t think Grandma could envision that, and now I can’t envision the arid uninhabitable plasticized earth that apparently there is ample reason to envision.

I read about plastic and take small steps: no more fizzy water in plastic bottles, run tap water into a glass and if you want bubbles, blow into it with a paper straw. Buy less stuff. Take public transportation. Skip fast food and buy salad makings at the farmers market. Don’t buy vegetables flown in from California. Read the newspaper online.

The paper put out a list of the best olive oils described variously as “herbaceous and peppery,” “moderately grassy,” and “fruity and buttery,” but olive oil is not an important source of pleasure in my life and so I buy the locally grown, which tastes like soybeans and comes in glass bottles.

The salad is more important than the olive oil, and more important than the salad is the conversation over the salad, and I choose to avoid apocalyptic talk in favor of silliness. I don’t talk about plastics over lunch. I talk about David who died and an angel took him out of the line at the golden gates and drove him in a limo through the suburbs of Heaven to the most exclusive section and a high-rise, an apartment with a big balcony on the 44th floor, one floor below Mother Teresa. David said, “What gives? Why me? I’m no saint.” The angel said, “David, you’re the first investment banker ever to make it to heaven.”

I’m a dad, I do dad jokes. A man walked up to a woman standing on the shore and asked, “How do I get to the other side of the river?” and she said, “This IS the other side.” I talk about the man who lay in bed looking up at the Milky Way, the various constellations, the moon, and then wondered, “What happened to the ceiling?” A cat ate a ball of yarn and three months later gave birth to three mittens.

I try to focus on today rather than brood about the future. I put things where I will remember them: my eyeglasses I put on the ironing board, which begins with an I. I remember when I bend down to empty the dishwasher to not to stand up suddenly and bang my head on the open cupboard door, which if you do it often you won’t remember where you put anything, including yourself. I practice kindness. I used to correct someone when they misused an intransitive verb by making it an object and I don’t anymore. And when I have said what I have to say, I stop.

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