Something happened to me a few weeks ago in the library, but I didn’t quite know what to make of it at the time. When it happened, it was one of those experiences that you have that makes you kind of step back and think, “This was something…this really was something. I’m just not sure what yet.” Well, I finally think I figured out what this thing that happened to me in the library was.
I had a lot of time to do some thinking because I drove up to Washington, DC for a long weekend and I got stuck in the most infuriating traffic jam I’ve ever been in before. I know this doesn’t mean much coming from a hyperbole addict that chronically exaggerates, but it truly was the worst traffic I’ve ever endured. After an hour in my car, I’d only driven a mile and a half. And to make this traffic jam even more enraging, I was stuck behind a burgundy Crown Victoria that had a pair of fake testicles hanging from the tow-hitch, complete with veins. It was a bad situation and all signs pointed to a violent outcome; whether or not it would be self-inflicted or societal pain was still undecided, but it was becoming clearer with every swing, bounce, dip and valley on that one-mile (per hour) span of perpetual highway…
I decided to distract myself as best as I could. A short chapter from The Grapes of Wrath did the trick until people started honking their horn at me for not inching up ¾” every 7-12 minutes. (Really? I’m bothering you with my reading but the guy in front of me is letting his car’s balls hang out and nobody says anything?) I decided to sift through my little memo book that I carry around where I keep all the things that happen to me, or that people say or tell me that I think might be something I can write about, just not at that particular moment. Maybe I don’t have time, maybe I’m not in the mood, or maybe I just don’t understand it yet and I need a little more perspective before I can figure it out completely. Either way, I leave those thoughts there so I can come back to them later and the traffic jam seemed like a perfect place to attack some of these thoughts. Of course, this isn’t always a fool-proof system because when I first read about my library experience in my little notebook it just said “The thing at the library with the guy,” which I had scrawled in a hurry at a stale red-light with only a few seconds left. It took me a few minutes to remember what the “the thing at the library with the guy,” was.
I was hanging out in the stacks at the High Point Public Library one afternoon in the biography section on the 2nd floor. (I’ve recently discovered how much I love biographies and autobiographies so I spend a lot of time in this particular part of the library. I love reading about the lives of people that are so different because when you boil their stories down to the cores, most people essentially want the same things…and this makes me hopeful). I was browsing through trying to decide between a book of letters between Thomas Jefferson and John Adams or a biography of Marie Antoinette.
The decision was taking longer than usual because I was distracted by a man who was also browsing through the biographies. Actually, browsing is the worst word ever to explain what he was doing because it has a pleasant, casual, and leisurely connotation. What this man was doing seemed primal and militaristic. He was attacking these stacks apparently resentful because it was taking so long to find the book he was looking for. I heard him coming, an impending bibliographic storm of huffing, puffing, and book slamming; no spine was safe, no page would be left un-dog eared. I heard him rifle through the titles at the bottom of the row on the other side of a wall of books, frustrated that his middle-aged-knees were being put to the test during his bloody book-finding crusade. Since we were standing on opposite sides of the end of a row, and based on the “son of a bitch,” he muttered, I knew where he was headed next. I braced myself for the storm and prepared to lose the solitude and the quiet that the High Point Public Library usually offers me.
He blazed around the corner, tousled hair, sleeves rolled up, his necktie tossed behind his shoulder (and I think his right eye might have been twitching). At first I thought he was going to push me over in his zeal, but it just took him a second to realize I was there; he was seeing books first, people second. I watched as he became conscious of the fact that I was a person and could not be stepped on, kicked or cursed (audibly) and his face changed a little bit.
“Excuse me,” he grumbled in a gruff voice that was a bit breathless from exasperation. It was an excuse me that didn’t really mean excuse me. It simply meant, “move…now.”
Because of an upcoming visit to Monticello, I decided on the letters. Marie Antoinette would have to wait for another day because I started to feel if I didn’t get out of there soon, there would be another beheading. I gave the world’s most rabid biography reader a scornful teacher look, called him a few names in my head, and then sought shelter away from the reading Tornado with the crazy eyes.
“Let them read fiction,” I thought to myself as I was getting ready to turn the corner, but before I could congratulate myself on the corniness of my internal-monologue joke, I heard a heavy crash behind me at the end of the row. I turned around to see the Category Five reader standing in the middle of a circle of books, still holding on to one that had apparently been the cornerstone of the book structure that was now rubble at this man’s feet. His face was beet-red with rage and I watched as the man sucked his bottom lip in and bit down on it with his top teeth. He looked like he was seconds away from spontaneous combustion, so instead of helping him pick up the books I decided to run for the poetry section. Before I could make a move, the man’s face changed. It completely collapsed into a giant spasm of laughter. His rigid posture melted, and he fell to the floor in what sounded like a fit of giggles.
At first I wondered if maybe one of the books had hit him in the head on its way down and he was no longer lucid, but then he turned and looked at me. His eyes looked less crazy or twitchy and before I knew what I was doing, I was at his side helping him pick up the books. I wasn’t laughing at first, but when his giggles turned breathless and tears starting streaming down the guy’s cheeks, I couldn’t help myself. Plus, the idea that this exasperated, gruff man was sitting in the floor of the library giggling like a little girl at a slumber party was too much for me. I started laughing, too. I helped him put all the fallen books on the reshelving cart, and I tried so hard to see what he was actually checking out because of the possibility of irony, but it was an indiscrete cover, a solid color with no pictures, and I never got a good look at the spine to see the title.
I couldn’t figure out why, but seeing the transformation of this total stranger made me so happy. I couldn’t stop smiling as I made my way to the front of the library to check out. It wasn’t until I was sitting in that dreadful traffic jam that I figured out why it made me so happy. I was able to watch a man discover that he was taking himself entirely too serious, and then I got to experience one of my favorite things about people: our ability to laugh at ourselves.
To me, the ability to laugh at yourself is one of the most attractive qualities of human nature. I think it’s because when you laugh at yourself, it means you are showing humility, joy, a sense of humor, and reflection all in one, and these are human qualities that I find very attractive. If you are taking yourself too seriously it means that you are out of touch with the reality of your situation, arrogant, entitled, and impatient which are all human qualities that I find unattractive. I think that’s why it made me so happy to watch this man’s transformation; I was experiencing a perfect stranger change from the most unattractive version of himself into the most attractive version of himself all because of his ability to laugh when he was being too serious, impatient, and selfish.
As I sat there motionless on the interstate, suddenly the traffic jam didn’t seem so bad. Getting upset and yelling curse words into the emptiness of my car, or banging my hands hastily on the steering wheel seemed a little serious…and a whole lot ridiculous. It was too much like barreling through the biography section with a scowl on my face, telling people to move. And the interstate version of having a bunch of books fall on me is a lot less funny.
So, I decided to make an 80s playlist on my iPod and have a little solo dance-and-karaoke-party in my Subaru. A little Safety Dance never hurt anybody.
I had a lot of time to do some thinking because I drove up to Washington, DC for a long weekend and I got stuck in the most infuriating traffic jam I’ve ever been in before. I know this doesn’t mean much coming from a hyperbole addict that chronically exaggerates, but it truly was the worst traffic I’ve ever endured. After an hour in my car, I’d only driven a mile and a half. And to make this traffic jam even more enraging, I was stuck behind a burgundy Crown Victoria that had a pair of fake testicles hanging from the tow-hitch, complete with veins. It was a bad situation and all signs pointed to a violent outcome; whether or not it would be self-inflicted or societal pain was still undecided, but it was becoming clearer with every swing, bounce, dip and valley on that one-mile (per hour) span of perpetual highway…
I decided to distract myself as best as I could. A short chapter from The Grapes of Wrath did the trick until people started honking their horn at me for not inching up ¾” every 7-12 minutes. (Really? I’m bothering you with my reading but the guy in front of me is letting his car’s balls hang out and nobody says anything?) I decided to sift through my little memo book that I carry around where I keep all the things that happen to me, or that people say or tell me that I think might be something I can write about, just not at that particular moment. Maybe I don’t have time, maybe I’m not in the mood, or maybe I just don’t understand it yet and I need a little more perspective before I can figure it out completely. Either way, I leave those thoughts there so I can come back to them later and the traffic jam seemed like a perfect place to attack some of these thoughts. Of course, this isn’t always a fool-proof system because when I first read about my library experience in my little notebook it just said “The thing at the library with the guy,” which I had scrawled in a hurry at a stale red-light with only a few seconds left. It took me a few minutes to remember what the “the thing at the library with the guy,” was.
I was hanging out in the stacks at the High Point Public Library one afternoon in the biography section on the 2nd floor. (I’ve recently discovered how much I love biographies and autobiographies so I spend a lot of time in this particular part of the library. I love reading about the lives of people that are so different because when you boil their stories down to the cores, most people essentially want the same things…and this makes me hopeful). I was browsing through trying to decide between a book of letters between Thomas Jefferson and John Adams or a biography of Marie Antoinette.
The decision was taking longer than usual because I was distracted by a man who was also browsing through the biographies. Actually, browsing is the worst word ever to explain what he was doing because it has a pleasant, casual, and leisurely connotation. What this man was doing seemed primal and militaristic. He was attacking these stacks apparently resentful because it was taking so long to find the book he was looking for. I heard him coming, an impending bibliographic storm of huffing, puffing, and book slamming; no spine was safe, no page would be left un-dog eared. I heard him rifle through the titles at the bottom of the row on the other side of a wall of books, frustrated that his middle-aged-knees were being put to the test during his bloody book-finding crusade. Since we were standing on opposite sides of the end of a row, and based on the “son of a bitch,” he muttered, I knew where he was headed next. I braced myself for the storm and prepared to lose the solitude and the quiet that the High Point Public Library usually offers me.
He blazed around the corner, tousled hair, sleeves rolled up, his necktie tossed behind his shoulder (and I think his right eye might have been twitching). At first I thought he was going to push me over in his zeal, but it just took him a second to realize I was there; he was seeing books first, people second. I watched as he became conscious of the fact that I was a person and could not be stepped on, kicked or cursed (audibly) and his face changed a little bit.
“Excuse me,” he grumbled in a gruff voice that was a bit breathless from exasperation. It was an excuse me that didn’t really mean excuse me. It simply meant, “move…now.”
Because of an upcoming visit to Monticello, I decided on the letters. Marie Antoinette would have to wait for another day because I started to feel if I didn’t get out of there soon, there would be another beheading. I gave the world’s most rabid biography reader a scornful teacher look, called him a few names in my head, and then sought shelter away from the reading Tornado with the crazy eyes.
“Let them read fiction,” I thought to myself as I was getting ready to turn the corner, but before I could congratulate myself on the corniness of my internal-monologue joke, I heard a heavy crash behind me at the end of the row. I turned around to see the Category Five reader standing in the middle of a circle of books, still holding on to one that had apparently been the cornerstone of the book structure that was now rubble at this man’s feet. His face was beet-red with rage and I watched as the man sucked his bottom lip in and bit down on it with his top teeth. He looked like he was seconds away from spontaneous combustion, so instead of helping him pick up the books I decided to run for the poetry section. Before I could make a move, the man’s face changed. It completely collapsed into a giant spasm of laughter. His rigid posture melted, and he fell to the floor in what sounded like a fit of giggles.
At first I wondered if maybe one of the books had hit him in the head on its way down and he was no longer lucid, but then he turned and looked at me. His eyes looked less crazy or twitchy and before I knew what I was doing, I was at his side helping him pick up the books. I wasn’t laughing at first, but when his giggles turned breathless and tears starting streaming down the guy’s cheeks, I couldn’t help myself. Plus, the idea that this exasperated, gruff man was sitting in the floor of the library giggling like a little girl at a slumber party was too much for me. I started laughing, too. I helped him put all the fallen books on the reshelving cart, and I tried so hard to see what he was actually checking out because of the possibility of irony, but it was an indiscrete cover, a solid color with no pictures, and I never got a good look at the spine to see the title.
I couldn’t figure out why, but seeing the transformation of this total stranger made me so happy. I couldn’t stop smiling as I made my way to the front of the library to check out. It wasn’t until I was sitting in that dreadful traffic jam that I figured out why it made me so happy. I was able to watch a man discover that he was taking himself entirely too serious, and then I got to experience one of my favorite things about people: our ability to laugh at ourselves.
To me, the ability to laugh at yourself is one of the most attractive qualities of human nature. I think it’s because when you laugh at yourself, it means you are showing humility, joy, a sense of humor, and reflection all in one, and these are human qualities that I find very attractive. If you are taking yourself too seriously it means that you are out of touch with the reality of your situation, arrogant, entitled, and impatient which are all human qualities that I find unattractive. I think that’s why it made me so happy to watch this man’s transformation; I was experiencing a perfect stranger change from the most unattractive version of himself into the most attractive version of himself all because of his ability to laugh when he was being too serious, impatient, and selfish.
As I sat there motionless on the interstate, suddenly the traffic jam didn’t seem so bad. Getting upset and yelling curse words into the emptiness of my car, or banging my hands hastily on the steering wheel seemed a little serious…and a whole lot ridiculous. It was too much like barreling through the biography section with a scowl on my face, telling people to move. And the interstate version of having a bunch of books fall on me is a lot less funny.
So, I decided to make an 80s playlist on my iPod and have a little solo dance-and-karaoke-party in my Subaru. A little Safety Dance never hurt anybody.
Comments
Post a Comment