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Notes from the Bargain Basement

1/28/2013

Many years back, after an extended moment of silliness with some friends, one of them turned to my beloved and proclaimed, "You sure got a bargain with this one!"

This one. Meaning, uh, me.

I have no idea now what grand kneeslapper prompted that remark. I can't even remember what we were doing at the time (Was it that night of the failed pumpkins? Or that dingy motel room we all shared in Vegas?), but like so many expressions that enter our lexicon by way of revealing a fundamental truth, the bargain comment has remained on the tip of my family's tongue for nearly thirty years.

With the passage of time the exclamation has taken on, as these things tend to do, a life of its own. Which means that it's now used exclusively in its ironic sense, when my cost-to-value ratio is particularly high, when I'm up to something that's clear evidence of the non-bargainness of me.

And then—Lo! Behold! Up turns a document to prove I am—I was—a bargain after all! A bill from the hospital for the cost of my birth, 55 years ago next month. The grand total for my mother's hospital stay?

$182.13

Seriously. And this was a five-day holiday. $25.00 per day for room, board & nursing. A scandalous $30.00 for delivery room charges. $2 for a birth certificate. Miscellaneous pharmacy and supply charges and yes, sales tax on the consumable items.

The hospital appears to have been rigorous with collections—my parents wrote two checks during my mother's time there, and the third and final payment was made the day following her release, Receipt No. D 8833.

By today's standards, the numbers are astounding in their lack of complexity, handwritten on the patient's standard yellow copy. Sure, there aren't any doctor's fees included in this bill, fees which surely would have tipped the tab over that ghastly $200 mark. And if you look closely at the upper left corner of the sheet, you'll see the notation (in red!) by the staff that payments by insurance weren't a factor in the billing.

In 2012 dollars, the purchasing power of that $182.13 would be $1446.92. With all of the establishments' smoke and mirrors, can we even guess what a baby "costs" today?

I'm certain that if you could ask my mother, she'd tell you there were days, far far too many of them, when it didn't seem to her as if she'd gotten such a deal. But I'm enjoying this moment of discovery, liking the fact that push-pinned to my biography is just one single document attesting to my value, the evidence unequivocal that yes, indeed, I was—I am—a bargain.

(This one's dedicated to you, LMR.)

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The Fog of My Everyday

1/21/2013

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This week's otherworldly world view

I've been thinking about fog.

We've been living in it for five days now, the mercury hovering—28, 31, 29, 32, 30, night, day, no higher, no lower. Fog-frost on rooftops, fog-glaze on handrails, fog-moss in sidewalk cracks, fog-glass on maple twigs. The cold is a clap to the collarbone, knife in the waistband, ice to ankles. Floor to sky, the air is haze. Is blur. A view through gauze, through bandage. A mummy's view.

I've been thinking about fog. How delicious it is in a movie, the seat back high, armrests close. Silent and shadowless. Hovering, diffuse. White and something other than white. A character named Atmosphere.

I've been thinking about fog. How you can stand fixed in one place and still lose yourself to it. From whatever the direction, you step into the same. A cloud to be entered. A cloud to walk through. How wholly you must trust that there exists no ledge in there.

I've been thinking about fog. The Mississippi Delta kind of fog. Fog of steam. Fog of swamp. Fog like Saran, no way to breath through it. I've been thinking

about fog. Fog of mulch. Of decay. Fog of landfill. Fog of roadkill. I've been

thinking about fog. Fog of shower glass. Of breath on windowpane.
Of love in the back seat of a car. I've

been thinking about fog

I've been thinking

I've been

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The Story I Don't Tell Myself

1/14/2013

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Recently, an artist of my acquaintance sent out a request to some of his contacts, hopeful they could provide him with some inspiration for an upcoming project. He was interested in the stories we tell ourselves, the narratives or mantras that help us get through the challenging and difficult times.

How hard can this be? I thought.

In a jiff I hit the Reply button, set to work with my response, then returned to his inquiry to make sure I had fully understood his request.

Nope. Wrong answer.

So I set aside the jiff, scratched a little deeper and once again hit Reply. Again began to type. Again returned to the original query.

And again—nope. It appears this one's a stumper. Or in confectionery terms, smooth chocolate on the outside, gnarly nougat in the center.

I don't believe I possess such a narrative. At least not one that I dust off when the mud's sucking down my boots. It's true I tip toward optimism, but that's more a way of being than a story I actively tell myself when the going gets rough. I've always been a vicarious learner, having shaped my point of view largely on lessons I've taken from others' experiences. If you burn your hand in the fire, I don't have to test it myself to see that it's hot (okay yes there have been those ugly exceptions). I've always felt that a strong personal philosophy would serve me well in the most despairing of times.

Sure, there are moments when my brain taps out a quick little memo to myself, something like You Can Do This, a message I consider a simple placeholder for the highly developed faith system I lack. But a quickie message such as this hardly qualifies as a personal narrative. Or so I think.

A woman who has been very special to me for a long stretch of my life is also a person from whom I learned many things. Her most important lesson, though, was an inadvertent one. We were quite alike, the two of us, and early on I recognized in her the darker side of myself. What I gained from her was a template for the person I did not want to be, and so I began to adjust my choices, to move in a direction that pushed me toward that person I preferred to become.

And then there was my mother who, quite sadly, gave her final years to an unhappy life. Many more times than I care to remember she said to me, "I spent my whole life looking for tomorrow. And tomorrow never came." Her words are a weight I carry with me still. But also was her message heard.

Earlier I asserted that I don't have a narrative, but perhaps I do have one one after all. It doesn't come to me in words I recognize, but it's there, its own sort of pentimento, under the surface, but bleeding through. Move forward, it says. Move forward in a way you won't regret.

Do you have a narrative? I'm not asking you to tell me. Just ask the question of yourself.

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Gonna Wash that Obsession Right out of My Hair

1/7/2013

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I'm doing laundry.

Whites—towels, socks, unmentionables.

This may sound like no big deal, running a load of wash on a Monday morning, but those who have intimate knowledge of my, uh, fixations, understand this to be no small thing. I can hear their voices as I write--But it's not Thursday! they cry in unison. Not only do I have fixations; others have noticed I have fixations. Uh oh.

Okay, so this laundry thing has its deep, dark origins, which I won't go into except to say that most of my pathologies can be reduced to explanations straight out of a Psych 101 text. Nothing too complex inside this hard case of mine: I'm a ruler with a straight edge, a screwdriver used for driving screws, a tuna can you open to find—duh!—tuna inside.

It's a new year. I don't go in for resolutions (though I did spend a few seasons renaming them, hoping to come up with an appealing and therefore, motivating, euphemism: Ambitions; Enthusiasms; Goals & Objectives), but I find the straighforward, calendrical squareness of January 1st to be an appealing day for reassessment. For realignment. To wit:

I don't like to get my hair cut on Mondays. I had my hair cut this morning.

I'm lazy about the morning dishes, often leaving them until late in the day. Here it is, well before noon, and they're all washed and dried and put away.

Yesterday there were 13 containers of pens on my desk. Now there are only 11. (Cut me some slack here--it's a start!)

And then there's that laundry, everything clean and neatly folded.

My what a very long week it's been already. If I play my cards right, maybe there'll be enough clothes in the hamper to warrant running a washload on . . . Hey! What about Thursday???

Oh, I get by with a little help from my friends

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Notes from the Bargain Basement

The Fog of My Everyday

The Story I Don't Tell Myself

Gonna Wash that Obsession Right out of My Hair

Nancy Carol Moody

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