POCKET PEBBLES:
By Linda B. Abrams - 1999 About Linda B. Abrams
tv commercials
there's a commercial on television that comes dangerously close to admitting that women fart.
she's at a party and must escape to the hall because she has "extreme gas." extreme gas? say what you mean and mean what you say. she has to fart. she's not old, not fat, not ugly. she is a normal ad agency party type. she's wearing a nice tasteful party frock (don't you just love the word, "frock?") and her hair is pretty okay. but, you have to notice, she is mingling freely, not attached to a man. well, hell; she farts, ya know? how in the world can she have a man? is this a mixed message or what? pretty people fart, but they are somewhat outside of the realm of women who use toothpaste x or sanitary product y.
this follows by a few months another commercial about farting. a gaggle of monks are gathered around a table full of vegetables (subtle message: "holy men are vegetarians"). they sprinkle Bean-O on the food so they can maintain their vow of silence. pretty funny, eh?
the demystifying of flatulence will resonate through our social structure. the whoopie cushion will become passe; little boys will not snicker behind hands; guys will not drop trousers and light them and people will stop referring to curmudgeons as "old farts;" it will become okay to increase one's diet roughage.
i'm trying very hard to think of a body function we have not exposed to klieg lights. the only one i can come up with is nose-picking. i anticipate an infomercial on the popeil booger guard any day now.
beauty
beauty is a kind of accumulation of details ... the kind of details that take a long time to acquire and to notice: the dimples in your mother's silver creamer, the fine wrinkles at the corner of an eye, the spots on a kitchen table where the surface has been worn by years of scrubbing, thinned by elbows, and the bottoms of coffee mugs, milk glasses, dinner plates, by lunches and by homework, and late-night solitary silence. living in the past is a dry and dusty path; living today in the company of past details is a thing of epic proportions.
truth
it's malleable and it's convenient, a sword and a shield, a hammer and a nail, rod and staff. it is violently thrust upon us in an unguarded moment of surprising disappointment; it creeps softly up to us, its warm breath a lump in our throat as we make sense of one piece of our life. it hides in a maze of law, stands boldly on street corners in a sheer blouse and a fake fur mini-skirt, lipstick slipped crookedly. it's in a child's eye, a mother's touch, a lover's caress, an old man's face as he sits in front of a simple meal.
when we fail to be truthful we do it from all manner of rationalizations: omission or commission; a cloak for our insecurities; to maim and injure; as an act of kindness and civility. we lie in the name of god, the name of justice, the name of love, to protect our jobs, our privacy, those we care for; to distend our egos (or the egos around us), to save time, to save face. we use truth for all the same reasons. unethical men use falsehoods to deceive; ethical men use truth to deceive.
the pure and simple truth is seldom pure, and seldom simple. there are enormous truths and gigantic deceptions; minor fidelities of every day that keep us believing and small lies that accumulate in a dark pile in our hearts. we can mangle truth, strangle truth. we can modify it, learn it, avoid it and cause it to glow in the dark. it can be spontaneous or crafted, contrived, unconditional, or wrapped in a ransom note.
in the end, we have only our words and our deeds. we each make choices, and the degree to which we live by them and love by them.
junk mail
man, i love junk mail. it overflows my mailbox and spills onto the porch, making me feel important and necessary; all these people slaving over computers and drinking coffee at 5AM just to influence me to buy a product, send a contribution, support a cause, or enter a contest.
i love the ballsiness of it, the assumption that if it's made to look enough like a legitimate government communiqué, it will be opened immediately. or if it has what looks like a yellow post-it inside with a reproduced set of initials, i'll think it's personally directed mail. "free," and "save 60%" and "you have passed finalist round a gazillion and two" have all become part of my afternoon reading.
and then there's the junk mail that's part of legitimate mail. credit card bills almost always have enclosures that tempt you to buy something that costs at least twice the minimum monthly payment on the card. department stores have these attachments to the envelope flaps that are just enough of a pain in the ass to detach that you bother to look at the photo of the woman in her under drawers, thinking about the ratty state of your lingerie.
coffee
the best thing about coffee is not the taste or the smell; it's the anticipation of being tense.
coffee reinforces me. as i lift the cup to my lips, even before i taste it, i am stronger and more resilient. i feel like a timex watch commercial. i can almost hear john cameron swayze, "... we strapped this woman to a barrel and threw her over the falls ..."
one of the most insightful commercials about coffee was linda ellerbee sipping from a stout mug saying, "coffee, it picks you up and calms you down." people scoffed at that. they thought it was contradictory and mutually exclusive and insisted caffeine was a stimulant, how could it calm you down? they missed the point. there is a great comfort in knowing you will be unbreakable.
eyeballs
i went to the ophthalmologist today. sitting in the waiting room leafing through an article on dis-conjugate gaze patterns (i hate waiting), i got to thinking about eyeballs.
i've held an eyeball in my hand. cutting into one is like slicing spam gel. and yet, understanding the mechanics by which an image travels through cornea, lens, vitreous, retina, macula and hitches a ride to the brain on the optic nerve brings me no closer to understanding how i feel about what i see.
anatomy and physiology cannot explain how a smile, the articulation of wrist and radius, are transformed into precious objects. or how anger can be unexpectedly dissipated when you notice how a swirl of hair on the nape of a neck looks somehow tender and vulnerable, like that of a young boy. you squinch down real close to skin and suddenly it is not this velvety fabric under your fingertips: it's flaky and spiky and treacherous looking. or you stand back and gaze at one of those images full of squiggly colors and ta-da, there's a shark.
when you're a child, you look at the world and see people bigger than houses, and round yellow suns. you see yourself large, looming over other objects in the picture. at some point, this view changes and the perspective becomes more literal.
perspective. that was what my eyeball dissembling came down to. that and some images.
telephones
the customer service rep i was on the phone with had to fetch something to answer my question. he asked me to wait and put the receiver down on his desk. as the minutes passed, it occurred to me that i had not listened to air in a long time: no cheesy hold music, no recorded advertisements, unsolicited health tips: nothing, just the sound of silence tumbling down a wire, through switches and routers and trunks and grids, bouncing through space.
although my brain understands technology well, sometimes i get emotionally awestruck by how things work. like when i turn on the tv that's not hooked up to cable and the right picture and its matching sound are plucked out of the air. i'll flip through the channels just to watch it happen, just to try to catch peter jennings' voice coming out of dan rather's face.
shortly after i moved to florida, the phone rang. i picked it up and a woman started talking about the cookout tomorrow. she was telling me she was bringing potato salad and was trying to decide if she should put onions in it and was i going to be getting there early and did i think shelby would be bringing that new boyfriend of hers, wasn't he sort of a weird one sulky and all and with that earring in his nose?
"hello?," i said, at which time she recognized she was not talking to shirley after all. we laughed and chatted a bit; she told me about the cookout and her sister shirley and shelby's boyfriend then she hung up, leaving me wondering what she had decided about the onions. what confidence she had in the technology to mash a series of numbers and then just start talking as if, of course, it would be shirley on the other end, who else would it be?
so here i am once again, receiver pressed to ear. the guy at the customer service desk is still gone. i hear some scratchy sounds. it might be someone shuffling papers near the telephone but i prefer to picture three birds, buzzards perhaps or big black crows, on a wire somewhere over a dry plain in kansas. they tilt their heads, watching a faded red ford pick-up speed by underneath them, shifting from foot to foot.
About Linda B. Abrams
Linda B. Abrams was a prolific writer, authoring over 50 short stories, a novel and a number of poems. The above observations are excerpts from her website, Pocket Pebbles, reproduced here exactly as they appeared on her website without editing or reformatting.
(For those that may not be aware, pocket pebbles are those little balls of lint and crumbs in the bottom of your pocket or pocketbook).
Luigi Bagnato
September 20, 2007
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