A DAY FOR TAKING US UP A PEG
I once had an idea for a novelty mirror, just large enough to reveal the human face while shaving, or making up. In my fantasy the mirror would have a wide frame on three sides and a tray at the bottom to hold pegs, as from a cribbage board.
Beside the mirror would be lettered every kind of private distress I could think of: headache, toothache, earache, sore throat, hangover, festered hangnail, aggravated dandruff, falling hair, deepening wrinkles, queasy stomach, back pains, an unidentifiable but spreading rash, an incandescent cold sore, creaky joints, overdue bills, overdrawn checking account, dead battery, expired driver license, summons for unpaid parking tickets. And that’s just the minor ails on the left side of the frame.
My idea was to create a Think How Much Worse Off You Could Be mirror. It would say that in large letters across the top of the frame.
Each of the lettered perils would have a hole to accommodate a peg. The way I imagined it, you would put a peg at each of the troubles you were free of that morning. I figured that unless my life had really fallen apart on any given day, the things that were OK in my life would widely outnumber the things that weren’t.
On a good day my lathered face would be framed by pegs. By reminding myself of the items I had to be thankful for, I would be able to dismiss my troubles--those dreaded unpegged holes--as the minor and transient matters they were.
Not all troubles are created equal, of course, and not having a toothache does not necessarily balance off a grievous drying up of your cash flow. But the principle is useful, I’m convinced. At moments of stress or depression, I have used the notion of the mirror to console myself that, whatever else was true, I hadn’t had an earache in years and didn’t have to run the obstacle course at Camp Croft under live ammo in the morning.
In a sense, the mirror is an elaborately negative way of getting to the positive. What you do, I decided when the mirror first swam into mind years ago, is enumerate the positive, and accentuate it, naturally, once you’ve decided it’s all right to shave and start the day.
It would be nice to think that for the purposes of Thanksgiving Day you could enlarge the concept, if not the mirror, to embrace not personal calamities but the national condition.
The difficulty is that it is too easy to conjure up all the problems, short-range, intermediate-range and long-range, that beset us: the widening rash of wars, the polluting of land, sea and air, the proliferation of poverty, homelessness and hopelessness as a way of life among under-classes on every continent, the rise of paranoia as the prevailing world atmosphere and the consequent dangers of lethal nuclear accident, the declines of contemplation, spaciousness, true ease and a sense of the larger community of man. And so it goes, as Kurt Vonnegut Jr. has said in several contexts.
What is harder to count is the good stuff, which tends to come in smaller packages, or to be fairly abstract. The mirror idea might have to be revised, putting the pluses on one side, the minuses on the other and hoping that on a good day you’d balance out and break even.
And looking around and admitting all the flaws, gritty shortcomings and unrealized potentials, it is still possible to say that we are a mobile and open society of promise and possibilities. The things we get wrong stand out, because they are seen against the larger backdrop of the things we get right--including the preserving of a press that can be usefully noisy and bothersome, as well as bland and silly.
The family may be under pressure but it is still cherished as the basic unit of society, the warm center of our lives, and its value appears to be newly appreciated after a time of rampant individualism.
The evidence of the best of our arts is that we continue to think and feel and aspire. The evidence of our public concerns is that compassion and generosity, toward the neighborhood and the world, still characterize us.
We keep changing, but we do it, so far, within a political and philosophical continuity that runs back to our beginnings. The values and the truths we prize are always under assault from without and within--sometimes in the name of our own best interests. Yet the consensus holds that our founding truths remain self-evident, and beyond price.
The balance of plus and minus on the larger scale is not easy to strike; harder all the time, it may be. But the face in the mirror on Thanksgiving morning can discover a well-pegged set of reasons to start the day.
