Kicking Ant Hills

Winter has arrived late this year, and seemingly intends to catch up on lost time.  A soft snow fell, leaving a thin layer of poofy nothing on my car Thursday morning.  Feeling lazy, I got into my car and drove off from underneath it, leaving a white cloud of dust behind me for the first hundred feet or so of my trip into work.  Later that morning, in the teen-degree weather another snow squall passed through.  The snow fell in clumps half the size of my little finger’s nail which rolled on the asphalt of the truck lot at work, where I watched.  Each clump splintered as it rolled, leaving little inch-long streaks as it broke up into nothingness.  An idle pastime for a simple mind: watching little clumps of snow roll along the pavement for a few seconds as they broke up into tiny pieces of ice dust.  For some reason it made an impression on me at the time, though I couldn’t for the life of me say why the image has stayed with me for two days.  Perhaps it’s a symptom of what my days have become.

This past Christmas I was in charge of coordinating a fundraising event for the cat shelter I volunteer for, wrapping books at Barnes and Noble.  As a rule, I purchase my books at Borders; membership to their “club” is free, so the discounts I earn are true savings, as opposed to making back the cash I forked over up-front to get discounts.  This makes me feel guilty though, since Barnes and Noble have been far kinder to our non-profit than Borders is.  Come Christmastime, B&N provides free supplies, gives us a table right at the front of the store next to the main doors, and lets us wrap books for donations.  Everything people choose to donate to us a free-and-clear profit to the shelter, and a welcome infusion of funds.  

The Shelter had reserved all the shifts from December ninth through December twenty-fourth, and I was in charge of seeing that all the hours between eleven and store closing were manned during that period.  Since the majority of our volunteers work for a living, this was no easy proposition, and I had a few sleepless nights over it.  Still, we were ultimately successful, raising in excess of $3,200 for our efforts.  I do not believe I will be foolish enough to volunteer to chair the event a second year in a row though.

I did a fair number of shifts myself, and even if I wasn’t on I visited the bookstore nearly every evening to pick up the day’s proceeds.  It is not a good thing for a person like me to spend that much time in a bookstore.  Things tend to jump off the shelves and into my arms.  I tell them not to.  I explain that I really don’t need the handmade 20% off gift tags, the book on snowflakes, the latest novel from Nick Sagan, but apparently there’s a place in my brainstem that has found a way to shut down higher-level reasoning when it comes to calendars and bookmarks.  On the plus side, I did manage to do a significant amount of Christmas shopping there.  On the minus side, I found myself using the “one for you, two for me, one for you, three for me” approach to gift giving.  

An additional plus:  one of the books that leapt off of the shelf and kamikazeed itself into my unsuspecting arms was James Tiptree, Jr.: The Double Life of Alice B. Sheldon, by Julie Phillips.  I discovered the writings of James Tiptree about twenty-five years ago when I didn’t return my science fiction book club  reply card on time and they automatically sent me “Brightness Falls from the Air”.  The book has had mixed reviews, and the criticisms leveled against it are just, but I still consider it to be a masterpiece of imagination.  Since then I have read virtually everything Tiptree ever published, but knew little about the author save that “James Tiptree” was a nom de plum for a woman writer.  Reading the biography has enhanced my understanding of her work, and makes me determined to complete my collection of her writings.  My science fiction loving friends out there may want to consider getting hold of Phillips’ book, and then rereading a few of Tiptree’s marvelous short stories again.  I know I’ve found the endeavor well worth it. 

I’m currently working my way through Dawkin’s The God Delusion.  I’m sorely tempted to show up at work with it under my arm, just to watch the reaction. I work with such a closed-minded little group of Mennonites that merely having the book in the same building with them would give them fodder for a week’s worth of tsk-ing.   In all honesty though, it would be the moral equivalent of kicking over an ant hill, which only upsets the ants without giving the kicker any particular sense of satisfaction.