If I had my druthers, there’s a whole bunch of stuff out there that I would change.
For starters, I have a list of things that should end immediately. Populating it is easier than shooting fish in a barrel: overuse of clichés; leaving voicemails; voicemail greetings that ask me to “press 5 for more options”; instructions on how to buckle a seatbelt on an airplane; credit card transactions taking longer than cash; asking me if I’d like to give some of my money to a charity when I am buying cough syrup; locking your car when you plan to remain in sight of your car the entire time you are outside of your car, especially when your car is parked in some sort of Upper Valley utopia like Post Pond or the top of Union Village Dam; flaccid handshakes; pizza with broccoli; the preposterous faux cosmopolitan words a certain coffee shop chain uses for the words “small, medium, large”; charging for jimmies; businesses that get out of their lanes (McDonald’s will never be a lobster roll emporium); complaining about traffic or parking in the Upper Valley; Zamboni drivers that miss a strip of ice; garbled, too quiet or repetitive PA announcements; ordering anything “on the side”; that pink hand soap in public bathrooms that leaves your hands smelling worse than before you washed; standing still at the top or bottom of a heavily-trafficked staircase or escalator; hard-poached eggs; “sent from my iPhone”; lice; recipes that call for ¼ teaspoon of anything (a good pinch will always do); TV timeouts; telling anyone how busy you are; golf commentators who call 170-yard sidehill lie 8-iron shots “pretty easy”; the ridiculous incremental dance on the way to what is sure to be legalized recreational marijuana nationwide; boy bands; expressing feelings about split infinitives, the passive voice or the Oxford comma in a public forum; bathroom bills; preseason rankings in college sports; honking anywhere in the Upper Valley; penalizing the server for poorly cooked food; trophies and medals for showing up; dismissive, condescending, high-brow conservatism; selfies; undiscounted greens fees when greens have been aerated; single-ply toilet paper; aggressive, in-your-face liberalism; passwords that require special characters; milfoil; vacillation between “dinner” and “supper”; cakey brownies and crunchy chocolate chip cookies; servers who ask if I am still “picking” at something; answering yes or no questions with anything other than yes or no; “hugs” when all that touch are fingertips to shoulder blades; nail clipping within earshot of another human being; going back for “one more thing” when you have already emptied the contents of your shopping cart onto the conveyor belt in a busy grocery store; children who forget to flush; offering me a new credit card and savings of an additional 20 percent if I enroll today when I am buying underpants for my children; overly alarmist check engine lights; referring to sparkling wine not from Champagne as “Champagne”; saying “on the one hand” without later saying “on the other”; AOL accounts; and, lastly, disappointing junk food that punishes your self-esteem twice, first for not being a healthy choice and second for being poorly prepared: limp fries, cheeseless nachos, overcooked hamburgers, soggy fried chicken, dry doughnuts.
It’s kind of a long list.
In addition to committing many of the above crimes, I can boast of several other special skills that I am sure many would love to see become extinct: chewing ice cubes in meetings; using air quotes; spitting sunflower seeds; confusing e.g. and i.e.; excessive high-fiving; age-inappropriate use of “like” in speech; buying beets with good intentions only to find them four months later in a slippery corner of the crisper drawer; and a tediously predictable over-reliance on the semi-colon.
But that’s a list of things one would change about me, and not relevant for our purposes here today.
In my imaginary benign dictatorship, I like to think I would be a realistic and compassionate ruler. Many of the items I have just cataloged will be difficult to eradicate, and, frankly, it would probably be exhausting to focus so much energy on trying to eliminate annoyances. So, in Lililand, we could dedicate ourselves to adding more of what we like instead of carping about what we do not.
My son’s first-grade teacher asked that we parents make eye contact with her whenever we are picking up our children. How nice, I thought, when our attentions are so frequently diverted by the chaos in the Capitol, or what’s going on over at the Joneses, to look someone in the eye, a simple acknowledgment of each other’s existence. Let’s have more eye contact.
I know people who give baked goods to new neighbors. Let’s have more baked goods as welcome gifts. Over the past few months, I have played some wickedly entertaining games of Tenzi, Yahtzee, and Last Word with friends and family. Let’s have more old-school games.
At my in-laws last weekend, the refrigerator contained iced tea and lemonade. Let’s have more Arnold Palmers. On the flight home, our family got bumped from the last row by the lavatories to first class, an absurd turn of events for a family traveling with a 6-year-old and a 4-year-old on a routine one-hour flight. Nevertheless, it was sweet. Let’s have more gifts that you cannot touch but will never forget.
There are a lot of double doors in the area, the kind where you walk through the first door into a little in-between-indoors-and-outdoors foyer before going through the second door. When you hold the first for someone behind you, they are compelled to hold the second for you. If civility could dance, this is what it would look like. Let’s open some more doors for each other.
If you need to put down your mental baggage for a while and give yourself a break, pull out a puzzle. It doesn’t matter how many pieces, whether it is for kids or adults, or what image is represented. Just start cobbling it together and voila! — zen in a box. With others, it becomes group therapy, family bonding or the finest teamwork. Let’s do some more puzzles.
This summer, after many years out of the live music scene, I was fortunate to catch concerts at Gillette Stadium, the Hopkins Center, Fenway Park, Carpenter and Main, Madison Square Garden, and on the Hanover and Norwich Greens. Let’s have much more live music.
The world in my mind’s eye is looking better every day.
Now, you’re probably going to point out that the odds of me getting my druthers are pretty slim. Fair enough. But if it’s all right with you, I won’t let that prevent me from trying to make some changes around here.
Mark Lilienthal lives in Norwich. He can be reached at mlilient@gmail.com.