Monday, June 28, 2004

Quartermaster

I was cleaning the front windows, thinking about whether or not the activity had zen potential (wipe on, wipe off, wipe out), when with an errant swipe I struck the rainbow caster, a small faceted crystal attached to a spinning plastic photovoltaic motor, all stuck to the window with a suction cup.  I accidentally gave it a little whack and the whole colorful assembly broke free, began to fall at 10/m/s/s down to the hardwood floor five and a half feet below.

And that’s when I found myself thinking back on halcyon college days lo these many years ago.  I had been learning a lot over the first 87-1/2% of my career there, and as much about myself as about the world around me.  One thing I’d learned was that I was no good at catching things. Friends would delight in tossing me a pen or a piece of candy or any small trifle, to see what would happen.  Typically I’d watch it carefully till it was where I wanted it to be when I was, theoretically, supposed to catch it; then I’d jerk my hand forward as quick as I could with the cherished hope that I would snatch it from the air.  As often as not, this resulted in my smacking the object in question with my palm or fist, sending it flying rapidly and unpredictably across the room.  All good fun, yes, till someone loses an eye.  Or a package of Yodels under the couch.

This inability to catch a thrown object had become part of my self-image, my egobelief: that this was just something I could not do. I was then, in the true spirit of education, given the opportunity to unlearn this proposition.  Senior year I got a part in a play that began with the tossing and catching of coins.  I was confident that I’d be able to handle the line memorization, the dialects, the broad physical humor and dark nihilistic currents.  I wasn’t so sure about catching 25 coins in a row on an empty stage in front of 150 people. 

So we practiced it: each rehearsal started with ten minutes of flying quarters - flipping the silvered disks back and forth, varying the distances, either running lines or silently, sped up or in slow motion… Over three months of rehearsals I put in hours of coin-catching practice.  By the time we opened, I had actually become good at it.  In our whole six-show run I missed only one quarter, and that was the one my counterpart had flipped, in a fit of enthusiasm, up to the level of the blinding spotlights.  And what’s more, my friends no longer laughed and ducked when they tossed the odd object over to me.  I was not longer a flailer - I was a catcher. 

That’s what I’d learned after four years of university training - to pluck a moving object from the air.  For some this comes naturally but for me it was an inculcated skill, and I’d done gone inculcated it.  It didn’t just gratify my misbegotten machismo - it actually made me feel that I was more closely connected to my world.  I could arogate entities unto myself; objects now, if they were not actually attracted to me, no longer seemed physically repelled by me either.  For me, learning to catch was a huge step forward, one that has had repercussions in many other aspects of my life. 

These, then, were the thoughts that flashed through my mind in the fractional moment after I bumped the spinning prism and loosed it from the window I was cleaning.  My right hand held a bulky rag and was out of position to assist.  My left hand then, almost of its own accord, slid smoothly forward, faster than gravity, a snake on the hunt, and plucked the crystal from the air as it began to fall, the movement controlled so as not to disturb the adjacent plate-glass window, as if it were just catching another quarter and my world were just another stage.  It’s been almost 20 years and I’m still paying off loans - but at least, in some way that is significant to me, I remain educated.