Quiz #91. "I'm here."
Finding magic in these strange times--and the best novel I've read in years (despite its unusual title). Steve's Stay-at-Home Coronavirus Quiz for November 12, 2020.
Thursday morning, November 12, 2020.
The election projected--and yet, it’s not over.
The pandemic surging, covid hospitalizations soaring at a dizzying rate, a catastrophic climb that portends a disastrous few months ahead.
Thanksgiving approaching--and yet, there are no signs the holiday will be a carefree break as it gets more dangerous for people to come together and celebrate anything in person in 2020.
We need some magic--and this morning, I got some.
My daughter, Annie, is a psychiatric social worker at Elmhurst Hospital in Queens. This morning, she texted to let us know that she’d been formally promoted. A Level-4 Supervisor, the highest level there is. A wonderful reward and recognition after what’s been an awful and difficult year for her at work. I texted back with congratulations and, at the end of our back and forth, I asked Annie if she’d gotten a book which I had ordered for her as a surprise from Amazon.
It’s a novel called “The Index of Self-Destructive Acts” by Christopher Beha. I actually finished reading it this morning, as I have been slowly reading its final chapters over the last few days to make the book last. Last month, my friend Ryan recommended “The Index” to me--and, he was right. I loved it. This past weekend, I ordered a copy as gifts for Annie and one of my nephews.
When Annie texted that she had not yet received the book, I went to my Amazon order history and saw that I’d gotten a notice that the book had been delivered to her apartment--and the notice even indicated, “Your package was delivered. It was handed directly to a resident.”
I sent a screengrab of the notice to Annie, concerned that someone in her apartment building had taken her book.
A few minutes later, Annie (who was at work) texted me a picture of the book in her office.
She explained what happened in a text.
I went from worry that there had been a rip-off to relief that there was, indeed, magic in this crazy world. I had sent the book as a little pick-me up surprise--without a clue that Annie’s promotion was coming this week. She’d gotten the book on Sunday but, because it came from Amazon and I had not told her about the order, she did not know that it was a gift from Sara and me. She did not realize we’d given her the gift until prompted by me. I was “there” for the moment of gift-giving. What’s more, as an added bonus, she got the gift while at work and basking in the glow of the well-earned promotion. Instant gratification and reward. I could not have planned it any better--though of course, I had not planned it at all.
At moments like these, when events in the world seem to come together in some completely unexpected way and the quirks of fate combine to deliver a wonderful outcome, I will often say out loud, “That’s the way God works.” Sara always laughs because she knows that what I mean by those words will no doubt be misunderstood by someone who might overhear them—someone who does not have a sense of my own unorthodox views on the Almighty.
Do I believe that God actually put it in Annie’s head that the package was the phone charger she’d ordered? Did He somehow convince her to wait until Thursday to bring the package from Amazon to work even though it had arrived on Sunday? Did He know she’d get word of the promotion this morning? Did He know that Annie and I would text this morning so that I could be almost with her as our gift “arrived” in her hands at exactly the perfect moment in the most unexpected way?
The answer to all of the above, is “No. Hell, no.”
As noted in Quiz #23. Poor Planning, in 2017, I had brain surgery for two unruptured aneurysms. My doctors found them quite literally by accident. In 2016, I was headed to the Memorial Service for my father. I’d headed there early to take care of some last-minute details with Sara and the kids, trailing behind me by 30 minutes in another car. I was sitting alone in our minivan, stopped at a red light on a clear day less than a mile from the senior living facility where my father had lived and where the Memorial Service was being held. I was rear ended by a distracted driver going 50 miles per hour. Our minivan was totaled, but, thanks to my seat belt, I walked away with barely a scratch. I attended the Memorial Service but developed headaches after it was over. Sara and I went to the ER that night which led to brain scans and follow-up tests which 6 months later revealed the aneurysms which--had they burst---had a 50 percent chance of killing me.
People kept telling me that my father had been looking out for me. That I should be thankful to the other driver. That the accident and finding the aneurysms was all part of God’s plan.
My response has always been that if it was part of God’s plan, at least we could fault Him for poor planning. Surely, there was an easier way for Him to get me to the hospital. Did He have to total the van? Couldn’t He have picked a different morning?What if the other driver had not been distracted and had just pulled up alongside me and yelled, “You ought to have your head examined”?
And so it is with “The Index of Self-Destructive Acts.” It’s the story of Sam Waxworth, a Nate-Silver-like character, who develops a statistical method to predict election results and gains fame for correctly picking every race in the 2008 election. He comes to New York City and unpredictable things start to happen. Here’s a sample:
Waxworth had spent a great deal of his life thinking about forecasting, and he’d come to conclude that the greatest impediment to predicting the future correctly was the belief that the world held meaning, the belief—as his mother put it—that everything happens for a reason. This was trivially true in the strictest sense that every effect had a clause, but if you expected things to cohere into a sensible story, you were apt to make events to fit your preconstructed pattern, to see things as they ought to be instead of as they were. In reality events happened one way that might as easily have happened some other way, and ought had nothing to do with it. That was why all good forecasting was probabilistic than deterministic. After the fact, we told stories of inevitability, but we were not characters in some book that had already been written. The future wasn’t fixed, waiting somewhere for us to arrive. It was brought into being by chance, contingency, unintended consequences. The best we could do was work out the odds.
To put it another way, Beha writes, “As Kierkegaard tells us, life can only be lived forwards and understood backwards.”
The book is chock full of great lines and passages like that. When I read a book like that, I like to fold down the page to mark lines I like. This year, I switched to colored, Post-It tabs. My copy of “The Index” is littered with them. There are so many tabs that the highlights miss their mark. Less would be more--and thumbing through them is now cumbersome, making it no easier to find my true favorites. Why mark the pages?
To me, the tabs and folds are really a way of trying to hold onto that moment when written words on a page speak to me. I think I’m hoping that if I ever go back to a book--which I don’t often do--reading the highlighted lines will take me back to that first moment of recognition.
For her part, Sara does not like it when I mark a book with folds or Post-it tabs. She doesn’t want to know what’s struck me if she herself decides to read the book. I understand that. When I decide to read or watch something based on a recommendation from someone I like and trust (like Ryan), I want to know as little as possible in advance about the book, show or movie.
And yet, when I tell people about “The Index,” I can tell they’re thrown by the title--and even more so when, if asked, I explain the title to them. As Beha and the novel notes, the Index of Self-Destructive Acts is from Bill James, a real-life writer who’s a pioneer in baseball statistics and forecasting. The Index of Self-Destructive Acts is something James actually developed to catalogue and measure the seemingly irrational and out of control things that a pitcher might do--from hitting batters with a pitch to making errors to committing a balk.
Trust me, “The Index” is not about baseball or statistics--though baseball and statistics are a part of the novel. In the end, it’s a story of family and it’s a love story, several love stories, in fact. Some unrequited. Others not. Beha also uses a story-telling technique that’s like watching waves roll in at the shore. With each new chapter, the interconnected stories of the novel unfold through the eyes of each character, one at a time. Each of their stories unfolds like a wave, from its first approach beyond the shore as it comes gliding in and finally comes crashing down in the surf, foam and a thin layer of water climbing up to the water’s edge. With each new chapter, the process repeats, the rhythm of the ocean and the story of the novel unfold as the characters take us from past to present and back again.
“The Index” has really helped me get through the past few weeks. This is the first quiz I’ve written in two weeks since Quiz #90. Snake on October 29th. I work in TV news and the election has been especially stressful with long hours and not a lot of sleep. With anxiety from the pandemic and the election, I’ve been having trouble sleeping for months. As noted in Quiz #89. “Covid-good,” I took steps to try to draw some boundaries in my work-from-home life, setting up an office in the attic so I wasn’t working, quite literally, from a bed in the guest room. As part of that separation, in October, I started reading “The Index” before I went to bed. When I’d first wake up, I’d reach for the novel instead of my iPhone, keeping the narcotic jolts of social media at bay.
In a metaphor that captures the insanity and intensity of the election, on the Thursday morning after the election, November 5th, I was on call and went to sleep with my iPhone ringer on, next to my bed. Overnight, a call from work did come in and it woke me up. After the call was over and the work issue resolved, I tried to put my iPhone and glasses back on my dresser. In the dark, my glasses dropped to the ground and cracked at the bridge of the nose. (The reverse of magic, I felt the news gods were telling me that I should have stuck to “The Index” at my bedside.) For the last week, I’ve been wearing glasses from my last prescription and will order a new pair at some point. I just have not had the time to do so yet.
While the recounting of the events above about breaking my glasses in the middle of the night is true and accurate, the photo above is a recreation, taken days after the glasses broke. This is roughly where they fell.
Sara’s birthday was Monday, November 2nd, the day before the election and I tried to make her a birthday cake early on Sunday morning, November 1st. It was a struggle. I used a cake mix and followed the pictures--but not the words--in the directions. I used two boxes of mix, one for each layer, cooked in two 9-inch circular pans.
From the pictures, I thought it was one box of mix per baking pan. If I had read the words of the recipe, I would have noticed that it was one box of mix for two 9-inch round pans.
Not a baker, it did not seem wrong to me that the pans were filed to the rim with mix and Sara woke up just after I put the pans in the oven to bake. She took one look in the oven and realized my mistake. With the recipe doubled, the mix was just about to drip over the edge and onto the oven bottom. Fully baked, each layer came out like a giant mushroom, the batter ballooning, spilling over the sides and crowning on the top. I thought I could still pull it together by using the premixed frosting like spackling or plaster, somehow glueing the cake back together. Sara told me it would not work--and yet, I persisted. It was a disaster as the cake mix crumbled into the frosting, pulling the cake apart until it was a giant chocolate mess of tortured, intertwined textures.
The only good news is that we had more mix and I was able to correct the mistake. The second cake, cooked according to the directions, looked good—and tasted better.
Happy birthday Sara!
My advice. Read the labels--and read “The Index of Self-Destructive Acts.” Don’t let the title fool you. I’ve texted Ryan that the title should be “I’m here,” a quote taken from the novel’s final chapters.
No spoilers. (You’ll have to read the book to find out if you agree with me.)
Just remember, there’s magic in the world.
“That’s how God works.”
“I’m here.”
What did not happen?
A. In reading “The Index of Self-Destructive Acts,” I noticed a typo on page 420. I plan on contacting Beha to let him know so it can be fixed for the paperback;
B. I was on the phone with my sisters Ginny and Susan when the election was called for President-Elect Biden on Saturday morning, November 7th;
C. When my sister Ginny read Quiz # 90. Snake and learned about the snake that had been found in Sara’s office, she reported that her husband Larry often found garter snakes in the bushes around their home. He takes them out to the woods beyond their house and tries to put them in the same spot so the “families” won’t be separated;
D. My daughter Betsy teaches 4th grade. This week, her school went all virtual after 5 confirmed cases of Covid;
E. My step-son John has been promoted in his work at American Express in New York City. Two people will report to him and he did virtual interviews with job candidates right before the election.
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Want more?
Here’s the next quiz in the series: Quiz #92. “We Hate the Garbage Man.”
Here’s the previous quiz in the series: Quiz #90. Snake.
Here’s the first quiz in the series: Quiz #1. Stella and Social Distancing, March 13, 2020
Here is an archive of all the quizzes.
The quiz is explained here: Steve’s Stay-at-Home Coronavirus Quiz.
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