Larry M. was my roommate for the semester we spent at the University of Dallas Rome Campus. He was one of the gang that traveled to London together before the start of the semester for a week and then took the train to Rome by way of Paris. He was my companion on several weekend trips out of Rome, too, including Florence, Munich, Salzberg, and the ill-fated attempt to get to Malta for Easter, which was aborted in Siracusa, Siciliy, when we found that the boats were all booked up, and then turned semi-tragic when we were robbed at gunpoint in a pizzeria in Messina on the night before Easter.

Larry used to carry a tiny notebook everywhere he went, into which he would write notes about photos he’d taken, places to visit and sights to see, addresses, hours of operation, Italian phrases, and so on. He filled several such notebooks, I think, as the semester wore on. One day, in circumstances that have completely escaped my memory, he wrote a note to me that said:

Mental Note #7639471
Don’t, under any
circumstances, associate
with Assholes.

I apparently found this to be such good and useful advice at the time that I folded up the tiny scrap of paper and stashed it in a safe place in my wallet. (He must have written the note some time after Easter weekend, because the note wasn’t lost with the wallet that was stolen in the Sicilian robbery.)

The semester ended and we all went home. My sister Anne was taking a photography course the next semester at University of Houston, and she made black-and-white enlargements of a few of my Rome semester photos to decorate my dorm room. One of them was a shot of Larry and our friend Alexandra sitting on my bunk bed in our dorm room in Rome. At some point in the fall semester of 1983, I cleaned out my wallet and found Mental Note #7639471. I placed it inside the acrylic box-frame with the 8 x 10 photo of Larry and Alexandra. It stayed there for as long as I kept those photos. Visitors to my dorm room and later apartments would move in close to find out what the little scrap of paper in the corner of the frame was, and then grins would break out on their faces as they read Larry’s messy college-kid chicken-scratchy handwriting.

Eventually, I got tired of looking at the photos, so I pitched the aging acrylic frames and packed away the photos. I still told the story of that note, though, whenever I wanted to talk about Larry and the fun times we shared in Rome. The note went with the enlargements into a box of photos, and that’s where Gayle, my professional organizer friend, found it a few weeks ago as we were working on a project to sort and categorize my old photos. She said, “You wanna tell me about this?” and handed me the yellowed piece of 26-year-old paper. The characteristic frayed edge that results from being torn out of a spiral notebook was still intact. The scrap had been folded again in storage, and the fold lines were fragile and crumbling.

There wasn’t much to tell her about the fragment. I didn’t remember what prompted Larry to write the note. I only knew that it had meant a lot to me at the time as a symbol of our friendship. To me, that note meant far more than what its words said. It also meant, “The world is full of assholes, but you and I have each other.”

I’ve come a long way since I first carried that note around as a touchstone next to my 20-year-old butt. So when Gayle unearthed it again, I had a good laugh, told her an unrelated story or two about Larry (who long ago took on the much more serious and dignified moniker of “Lawrence”), and put the note into a small stack of materials designated for scanning and demolition. I scanned the note, put the JPEG image online in an album of UD photos on Facebook, and tossed the ancient scrap of paper into the recycling bin.

On top of the old story of my friendship with Larry that the note symbolized—the story of all the support, kindness, and patience he offered me through the rough years of college—I’ve added a new layer of meaning. The note now signifies my ability and willingness to transcend the “stuff” that I’ve imbued with meaning in my life, and instead to embrace and cherish the meaning in its purer form. We human beings love to create meaning—it is, to use the old cliché, “what separates us from the beasts.” We make meaning, we assign meaning, we collect and hoard and share meaning. Our lives become full of things that signify something to us, things that remind us of an event or person, some treasured experience or emotional state.

But things can never be more than just things. Paper can’t be more than just paper, no matter if King John or John Hancock or Elvis himself once handled it and wrote on it. And as much as we are free to assign meaning, it’s also in our power to take it away, to release meaning from the objects to which we’ve ascribed it and into the realm of pure forms. And so, although the paper form of Mental Note #7639471 has gone off to be recycled, the significance of Mental Note #7639471 will always be with me.

© 2009 Edward F. Gumnick

Grass. I have a real problem with grass. For starters, it’s not much to look at. Sure, it’s green. But it’s a monotonous, uninteresting green. And then we have a few weeks of drought, and it’s not even all that green. And what does it do? It’s not a food source. It doesn’t provide much in the way of food for insects or animals, either, since we don’t let it get tall enough to flower or produce seeds. In fact, you can make a good argument that it’s actually bad for insects and animals, since it supplants natural vegetation that would be more likely to produce something they can use for food or building material. A grassy lawn is a monoculture, a genetically vulnerable and unnatural creation incapable of supporting the kind of complex ecosystems that evolve in the wild. Some scientists have speculated that the rise of monoculture lawns may be one of the stress factors that have decimated honey bee populations.

Grass is a thermodynamic disaster area. To keep it looking decent year after year, we have to apply fertilizer and pesticides. It rewards the effort by growing, transforming the fertility of the soil into tall blades. Then we lop them off and haul them away to a composting center—or worse, a landfill. We deplete the soil to produce a useless crop that we then discard. And as if that weren’t enough, we use gasoline and electricity to do the harvesting, spewing air pollution and noise in all directions, replacing the peaceful sounds of a summer evening with the shrill whine of the weed-eater and the deafening roar of the leaf-blower.

Not all of the fertilizer and pesticide get metabolized by the lawn, of course. Some of them leach out—along with the copious amounts of fresh, clean water from the municipal supply that are required to keep the grass alive in hot weather—into the storm drain systems, adding damaging levels of nitrogen to the ecosystems downstream and moving ever more of our limited supply of usable phosphate down to a lower and less useful position in the planetary ecology.

And what’s it all for? Oh sure, occasionally you see children playing on a lawn. But most lawns seem to be empty of people most of the time. Even if there’s some local and occasional demand for patches of grass for certain activities—croquet, volleyball, playing in the sprinkler—the supply of grass-covered ground seems to vastly exceed the demand. All of our grassy lawn needs could probably be easily met by one or two grassy lawns per block of houses.

So what should we have instead of grass? Considering all the negatives that go along with grass, one could make the argument that we’d be better off with nice, smooth expanses of low-maintenance concrete. But concrete prevents the absorption of rainwater, so it leads to increased flooding. Also, pavement is a sink for solar energy, and our cities are too warm already. So how about some nice gravel or river rocks? That would solve some of the runoff problem, but they’d still soak up too much sunlight and turn it into heat.

Gardens seem like an obvious choice. The average garden might require a little more work than a lawn of the same size, but it can also yield flowers, herbs, vegetables, or fruit. But the right kind of garden can actually be maintained with considerably less work than an equivalent amount of lawn if care is taken to incorporate some low-maintenance, slow-growing elements. Trees, shrubs, ground covers, and vines can provide cooling, shade, soil and water retention, and beauty with nearly no work at all after the initial investment of effort. Nurseries can supply drought-tolerant native plants to facilitate “xeriscaping”—a form of landscape design that requires minimal amounts of supplemental watering.

Or we could let our lawns return to nature. We could let wind-sown and bird-born seeds take root in the soil. We could let native flora make their way back into the city. We could help nature along with diverse plantings to replace our monoculture a little at a time. We could watch for the return of bees, and butterflies, birds, reptiles, amphibians, and small mammals. And we could enjoy the peaceful sounds of a summer evening.

© 2009 Edward F. Gumnick

Fragment #2

I want all of my life to be like these moments:

• The day that Continental canceled our flight out of Rome, so we spent the day exploring Ostia. We surprised ourselves with how much fun we could cram into one unexpected extra day of vacation.
• The day you led me through rush-hour traffic to Griffith Park, then showed me where the trail began. I was energized by your kindness.
• The day the cold front blew through the city, and then you took me to your soccer practice. It was too cold for me to spend two hours waiting on a bench, so I wandered the unfamiliar neighborhood until I found a coffee shop open. Then I came back and climbed up and down the pedestrian staircase to to the road high on the hill above the soccer field to keep warm. While I walked the stairs, I had a heart-to-heart talk directed at a silent God. I told him that I thought he was irrelevant, and that I’d listened to his people and their bad ideas for long enough.

Their house was the fourth from the bottom of the row—fourth on the right as you climbed the street in the front, fourth from the left as you climbed the alley in the back. In the back, the outbuildings were landmarks to find our way into the correct backyard through a gate in the low chain link fence. All the fences on Mommom and Granddad’s street were of the same height, as if someone had started putting up fences at one end and worked their way up the alley. Most of the yards had clotheslines; my grandparents had rose bushes, too, and a garden hose and sprinkler.

From the front, you had to find the house by more subtle signs. All of the houses were of red brick and white-washed concrete, and all of the porches had the same open brickwork front railings. Mommom and Granddad’s house was marked by rectangular, whitewashed ceramic planters that were always filled with stinky red geraniums. The porches ran together in a row, ascending the street, separated by low concrete dividers that an adult could step over. A child could sit on the little wall and swing one leg over at a time. On one side, you could walk to the neighbor’s porch by way of the shared landing at the top of the conjoined concrete staircases on either side. Mommom and Granddad shared their staircase with Miss Elizabeth and Miss Marie. Miss Elizabeth was friendly but stern with a surprising old-lady mustache and fierce eyebrows. Miss Marie had wispy white hair. She was older, very kind and sweet. She would invite us in and offer sugar cookies from a tin, but only if she knew that Mommom was away from home or busy somewhere else in the house.

Granddad had whitewashed the planter boxes to match the concrete face of the basement wall, below where the bricks started. Many years later, I stripped the white paint off of one of those planters to find a glaze of gingerbread brown with a wash of green highlighting the ivy pattern wound around the top.

I wasn’t surprised to find out that the idea of “the happiest man in the world” hadn’t originated with Patty Gras. As near as I’ve been able to determine so far, that phrase originated in an article by Anthony Barnes in the January 21, 2007, issue of The Independent. The article talks about Matthieu Ricard, a French academic who left his job to become a Buddhist monk. Ricard was one of the subjects of some research done by Dr. Richard Davidson, a professor of psychology and psychiatry at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. Dr. Davidson’s team of researchers found that MRI scans of monks who’ve done a lot of meditation show indications of a higher level of “positive emotions” in the left pre-frontal cortex of the brain—associated with happiness—than college students in the control group.

I took a look at the paper that the researchers published in 2004 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, entitled “Long-term meditators self-induce high-amplitude gamma synchrony during mental practice.” It doesn’t contain the words happy, happiness, or happiest. I don’t have the expertise to understand all of the researchers’ conclusions, but I can say for sure that they don’t include the assertion that Matthieu Ricard is the happiest man in the world or, indeed, that Buddhist monks are habitually happy. It does seem to conclude that long-term meditators can induce mental states in themselves that are related in some way to positive emotions. This is interesting and thought-provoking scientific data that doesn’t need to be sensationalized by labeling anyone with the absurd title of “the most joyful person on the planet.”

But I’m glad that Patty Gras sent me that silly promo, because otherwise, I might not have looked into the UWM research or learned that Matthieu Ricard presented a talk at the TED Conference entitled “Habits of Happiness.” I’m looking forward to watching the video podcast. (I’m disappointed with the folks at TED for propagating the “happiest man in the world” label, though.)

I’m interested in the possible connection between meditation and positive emotions. I’d heard of this research, and I’ve been curious about where it might lead, but I’d never seen any presentation of the actual data until now. As I’ve mentioned before, I’d like to find a place where I can study or practice meditation with guidance from someone who teaches it from a scientific perspective, not a mystical one. If it hadn’t been for Patty’s careless e-mail—and my critical reaction to it—I might not have found these interesting new data points for my own research into so-called “enlightenment.”

Thanks, Patty! Keep the woowoo coming!

© 2008 Edward F. Gumnick