[stylist] The Heaven of Simple Things

[William L Houts]

Hey Blinky Colleagues:

I just posted this on Facebook.  I think it's pretty good for such an 
early morning post, and thought I'd share it with you all; a bit of 
reading to do, maybe, over your morning cup.


--Bill


---


This morning, I've been thinking about the heaven in tiny things. How it 
is that we Americans seem to be driven by ideas about wealth and 
celebrity, so
often supposing that the real life, with the real people, the real money 
is somewhere down the road rather than in our kitchens, our garages, our 
bedrooms.
But I've been thinking lately that you can find heaven in tiny homebody 
revelations. For me, I feel a deep satisfaction when things simply work 
the way
they're supposed to. For instance, I'm fascinated by coffee makers. We 
use the simplest sort at our house, without all the bells and timers and 
dancing
iguanas which come with your more expensive models. And the thing which 
gets me every time is the way the coffee drips down through a hole in 
the lid and
into the carafe. I mean, isn't that just the best and tiniest glory? The 
coffee percolates and it was someone's job at the factory, maybe the job 
of several
someones, to make sure that the ready hot coffee would drip through the 
lid and into the carafe without splashing, each and every time you brew 
some. It's
miraculous!

Another time, I was sitting at my computer in a chair I had bought from 
Keeg's on Broadway, if anyone remembers that Sunday morning Capitol Hill 
destination
which has been gone for twenty years or more, so passes the glory of the 
world. And one morning I was sitting in the chair and the left arm rest 
became
detached from the back of the chair. I looked at the arm rest and I 
could see that the screw which held one thing to another had become 
unscrewed. The
thing about this was that the screw was a peculiar octagonal thing, and 
it called for a peculiar octagonal screwdriver to wind it back into 
place. Well,
as it happens, I recognized the gauge from a toolkit I had bought for my 
mountain bike. So I fit the weird screw back into the hole, dug out the 
Swiss
Army-like bike tool and wound the naughty screw back into place, drawing 
armresst and back into their perfect marriage once again. I remember the 
thrill
I felt when I realized that this was all working exactly the way it 
should work. There had been a breakdown, but I had recognized the 
problem, realized
that I had the right tool to address it, and set to work. The whole 
incident took less than five minutes and I was back in business. I 
remember the tiny
ecstatic groan given out by the octagonal screw as it wound back down 
into its seat. You can go through many years of feeling that nothing is 
working quite
the way it's supposed to. You don't get to date that hot redhead, you 
don't get the higher paying position at work, the cake you tried to 
bake, the one
with the chocolate raspberry frosting which looked so good on the box 
falls flat. But on this one occasion --and there have been several like 
it in my
life; I'm not as sad as all that-- I had exactly the right tool for the 
problem, and set to work, and Lady Universe grinned her big gummy grin, 
and I heard
that happy groan, and I was back in business.

Now, almost nobody, and certainly nobody we're likely to know, ever wins 
the lottery. And it's just a numbers thing, an odds thing, and nobody's 
punishing
us or mocking us or trying to make us feel sad. But maybe as a culture, 
we would do better to step away from the Big Media version of success, 
of celebrity
and wealth, and prepare ourselves for that tiny ecstatic groan, that 
cosmic Yes which comes to every one of us now and then. I think we might 
be richer
and happier if we did.