I think I have figured out my grandma’s secret philosophy of life. Live every moment not as if it were your last, but as if you were about to become trapped—perhaps under the wreckage of your house after a hurricane, or just by an everyday occurrence like bathtub electrocution or getting your hand stuck in a garbage disposal—immobilized in whatever state your everyday life happened to be in, ready to become a permanent frieze for all the West Hawaii Today-reading world to see.
This has come about through a series of near-natural disasters. First, there was Hurricane Flossie (a.k.a. Hurricane Falsie, a.k.a. Faux-sie, a.k.a. Not-sie—Ben is indefatigable when it comes to aliases). Then, last week, we had a crazy thunderstorm, which had all the students declaring Armageddon and brought about a cold snap that has created a fashion “trend” (it also cropped up my sophomore year when the temperature dipped frighteningly below 60 degrees) of girls wrapping their mini-skirt-and-camisole-clad bodies in thin, fleece, cartoon-character-festooned blankets. Teachers and students alike were confident school would be canceled, if for no other reason than the trauma caused by house-rattling thunder. Unh-unh. That would make us look like we didn't care about academic achievement.
week later, another storm offered another elusive reprieve. Out come the blankets, up fill the shopping carts with unnecessary bottled water and self-indulgent, pointless Spaghetti-Os. I swear, the Hawaii County Civil Defense strongly suggested that I buy these things.
One result of last week’s over-hyped storm (what, in Hawaii? Naw) was a series of newspaper stories on the “aftermath.” The cover had two comic features:
- Both photos (the cover and the inside one) featured a Jack Russell hybrid in the foreground with captions saying first something like, “The Kanaka family dog, Jesse, sniffs the wreckage of yesterday’s storm, as the Kanakas try to tow their Bronco out of three feet of mud” then, “Wreckage. Surveyed by Jesse, the Kanaka family dog.”
- The other family profiled had their roof cave in. The photo displaying the Wreckage was of their bathroom, whose messy state could in no way be attributed solely to the storm. I mean, what was all that crap doing in the bathroom in the first place? It wasn’t a tornado.
This got me to thinking. What would people think if they woke up to a photo of our bathroom? Obviously, a collapsed roof would be forgiven. But how would we explain the dried-out wineglasses and coffee mugs pushed to the corner of the counter, squished in with tubes of Benadryl? (Dude, I was finishing my last glass when I decided it was time to get serious about flossing.) And what of the assortment of reading materials? Or that ubiquitous can of corned beef? We could never explain the state of our bathroom, let alone our house. Which is why I cower in fear whenever the prospect of a visit from our landlords, or a particularly hard rainstorm, appears on the horizon.
So, here are Grandma’s rules:
- Never be wearing dirty or embarrassing clothes. (I decided to leave the Ebonics in; they must’ve occurred to me for a reason.) While the logic of saving your dry-clean-onlies for a special occasion may seem irrefutable, they won’t matter much when you’re dead.
- Start cooking your rice by 3:00. If you have to ask, “What rice?” or “Why is it my rice? What about the other people involved? Shouldn’t they cook rice?”, you shouldn’t even be reading this.
- While you’re at it, take your bath before then, too. This brings up an important side note: only men shower, preferably in the room attached the garage to prevent their sullying of the house with their work-day filth. Women bathe. Or bocha, I suppose, though I’ve never liked the word, evoking as it does the image of soaking oneself in a flavorful broth to create a delectable, starchy soup.
- Whatever you do, clean as you go. Whether it’s cooking or wrapping a re-gift in layers of paper, plastic, and tinfoil packaging, you must make sure there is never a backlog of dirtiness or messiness long enough to suggest that you were stopped in the tracks of life (by lightning, flash flooding, etc.) doing anything but trying to rid the world of its inherent filthiness and depravity.
The depravity was purely my inference. The rest is, I promise, objective fact journalistically observed. My grandmother has taught me well. It’s too bad that it takes an impending disaster to make visible the importance of her lessons.
