Art Appreciation and Me

Whenever I find myself wandering the pristine halls of an art museum I’m always there with someone else, someone who is both better looking than me and more finely attuned to the intricacies of artistic expression. The attractiveness part I can come to terms with; it’s the latter that makes me more than a little jealous. I just don’t have the ability to dissect a painting or see past its surface. At best I’m either pleased or turned off by a shape or a mixture of colors, a nice image or maybe an expression on a subject’s face. I cannot tell what the artist was thinking when he captured the soft circle of a woman’s bare breast, or when someone shattered glass around an iron scaffolding. And instead of experiencing the subtle joy and elation that others feel, I’m left like a hillbilly child visiting relatives in the city, mouth toothless and gaped with uncertainty.

As a rule, I tend to stay away from places that remind me just how uncultured I am — a fine wine tasting, Shakespearean plays, restaurants offering anything other than cheeseburgers or spaghetti — mostly out of fear that I’ll make a fool of myself, that I’ll be found out. At best, the image I’ve carved out for myself through years of careful lies and deceit is one of me keeping up with culture, nowhere above anyone else but barely treading water. In reality, I’m the guy who steps into a fine restaurant wearing a t-shirt reading “I’m not a gynecologist, but I’ll take a look,” and when I’m asked to please leave I’m not sure why. On the rare occasions I’m not dressed like a slob or an overgrown teenager and I do manage to get seated, if I’m not careful a gazing couple might spot me trying like a buffoon to crack open a lobster tail. And so it’s just easier to avoid such places.

Shakespearean plays hold a similar danger. By default anyone looking forward to attending a performance of Shakespeare must have an IQ of 150 or above; as for me, I’m usually dragged there by friends, theater people themselves who can recite perfectly metered love sonnets and soliloquies in their sleep. In high school, though I never would have admitted it then, I was really in the same league as the jocks and the hardcore stoners when it came to matters of Shakespearean tragedy. Had it not been for our textbook’s annotations I would have floundered in the lines of iambic pentameter forced upon us, and even with the textbook’s help when we were asked to write a report on a play it was like being given a handful of wooden blocks and told to build a fully-functioning locomotive. Overcome with anxiety, I might find myself searching the internet for someone’s online notes or, if a deadline was fast approaching, an entire paper that I could purchase and pass off as my own. At live performances that same sense of helplessness falls over me, and before the first act is up I’m listening not to the actors but to my fellow theatergoers, searching for that collective intake of breath that precedes a laugh or a groan, something that they’ve all caught and I haven’t. Then I’ll laugh with them, and keep my charade as a genuine purveyor of intellect and refinement. One of their peers. An equal.

At an art museum, however, it’s a little easier to slide by unnoticed. For the most part museums are quiet places where the people around you have something to look at and distract them from the fraud in their midst.

Several of my friends are quite good at judging artwork; my friend Rusty, an artist himself, can take a look at a painting and tell me any number of things about its technique, placement on the artistic timetable, and its similarity in style to other artists’ works. Whenever he does this, I’m left in awe. “How do you know all that?” I’ll want to ask, but I don’t, because my inquiring would make me seem less upscale and erudite. Instead, I simply nod, scratching my chin as if contemplating, and mumble, “True, true. Yeah.”

Amber, a high school friend of mine, might lose herself in the swoops and circles of a painting for what seems like hours on end. And even without the aid of drugs — prescription or otherwise — she can find something to focus on, something the canvas triggers in her and makes resonate. Meanwhile, I’m wondering what the hell a series of concentric squares scribbled in harsh yellow lines is supposed to mean to anyone, and I’ll look at my watch for the hundredth time to see how soon we’re going to eat lunch.

The one part of the museum I can enjoy is the statues. Although I can appreciate the fine craftsmanship and extensive detail in all of them, my favorites are the ones that appear to have been in severe personal accidents. There’s nothing more interesting than a statue of a woman, staring off to the side longingly, with arms that stop at her elbows, or a bust of a face with its nose and finer features askew and exaggerated. Maybe it’s just the morbid part of me that’s engaged by these, but I find them the most interesting part of the museum experience not because of what the particular artist was trying to express, but because onto them I can project any number of gruesome scenarios.

Here, a woman unfortunately decides to reach under the lawnmower for her fallen wedding band. There, a man realizes too late that the uncaring escalator will not relinquish his dangling shoestrings. And my personal favorite is the baby born with an elongated head to a drug-addled mother, or maybe because of a rare genetic disorder. True, sometimes these ideas don’t exactly make sense, but they make for an interesting way to pass the time. When I’m at the museum, I can’t exactly share these thoughts, as it tends to place upon my listener’s face a look of harsh disapproval followed by a mellower but no less scathing glare of superiority. I’ve learned this time and again after mentioning to, say, the birdlike woman standing next to me, craning forward to investigate each ridge in the clay, or the frumpy professorial man running a hand through his thinning hair as he contemplates the artist’s intention in giving his subject only a top row of teeth.

Instead, I keep my thoughts to myself and try my best to fit in. Just as I would with Rusty, I might find myself staring down a Monet, my eyes held open to increase the chance of them watering. If I’m lucky, it’ll look like I’m crying, moved by the grace and beauty of something so wonderfully captured. If not, I’ll be seen as either the wide-eyed eccentric lost in his ruminations or the out-of-touch sociopath wrangling his twisted visions. Neither, I suppose, is that far off the mark, and they both beat out being viewed, simply, as stupid.

By the time we leave the museum, my compatriot and I, I’m usually feeling tired and weak. Not physically, but mentally, like I’ve spent hours trying to churn out plot points for an entire season of a soap opera. In a way, I guess it is sort of the same, and I have to wonder if that’s similar to what happens with my friends and all those other people who come to look at these pieces of art. Are the experiences they have with a horizontal mosaic of primary colors or a dark-hued portrait of a man dressed in a hooded white robe just their projections reflected back, not so different from me pushing tragedies onto arcane statues? Maybe so, I’ll think, but I’m always ready to move on, to stop thinking so hard. And in stepping out of that brightly lit building so full of creativity and introspection, I find myself wishing that, instead, we’d just gone to see a production of Hamlet, where I’ve almost learned exactly when to chuckle and when to cry.

Jack the Pumpkinhead

A few years before I was born, my father got his job working at Hallmark Cards. This, more than anything else, shaped my childhood.

Growing up, my family celebrated EVERY holiday. We always seemed to have more decorations than we knew what to do with. My mother, a very crafty and creative person, would make some of them, but the majority came from Hallmark. At the end of a season, my Dad would snag a bunch of decorations at a discount, and we'd use them the following year.

We had stuff for all of them--I mean all of them. When I first brought my wife "home for the holidays" she was surprised to find out that my family had a menorah (my family is not Jewish, but Hanukkah is a holiday so we had the proper paraphernalia).

Of all the holidays we celebrated, the best was Halloween. That was my Dad's favorite holiday (it was his mother's favorite, too). Every year our house was transformed in a bizarre wonderland, complete with rubber bats, screeching haunted houses, paper skeletons, and foam pumpkins. Our parents would take us out trick or treating and when we came back my sister and I would have a gift waiting for us, usually in our rooms, left by "Jack the Pumpkinhead."

There have been two periods in my life. One period where I was embarrassed by this because I didn't know anyone else that got a little present on Halloween from "Jack," and another period where I thought "Well Linus [from PEANUTS] seems clued in on this so it must be more common."

I think that my Dad probably got this strange tradition from Charles Schulz when he saw IT'S THE GREAT PUMPKIN CHARLIE BROWN when it aired originally in 1966 (when he was six). I saw this cartoon a few nights ago, and I must say...it's quite subversive. I'm not sure if my father (and many others) picked up on Schulz's rather ironic Christmasification of Halloween, but growing up my household believed in Jack the Pumpkinhead.

Like most things, my father took what existed and sort of mixed it with something else entirely. You see, Schulz's characters talk about "The Great Pumpkin," whereas my father insisted that our family was visited by "Jack the Pumpkinhead." Who the heck is that? Jack the Pumpkinhead is a character created by L. Frank Baum in his 1904 novel THE MARVELOUS LAND OF OZ (yes, THAT Oz...you know, the one where Dorothy goes with Toto). I have it on good authority that my Dad was probably exposed to this book as a child (because growing up we had a beat-up copy of this book amongst our books that probably belonged to him...or my mother).

Thus, "The Great Pumpkin" was "Jack the Pumpkinhead" in our house.

I can recall getting several presents over the years, but only one honest-to-God "Jack" encounter:

My parents brought us home from Trick of Treating, and my sister and I started to take our costumes off. Suddenly, from the kitchen we heard a commotion. Running, with our pants down at our ankles, my sister and I got to the kitchen just in time to see my father dash madly out the back door. Yelling, he ran all the way to our back fence--hot in pursuit of something.

Horrified and excited, we waited for him to slowly make his way back into the house. He appeared worn-out and disappointed.

"Oh man," my dad told us. "You missed it! I almost caught Jack the Pumpkinhead!"

What? You did?

"Yeah, I caught him in the kitchen and ran after him--but he got over the fence before I could catch him."

Really?

"I almost got him," he said. "I was this close to catching him...but he got away. I could hear him laughing at me..."

Parents (and future parents) take note: this stupid, obvious bit of theater was 100% believed by both myself and my sister Amber. That's the power parents adults have over children (wield it justly). My Dad is not Daniel Day-Lewis, and yet I was (and still am) in awe of his performance. For the longest time I not only believed in Jack the Pumpkinhead, but I was convinced that my father had nearly caught him!

My wife (for obvious reasons) grew-up in a Santa-free household, and would no doubt be horrified by this story. Her family has this "thing about lying to children," but you know what? All adults lie to children, in some for or another. And beyond entertaining us, the lie did nothing to Amber or me. I don't still believe in this Halloween-Santa. I'm not devastated when he doesn't show up, now that my Dad isn't putting trinkets on my pillowcase.

It was just something fun and sort of magical from my childhood.

Of course, as an adult I see the real magic at play--the swirling of pop culture inside the mind of a goofy, 20-something-year-old father...how he waited for us to lower our guards, then go running across the lawn. Whenever I wonder where it is I get this strange capacity to create things (be it a Grape-Flavored Tear Drop poem or cartoon sheep), I always remember Jack and my Dad.

Card Reader

At almost ninety years old, my great-grandmother doesn’t get out much. Instead, she relies on her family to do things for her. My Grandma Sharon, her only daughter and now the person with whom she lives, cooks for and takes care of her, while my father and great-uncle help out with the more technical and everyday issues that arise — things like insurance problems and TV repair. The responsibilities that fall upon my brother and me are of a simpler nature. Namely, we act as gophers, seeing as we have neither the inclination to do anything more or, in my case, the ability to understand things like Medicare documents. Rather, my brother, Matthew, and I run around to different places, picking up things like groceries or prescription medications, occasionally making the short trek up to our grandmothers’ house to bring in the mail and newspaper when no one is able to go out and get them.

My latest assignment from my great-grandmother, a smallish, white-haired woman named Inez, came back at the end of September, when her daughter’s birthday was just around the corner.

After she asked me if I could pick something up for her, she handed me a small white envelope with a folded piece of notebook paper and a small stack of cash. I didn’t open the piece of paper, remembering as how, several years ago, I’d been in a similar situation and had managed to make a complete ass of myself.

Back then, my great-grandmother had had me lean close to her so she could whisper in my ear what she had wanted me to pick up — again, for my grandmother’s birthday. All I could focus on was the particular aroma of her, that not-so-subtle smell of age mingled with liberal doses of Jovan Musk, and so I had only caught most of what she said.

When I stood back up, I thought I knew what she wanted me to buy, but in order to make sure, I repeated back to her what she had said.

In any other place this might’ve been okay, but as it were we were in my Grandma Sharon’s living room, and she was sitting right next to us. I watched my great-grandmother’s face slacken in surprise, and as she let out a slight gasp and looked at me with eyes that said, You imbecile, I felt myself grow smaller, like a turtle retreating into its shell.

This time there would be no ruined surprises, and so I left the paper folded, thinking that if I did take it out I might just read it out loud, word for word, in front of both of them.

After work the next day I drove out to the mall and picked out the various bottles of hand and body lotion I’d been tasked with procuring. I walked down to the other end of the building to try and find a greeting card. In passing shop after shop of trinket-peddling mom-an-pop stores employing teenagers who never seemed to look up from the text messages they were sending, I found myself before a Hallmark store.

This shouldn’t be too hard, I thought.

Before I stopped giving greeting cards to people, I was pretty fast at picking them out. My system was an efficient one: after finding the appropriate section for a birthday, holiday, or death, I would place myself before the selection and simply choose one at random. Sometimes things worked out and other times they didn’t, and although it was nice not having to wade through card after card, it was admittedly kind of sad losing so many friends after giving a Happy Birthday card with a picture of a girl to one of my guy friends, or, even worse, giving a grieving friend a Let’s Party! card some asshole had set down in the wrong section.

When I stepped inside the store it took no more than thirty seconds for me to feel out of place and more than a little uncomfortable. Awkward enough was the fact that I was the only man in the store, but I was carrying all my grandma’s lotions in a delicate white bag decorated with flowers and probably the most effeminate lettering one could ever imagine. Ordinarily that sort of thing wouldn’t bother me, but when the women around you look like they’ve just stopped in after their most bountiful pig slaughter or have donned some in-your-face God Loves You shirt, it doesn’t inspire the warm and welcoming feeling of inclusivity.

At least the store isn’t busy, I told myself, marching past pristine glass cases displaying overpriced chocolates and shelves holding decorative picture frames. There were maybe six or seven other customers there, plus the five workers I could see. The women shopping I was separated from by about ten to fifteen years, while the ladies stocking the floor and working at the cash registers looked to be well into their fifties and sixties. It felt odd being there. Not because they were women, but because everyone was so much older than me. They made me think of just how much time I’d wasted and all the things I’d yet to accomplish.

My English degree.

A finished novel.

Any reason to buy and wear a fine dinner jacket.

Were I to climb on top of a high-rise, perch myself on the edge of the roof, and threaten to jump, what might someone say to coax me down? I wondered as I searched the rows of cards for the birthday section. It was sad to admit, but it wasn’t like I had many proverbial irons in the fire, and so I was left feeling both small and insignificant, a failure of sorts except that I hadn’t really tried at much.

“Now hold on just a minute,” I told myself, suddenly thinking out loud. I tried to reason that there were things I was doing, tasks that I was trying to accomplish. But the best I could come up with was making it through all five seasons of The Wire, a television program about cops and drug dealers in Boston, or developing my appreciation for Joni Mitchell’s album Clouds, a collection of songs that, to this day, still makes me want to shoot myself in the head. Other than that, I was more or less drifting, and in all honesty, I thought, that was pretty pathetic.

Reading through the greeting cards didn’t really help either.

When I found the birthday section, I planted myself in the center of an aisle overflowing with bright pink signs, like I was standing before a giant rash. At first the notion crossed me that I could just do as I had before, and let luck and fate do the deciding. But then I remembered how my great-grandmother always fawned over an eloquent card, one that said exactly the right thing, and so I began leafing through them.

I must have been a sight: me, twenty-three years old, eyes sunken and tired after a day’s work, leafing through cards that read For Sister, From Sister and To My Goddaughter.

I started looking for and avoiding anything referring to mothers or sisters, and if I noticed my hand drifting toward something with the word “cousin” or “niece” I drew back like it might hold the plague. Instead, I tried to look for something flowery. Grandma Sharon could give my great-grandmother a card that simply read, You’re the Best! and she’d gaze at it, smiling distantly, as if remembering delicate moments, but if the card was one that gushed about moments together and lessons learned, she might break down and start crying. That was the kind of card she would want to give.

The verses inside the cards were all printed in delicate, elegant writing, as if pixies had calligraphed each and every one. Some of them were really quite beautiful to look at, but while the cards differed in content the meanings, more or less, stayed the same. “What would I have done without all the special, beautiful things you’ve done for me?” one card asked. Another read, “How can I thank you for all the magical moments we’ve shared?”

After ten minutes of looking I was skimming every other line. Each card was so sugary I felt worried I’d end up leaving the store with diabetes. Besides, I was tired and the fluorescent lights were starting to give me a headache. These cards were supposed to convey so much — all the heft and magnitude of how much the recipient meant to the giver — but all i could focus on was one question: Who are these cards based on?

What kinds of lives did the people who wrote these cards lead? True, I wasn’t a girl, but, being gay, I was the next best thing, and I didn’t think any daughter had those kinds of moments with her mother.

Looking at the cards, I was reminded of the feelings the women around me stirred up. If someone were to write a little blurb about me and all the special things I’ve done, I thought, they’d have to reach pretty far. I’ve never really done anything heartwarming, much less heroic or commendable.

“Great job playing that video game twice that one summer,” mine might say.

Or, “Thanks for all those times I thought you were going to do something special.”

I started moving through the cards, grabbing randomly and hoping that one would have something close to sensible. Feeling out of place here was bad enough, but to be confronted head-on about my obvious lack of value was too much.

Finally, I picked up a card with a little ribbon adornment. he background was a pine green color, and inside I read from a mother’s wistful point-of-view about the moments they had experienced together, the profundity and the power of them. After reading it once and then rereading it again to make sure it didn’t say anything completely stupid, I decided it would work. Grabbing its matching envelope, I made my way to the cash register feeling like someone on the run.

The woman who looked up at me from the cash register was short, at least a full foot and half below me, and from above her I could see the still-dark roots of her otherwise gray hair. She wore large glasses that made her smallish face seem exaggerated like a cartoon character’s, and as she went about ringing up the card I wondered if all of her possibilities were summed up somewhere in the rows and columns of heavyish single-folded paper.

“Ooh,” she said, picking up the card and setting it back down. She tapped it with her finger. “This one’s a good one. Pretty.”

“Thanks,” I said. I was in a hurry, but I meant it. It was nice, the feeling of accomplishment and recognition for having picked out a graceful, tasteful card. I felt as though I had succeeded at some difficult task.

But, in stepping away from the counter after the lady slipped my receipt into the little peach-colored bag, I caught a glimpse of the other customers, the ladies dressed in their God-fearing sweatshirts or their harshly-worn jeans. How foolish it was to think myself different from them, better even, I suppose, when I truly had nothing to show that might put me on a higher plane. On the way out, I noticed a small rack of cards with a sign above it. Blank, it read, and as I passed by the cards, empty like something someone had intended to start and finish, I realized that the cards right there, waiting, declaring nothing and able to boast even less, seemed to have been made just for me.

Sheeple

In the Waiting Room

After the service technician asked me if I wanted them to go ahead and change my windshield wiper blades, I knew I had made a mistake. He was just leaving the little cinderblock waiting room when I started to question his sincerity about “helping me out,” a phrase he’d used more times than I’d glanced at my watch while waiting for the auto maintenance experts to change my oil, which was all I’d come for in the first place. Now, as I leaned back against the uncomfortable plastic chair, small enough it might have been borrowed straight out of a kindergarten classroom, I felt as much the chump these people saw me as. Facing me, built into the wall, was a large glass window where I was supposed to be able to keep an eye on the mechanics, and as I watched gruff and intimidating men with names like Terry and Charlie and Reggie — anything, really, with a hard e sound at the end — lean under the open hood and slide beneath the car’s undercarriage, the window really did seem like a stupid idea.

It didn’t make sense to me that I was supposed to check up on the men servicing my car like nurses, gruffer perhaps, and with a better arsenal of dirty jokes, fluttering around hospital beds. If I knew anything about what they were doing, I reasoned, then I wouldn’t be here. I’d simply unscrew the whatchamacallit and drain the lightish-darkish, thickish-runnyish goop from the doomahicky myself, at home, where I did not have to sit in a chair designed for bodies a third of my height.

At the end of the room stood a TV cart, and strapped to its top was a thick gray box of a television. I watched it after perusing the only grabbing articles in magazines that ran the gamut from Maxim to Hot Rods, the latter having piqued my interest until I realized that it was about automobiles. On the television screen, Maury Povich talked to a young black woman who held a young infant to her chest. The child was kept from suckling directly from its mother on national television by what was supposed to be a tank top but really just amounted to a sheet of fabric stretched to cover her stomach and breasts. As she pulled it up repeatedly with her free hand, she spoke about how she knew nothing of who the real father might be, but that if he thought she wasn’t getting child support, he —

I was expecting to mother to say something like “He’s mistaken” or “He’s got another thing coming.” Instead, when the woman went to finish, her audio was replaced by a more publicly pleasing but decidedly less interesting buzzing sound. At first I thought she would just call the father a choice word or two, but as the noise went on and I watched her free hand start to move in sharp swaying motions in front of her face, I realized she had harsher words for the man, who was then paraded out on stage for some ensuing drama.

Whenever I watch television shows I try to judge each one on its own merits, as I can usually find something enjoyable in whatever is on. This, however, left a poor taste in my mouth, and I couldn’t help but think how stupid this was.

I felt so not from someplace above the woman and her until-now fatherless baby, but rather from my own experience feeling stupid. I never would have pegged myself as mentally challenged, as my stupidity came from both a lack of common sense and the fact that I’m prone to daydreams when I could be learning how to do something.

Ask anyone with whom I’ve been to a major city and they’ll tell you that I’m pretty much useless. When we’re trying to find our way around, it’s bad enough that I can’t figure out how to read a map for the city’s metro trains, but worse still is how while my companion is quickly deciphering where we are located on something so complex as a straight line labeled with street names, I’m standing off to the side thinking about how interesting it might be to meet someone famous or imagining what we’ll be having for dinner later that day.

“If you’d just pay attention,” my companion might say, “you could figure out how to read this so I wouldn’t have to be the one to figure out where we are all the time.”

Any number of people have told me this, and every time I fell slightly guilty. But when I try to make sense of things like maps or directions, I invariably end up giving myself a headache, resorting after a few long, drawn-out minutes to guessing where we’re at and going from there.

Through the window, two men in solid blue-gray jumpsuits laughed at something, and although they didn’t look over in my direction, I was sure they were talking about me.

“So, Terry,” Larry might be saying, “I just got the kid to agree to a new set of wiper blades.”

“That’s how many today, Jerry? Six? Eight? You’re on a roll.”

And then there was the knee-slapping laughter and the extra sixty dollars I’d see on my bill.

What bothered me about the whole thing was their lack of consideration. I was in my early twenties, and so it didn’t seem fair to assume that I might have extra cash to blow on new wiper blades when the ones I had worked. Mostly. Sure, my attire didn’t exactly peg me as poor, but I thought that a true gentleman would have at least warned me about the ridiculous cost. Besides, didn’t he know that I need to buy myself lunch and a new video game? Later, I would learn that, had I opted out of their suggestive selling, I could’ve walked into a department store a little more than a block away and purchased three sets of blades for about the same amount. And this was after the “special deal” Harry would manage to work out with his boss.

A commercial for Chevrolet trucks came on the television screen, and it made me think of my father, who drove a Chevy and had been blessed by the auto gods with a gift of knowledge about anything car-related. As I watched rugged, hairy men drive like maniacs over rocks, through streams, and in fields, I wished for the ability to take care of the things these men surely knew how to do. Replacing brake pads, changing oil, removing and reattaching a tire: these were all things those men could do and I could not. But then, as the seconds ticked away and a dusty, mud-caked pickup drove into a blood-orange sunset, I wished again: this time for my father to simply take care of these types of things for me.

The more I thought about how great it would be to tell my father about an issue — “the air conditioner isn’t blowing cold air” or “the dashboard is getting pretty dusty” — and have it magically rectified the next day, the more I realized it really would make me look quite inept. Ordinarily, I wouldn’t have cared. Throughout high school, I had never pretended to know much about anything aside from maybe television shows or Stephen King novels, and even in my couple years of college I was more prone to sit back and let other people show off their smarts rather than risk embarrassing myself with an ill-supported answer or a response so far out of left field it might’ve come from the next town’s baseball diamond. This, however, was different.

Back in the auto shop, I watched as Harry crossed in front of the window and opened the door to the waiting room.

“Well,” he said, “everything’s ready.” And he grinned.

I arose from my little chair, feeling once again like an oversized man-child. Harry’s gaze reminded me somewhat of the look my father sometimes gave me, the one that said: I love you, but it hurts me how much you are retarded.

This was the same look he would give me when I did do something admittedly stupid. Like the time when I was ten and blended birthday cake, soda, and ice cream together to make the ultimate birthday float. Or the time I was eight or nine and, while playing in my bedroom, I fell off a chair and knocked the wind out of myself.

In the end, though, when Harry offered me his hand, I shook it. I went and paid my bill at the receptionist’s desk, and as I was leaving, keys jangling in my hand, I wondered how hard it might be to, say, change my car’s oil myself. It might be dirty, sure, but it would save me the displeasures of having to a) make appointments here and also b) be taken advantage of.

I knew it probably wouldn’t work when, stepping into the brightly lit showroom, I realized I was lost. I stood in the middle of the showroom with two doors on either side of me, and as I tried to figure out which one would take me out to my car, I stumbled around the floor, pretending to look at cars.

After almost five minutes and two car salesmen asking me if I had any questions, I picked a door and walked through it. I felt like a chump, vulnerable and childish. Changing my own oil would never work if I couldn’t even figure out how to get to my car. Stepping outside into the harsh light of day, I spotted it sitting next to a couple other cars with little numbered tags hanging from the rearview mirror. Luck had worked this time, but there was no guessing that I was — and am — pretty much helpless.