August 27, 2010

ST. SIMONS ISLAND, Ga. -- For most of us, people, places and things are of some interest to each of us in one way or another. Primarily, I'm a people person. I like to learn whom a person is, where he or she is from, and, basically, what molded them into the person in front of me or in the pages of a book. I'm interested in the culture surrounding their past and present - where they've been, where they are and where they're going.

Conversely, there are cultures not able to grab my attention at all. Well, I'll amend that to say unless and until there is an obvious need for help.

So it was that I found myself trapped in a one-way conversation with the dental hygienist. For a dozen years we've had delightful chatter over her trips to Alaska, her training her dog, her move to farmland and it was always back and forth as conversations go.

This time, as I was belted under a heavy, lead apron draped from my collarbone to knees - as she was - protecting us both from the radiation exuded in x-raying my teeth - she was joyfully telling me about a wonderful book she just finished. I'm a reader so I was anxious to hear about it.

She proceeded with the set up and directed me to turn to the left as she skillfully pushed a butterfly-bent film in my jaw, told me to bite down, turned around and stood behind the door, saying: "Stay still" and in less than a second she removed that butterfly and repeated the procedure to the right, to the middle to the top to the bottom, to the middle top and the middle bottom - all the while telling me the story of when the Brits moved in to conquer India, what the peasants were like, what they wore, how some of the Brits began wearing togas, She told me how the Brits were able to conquer India after fighting the French back and forth for the final victory.

My mouth was full of pieces of film known only to dentists while saliva built up and finally drizzled around my tonsils. All of the procedure was done in a "business as usual" way but I was bored and couldn't speak. Her spirits were high and she was hoping I'd get the book; "I can't do justice to the story but I know you'd love it."

This delightful technician almost bubbled over with enthusiasm but the closest I could get to actually wanting to buy the book was repeating the final words of Poet Rudyard Kipling as he ended "Gunga Din," his most famous poem: "Though I've belted you and flayed you, by the living God that made you, you're a better man than I am, Gunga Din." I would like to have known the living Gunga Din, so eloquently portrayed in the words of Kipling.

As I sat in the chair until the dentist viewed the x-rays, I pondered why she was so enthralled and why I couldn't care less about the period of time and the people living then.

It's a matter of taste. I am concerned, of course, when disasters happen around the world, especially to the people. I see and read of what people endure, what they are forced to cope with during rampages of nature. And I don't only feed on the contemporary. I believe I've read every personal account from that time we came to call the Holocaust - from the Diary of Ann Frank to Elie Wiesel's "The Night," and many that followed.

I read with great interest about the tsunami in the Indian Ocean, my heart was in my mouth as people clung to trees, wondering all the while what I would do. How could I help? What can I do? I joined with others in the quiet of my heart and prayed for the innocents. My taste in reading lies in their stories. I knew how they were ending.

I particularly like autobiographies - and biographies as well, if I can trust the author and his sources. Along with people and the human condition I enjoy reading about places - especially if the place was once another place. I learned that far beneath Bryant Park, site of the New York Public Library, there was once a potter's field and the burial ground for indigents.

I recently read about the plight of the miners trapped underground in Chile, South America. It will be months before they are released and in the meantime oxygen, food and water are supplied through a narrow opening to where they wait 2300 feet below.

Of those trapped, I can only hope they are supplied with pads and pens to record their days, their coping mechanisms, their fears, their dreams. I'd buy that book. Yet there are those who could not care less for the story in book form. They have read about the collapse and the ending of the forced confinement.

I have email forwarded to me with photo attachments of what interests the sender: airplanes, boats, antique trolleys, and the like. I look and then delete. I admire the photography but not the content, per se.

We are all the same by inhabiting bodies that hurt, love, bleed, risk, help, grieve, laugh, cry, yearn - but what we like is different to all of us. It's a matter of taste. Oh, it's said we can "acquire" a taste for something but I know what I like and no amount of persuasion will encourage me to eat an oyster or say "yes" to peach ice cream.

No, my appetite leans toward experiences of others where I can stamp my identity on their moments and walk the walk with them toward an epilog satisfying to both of us.

   

If you liked this, you'll love the book!