MindSpinner

At the small-town pharmacy and gift shop where I’ve filled my prescriptions for years, four employees stood in the doorway yesterday afternoon, examining the twin glass entry doors. I chuckled and said, “Looks as if you’re having a meeting.” They laughed, too, but ruefully. They were looking at the glass, which looked ordinary enough to me, even clean and new. They kept looking at it as if there were something to see besides glass. Then one of the women, the friendly spouse of a history teacher, explained.

“Someone threw a rock through the door last night. They helped themselves to what they wanted.” They wanted, predictably enough, drugs that could be sold on the street, not the gifts, candles, cards, and trinkets that still lined the shelves. She did not state the magnitude of the losses incurred at the hands of thieves who broke the glass door.

This little pharmacy is usually very busy and cheerful. Pharmacists and cashiers know people by name, and customers, given their number, have to wait for ten minutes or so for prescriptions to be filled. But yesterday pharmacists outnumbered customers, and I heard my name in not more than two or three minutes.

A Walgreens has opened right up the road, and a new Rite Aid just across the street. The coupon for Walgreens came in the mail last week - “Bring a new (ongoing) prescription to Walgreens and save $20.” At the small-town pharmacy, it won’t be the thieves of a single night who steal the store. It will be Walgreens and Rite Aid, which were not needed where they mushroomed, within a quarter mile of each other, and right on the doorstep of a friendly little pharmacy that takes good care of its customers. The undercurrent of grimness I sensed yesterday extended beyond broken glass and stolen pills. To steal pills is a crime. To steal customers is savvy business.

If you want to commit a crime, and do so with a window of impunity, you have to be powerful and commit a really big one in the name of something or other. You’re just doing business, or you are defending national security, or you are waging war.

But not everybody is fooled - just enough folks to ensure that you get by with it for longer than you should.

In five years, the small-town pharmacy may be gone - stolen away little by little. I’m feeling as if my country is being stolen away just as surely, by those who throw big rocks in the name of hollow ideas. I feel the loss of all I longed for it to be.

Much of what I’ve come to understand about my hopes for a relationship I learned years ago from Milton’s reasoned arguments in “The Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce.” (Ironic, no?) Milton, in arguing the case for divorce (he wanted one), managed to define about as well as anyone can what an ideal relationship might be. He argued that we human beings have a “rational burning,” an innate desire, for fellowship and intimacy with a “fit conversing soul,” a “ready and reviving associate” with whom we can carry on a lifelong “meet and happy conversation.” This has always seemed right to me since, the only course worth steering. Love is the whole - the challenges met together, the small thoughts and observations of the day, a resonance of minds, nearness of bodies, touch of hands, a flow of regard and affection, desire and interest between two people that serve to weave happiness like brightly colored threads through our lives. While I’ve always been a capably independent soul and regularly recharge by spending time on my own and by undertaking creative projects, I know that one of the holiest goods in life lies in two people creating what Leonard Cohen calls a “tent of shelter” together, one airy with space for two individuals to be themselves, open for going out into the world and coming in once more, sturdy shelter against storms, as intimate and warm and safe as the closest embrace.

Anyone who has lost greatly will affirm that to love greatly is to risk the very fabric of one’s being to be rent to shreds by grief or worn threadbare by years of indifference. Poet Donald Hall writes of love several years after the loss of his wife, Jane Kenyon:

When I fall in love
I jockey my horse
into the flaming barn.

I hire a cabin
on the shiny Titanic.
I tease the black bear.

Reading the Monitor,
I scan the obituaries
looking for my name.

As Hall suggests, there is assuredly risk in attempting real intimacy. The question is not finally whether we will lose it all - we will. In this sense, the barn was always burning. There is nothing we have on this earth that we will not lose at last or far too soon. The real question is which of life’s gifts we will risk receiving with open hands for the time that they may be ours.

As his own death neared, Raymond Carver wrote a poem entitled “Late Fragment”:

And did you get what
you wanted from this life, even so?
I did.
And what did you want?
To call myself beloved, to feel myself
beloved on the earth.

The only peace and the greatest joy we are given to know comes simply from opening our arms wide, as Dickinson would say, “to gather paradise.” There is flow in this, giving as well as a receiving, whether we embrace a love, or a task, or the cultivation of a garden. We are part of the gift, part of the giving.

In much of the South, barns do not burn and are not torn down, even when they fall from use. They stand through winter sun and summer rain. Certain artists come to draw or paint or photograph them. Their beams sag like bowed backs. Their hollow halls leak beams of dusty light, and wind whips through spaces between gray boards. Mice and feral cats and likely snakes make homes in corners. Children disinclined to disbelieve in danger play there in unnumbered imaginary worlds. The builders have gone, and the owner, the horses and cows with them, but nobody comes to tear empty barns down. They stand, more alive than monuments, until they sag finally into the earth or fall in a storm.

I cannot help but think that lives lived well, lives in which love finds genuine expression, are not burning barns at all, but halls of air and light that stand as long as memory or the words that express them - and catch the light at dawn and at sunset.

Here in middle life, I am less afraid than I have ever been, and more at peace - more able to spread my arms wide. For one thing, I have learned that though I may be burned, I am not consumed.

My Valentine’s Day tribute is to one who sees likewise, hopes likewise, loves likewise, one with whom I’d like to share conversation - and days and years - until I can speak and listen no more.

A recent meme exhorts bloggers to “say it so” if “there is someone on your blogroll who makes your world a better place just because that person exists” and whom you would not have met were it not for the Internet. I’m saying so. That story will wait for the day it can best be told.

Truth is, I have several abiding friendships that have come to be because the Internet is a serendipitous place, and I am grateful for them all. I’ve become a part, either vocally or quietly, of conversations that matter to me. Today seems the right sort of day to say “Thank you.” So Happy Valentine’s Day, everybody. (That’s it. This will have to do. Can’t post real chocolates.)

Why would I fill out a 146-item questionnaire for an online dating site when I’m not looking for a date? (Have date :->. Call that Hemingwayesque understatement.)

A. Because I’m a sucker for a survey that asks me to identify smiles as sincere or insincere and requires me to measure the length of my index finger against the length of my ring finger.
B. Because I’m intrigued by the approach of a dating site developed by an anthropologist who studies the brain physiology of romantic love and sexuality.
C. Because I’m easily intrigued by substantive diversions (not to mention trivial ones).
D. Because I want to know whether I’m a Explorer, a Builder, a Negotiator, or a Director. (It turns out I’m no less than 20% of each.)
E. Because I want to understand myself well enough to be the best partner I can be.
F. All of the above.

The answer is F, “all of the above,” and this should come as no surprise. (I know there are too many choices. Multiple choice questions make me feel subversive.)

In “How Do I Love Thee?,” an article featured in this month’s Atlantic, Lori Gottlieb examines the emerging science of attraction which underlies dating sites such as eHarmony, PerfectMatch.com, and Chemistry.com.

I knew eHarmony a while back - not impressed - profiles lacked sufficient “voice” - they were “output” instead. Only a voice tells me I’m interested. I watched some made-for-TV movie once that turned out to be a 90-minute ad for PerfectMatch.com, but I never checked into that site - I’d canned the notion of Internet matchmaking by then. But Chemistry.com sounds interesting on other grounds. Dr. Helen Fisher, an anthropologist at Rutgers, devised its questionnaire and four resulting personality types based on the influences four key hormones have on personality:

“I’ve always been extremely impressed with Myers-Briggs,” she said, referring to the personality assessment tool that classifies people according to four pairs of traits: Introversion versus Extroversion, Sensing versus Intuition, Thinking versus Feeling, and Judging versus Perceiving. “They had me pinned to the wall when I took the test, and my sister, too. So when Chemistry.com approached me, I said to myself, ‘I’m an anthropologist who studies brain chemistry, what do I know about personality?’ ”

Turns out she knew quite a bit: Genes for the activity of dopamine are associated with motivation, curiosity, anxiety, and optimism. Genes for the metabolism of serotonin, another neurotransmitter, tend to modulate one’s degree of calm, stability, popularity, and religiosity. Testosterone is associated with being rational, analytical, exacting, independent, logical, rank-oriented, competitive, irreverent, and narcissistic. And the hormone estrogen is associated with being imaginative, creative, insightful, humane, sympathetic, agreeable, flexible, and verbal.

“So I had these four sheets of paper,” Fisher continued. “And I decided to give each a name. Serotonin became the Builder. Dopamine, the Explorer. Testosterone, the Director. And estrogen—I wish I’d called it the Ambassador or Diplomat, but I called it the Negotiator.” Myers-Briggs, she says, “clearly knew the four types but didn’t know the chemicals behind them.”

One hundred forty-six questions later, this is what I turned up. Not bad. (But when are these profiles ever painfully honest?)

The following analysis is based on your responses to our questionnaire. Your results identify your major and minor personality types, as well as the types with whom you’re likely to be compatible.

Your Major and Minor Personality Types
Characteristics of all four personality types can be found within each of us, but there is almost always one personality type that is dominant. We call this the major personality type.

The Chemistry Profile also identifies your minor or secondary personality type. You exhibit some aspects of this personality type, though not to the same degree as with your major type.
• Your major personality type = Negotiator
• Your minor personality type = Director

You are a NEGOTIATOR/director

You have a great overview of reality. You see many angles to the same issue and enjoy discussing multiple solutions to complex problems. You like to use your imagination and engage in creative theorizing.

You have executive social skills, easily picking up the gestures, facial expressions and speech patterns of others. You are intuitive; you generally understand people, and your sympathetic nature makes you pliant, adaptable and likeable.

Yet despite your charm and poise in large social situations, you often enjoy solitude or intense conversations with just one individual or a few close friends.

You are good at doing and thinking a lot of things at the same time. But when you focus on an issue, idea or problem, you like to concentrate in depth. You leave no stone unturned.

And with your insight, charm and intellectual bent, you make warm and interesting company.

Fisher posits that successful relationships are founded on both similarity and complementarity, so my Chemistry.com profile suggests which personality types will be an optimal match, with the idea that two people who share substantial compatibility can also balance each other through complementary differences. The night’s too short for me to turn the graphs into narratives.

“We also want someone who masks our flaws,” she explained. “For example, people with poor social skills sometimes gravitate toward people with good social skills. I’m an Explorer, so I don’t really need a partner who is socially skilled. That’s not essential to me. But it may be essential to a Director, who’s generally less socially skilled.”

Chemistry.com’s compatibility questionnaire also examines secondary personality traits. To illustrate, Fisher cited her own relationship. “I’m currently going out with a man,” she said, “and of course I made him take the test instantly. We’re both Explorers and older. I’m not sure two Explorers want to raise a baby together, because nobody will be home. But in addition, I’m a Negotiator and he’s a Director type. Our dominant personality is similar, but underneath, we’re complementary.”

I could tell from the outset I was being had. “Ms. E will do it. Get Ms. E,” Mr. G called out with inordinate glee, as Mrs. P. joined him at the classroom door next to mine. They were planning for the afternoon pep rally prior to Homecoming.

“You can dribble a basketball, can’t you?” They asked, seized with giggles.

“Well, yes. I guess so.”

“Good, we’ll put you in the relay race on the teachers’ team.”

When I am the first person chosen for a team in an athletic contest, there is something seriously wrong. It’s not as if we lack youthful, athletic faculty members on our staff. I haven’t run a basketball full speed down a court in a few years now. Obviously these people were not interested in winning. They were interested in rooking somebody into something and thereby saving themselves.

All this was clear, but what the heck? The whole point of this exercise would obviously be entertainment, not victory - thus the composition of the relay team. I considered hiding among the middle school students during the pep rally, but I was too busy finding the yearbook staffer who would be taking pictures and making sure he had the digital camera. So I was easy to spot and comandeer.

The relay was explained. Each of us would put his or her forehead on the end of a standing baseball bat and in that position circle the bat 5 times as fast as we could, then dribble to midcourt, pick up a rope and jump rope all the way back. As you will remember, there had previously been no mention of the bat or the circling or the jump rope.

I thought I went around the bat pretty fast. I thought I went around more times than people kept count of, but then I was getting very dizzy. I was handed the ball and began to dribble, running as fast as I could go. Problem was the ball was listing to the left, and I was listing to the right. I did not trip. I did not fall. I ran into the floor (or else it rose up to meet me, I’m not sure which). I’m told I slid most of the way to midcourt, but I was still too dizzy to apprehend the sliding. I did apprehend the uproarious laughter - mine and everybody else’s. The relief came at midcourt when I discovered I still know how to jump rope, not at any great speed, mind you, but at least without tripping on the rope.

Fortunately the yearbook staffer did not manage to capture the moment. As for Mr. G, I still have that picture of him he begged me not to put into the yearbook, and I do believe I can find a spot for it yet ;->.

It’s homecoming week at school. I’ve hosted banner-making parties in my classroom. I take tickets at the game tonight. We the yearbook staff have met our next-to-last (and biggest) deadline. I haven’t had a minute to grade papers after posting grades for progress reports late Sunday night, ensuring that I have hours of schoolwork to do this weekend.

Last night my watch stopped at 11:18 - dead battery. I checked my dresser drawer for my second watch this morning - that has stopped, too, one day or night at 9:27. I even checked the gold pendant watch my mother gave me once, which lies neglected in my fancy schmancy jewelry organizer for lesser treasures (a plastic ice cube tray). The pendant is supposed to look like a ladybug; the ladybug’s body has the requisite shiny spots, gold on gold. It’s just the size of those scarab beetles that burrow into people’s brains in movies we all remember. That’s stopped, too, at five minutes after 12:00.

I think the cosmos is trying to send me a message. Inner longing and pragmatic brain are debating its content. Inner longing crosses her arms and says, “Clearly, time should stop for a bit. Schedules should cease. You need a few days off the spinning hamster wheel of your life.” Pragmatic brain snorts in reply, “Nice try. Add ‘buy watch battery’ to your to-do list - that’ll be a trip to small-town Wal-Mart on Saturday morning for you, Sweetheart.” I crack their heads together like a couple of coconuts and say, “Who really needs a watch, anyway?”

But the clock on my laptop says it’s getting late. I need to get stuff into the car and the trash to the curb. TGIF.