Best Of: Two Pure Moments

Any blogger worth his salt (six pounds of industrial-strength, car-rusting, boot-discoloring, ice-pulverizing road salt, in my case) simply must provide his dozens of readers with an ultra-authoritative best of list this time of year. I thought of taking the easy way out and culling 100 best album lists and cherry-picking the most obscure title off each and calling the result my uber hip list. But bah.

In a year filled with cluttering stress of gargantuan proportions (unemployment, The Decision [and the nadir of Cleveland sports suckitude], the deaths of J.D. Salinger and Alex Chilton, Oprah's pending retirement, etc.) I have never valued the zen moment, that briefest brush with purity, as much as I have this past year. Outside of the last three songs on Bob Dylan's Witmark Demos CD, the musical zens were few and far between. Literature provided a couple more: laughing riotously at some dense passage in Thomas Pynchon's Mason & Dixon, weeping at the end of David Mitchell's amazing Black Swan Green, being stopped cold by one sentence in Philip Roth's wonderful Nemesis.

But art, ultimately, is too pretentious. When I re-live the past year's great mini-moments, I am struck by the purity, the total self-possession, the sheer be-here-nowness of two utterances by two of my nephews. The first occurred on a golf course, a rather idyllic place for such nirvana. I was watching two of my nephews for a weekend, and ended up taking the eleven-year-old out for a game of golf on Saturday. As we waited on the eighth tee, I asked him about the next day-and-a-half, a question that came down to whether he wanted to go to church Saturday afternoon or Sunday morning (totally non-zen disclosure here: I was angling for him to say Sunday, so we could go watch the OSU-Miami football game). He pondered his options for a minute then reasoned: "If we go to mass today, I can take a shower today and one tomorrow after my soccer game. If we go to mass tomorrow, I'll have to take a shower before mass and then one after my soccer game. I don't want to have to take two showers in one day. So let's go to church today." Decision made. God, what a fortunate and wise soul! To be able to boil your life down to the need for (and the avoidance of) showers. I'm still in awe.

Another scene: two other nephews, one 18 the other 15. The fifteen-year-old has grown all year like a stalk of corn in a hot and wet Iowan summer. And he's skinnier than that stalk. Perhaps the only healthy being ever to possess negative body fat. He stands in the kitchen after a hard day's work caddying, clad in nothing but boxers. His older brother confronts him in the perfect older brother menacing way: "Either eat something or take a shower." Good God, what insight. To capture the essence of the moment, let alone the essence of teenage boyhood, in one concise, algebraic, imperative sentence. Send the young man up to the guru's perch high in the mountains immediately.

Simply the best. Two better moments in the spitoutyourgum world cannot be found. Wit, wisdom, clear language. The only thing missing is a soundtrack.