No, Really

We have a move in date!  Don't laugh.

The Tyranny of Choice

I have in my hand one of those paint-swatch “wheels,” that gather together a manufacturer’s offerings in one handy – and utterly bewildering – place.

            This particular wheel comes from Benjamin Moore.  Each of these gathered swatch cards shows seven related colors, moving across an effectively infinite spectrum.  There are well over 200 cards in this wheel representing several different collections – the Historical Colors collection, the America’s Colors collection, Organic Colors, Inorganic Colors, and others. 

This inventory, then, which does not even constitute the entirety of this one maker’s wares alone, includes more than 1,500 hues, many of them almost indistinguishable from the one before or on the next card or in another collection with a different set of themed names.

There is an entire collection of just Off Whites – because, of course, “White Ice” is nothing like “Icicle,” which is so very distinct from “Ice Mist,” which only a blind-ass fool could mistake for “Glacier”.

Now, I’m sure these shades are, in fact, demonstrably different. I’m confident science possesses instruments fine enough to measure these distinctions.  And, to be fair, I actually can see them with the unaided eye.  Really.  But only when they’re right next to one another and only when we’re engaged in the fool’s errand of trying to choose just the right thing.  Were the paint store to accidentally give us “White Heron” instead of  “White Dove,” we’d never know the difference once it was on the wall, and it would have no effect whatsoever on our lives.

Yet we struggle to get it just right.  The perfect shade for each room – to go with the floors, the furniture, the rugs.  To set the right mood.  To complement the next room over.

The mathematical possibilities created by the absurd overabundance of colors available render it, for all practical purposes, impossible to achieve the perfection desired.  And the confusion is worsened by the multiplicity of makers, times the proliferation of “bespoke” pigmenteers, marketers who merely put their name on a subset of colors undoubtedly already offered by other sellers under other names – but in less appealing brochures at much less reassuringly exclusive prices.

            The futility of the whole exercise is further compounded by the nature of light and color itself. The “Wickham Grey” we picked for the entry hall and stairwell – which, in the sample we chose from looked, you know, grey – looks bluish over here and greenish over there, depending on whether it’s receiving natural or artificial light, what it’s next to, and what you had for lunch. 

            Our friend Justin captured this dilemma long ago.  Having grown up in Jamaica, Sweden, and the U.K., he was entirely overwhelmed by the staggering amount of variety he was confronted with everywhere he turned in the States. The act of ordering lunch, simple where he’d grown up with only a reasonable range of options, became a labor under the imperative of making the best possible order out of an ever-expanding universe of choices.  The implied potential of enjoying the single, perfect sandwich made the threat of ending up with a merely good one unbearable.

Ironically, the freedom to choose exactly what you want makes you a slave to the tyranny of increasingly fine distinctions.  Please, let me choose between just drawer pulls A, B, and C. I simply don’t need the combination of styles, variations on said styles, colors and materials to make me sift through nano-differences up to ZZZ₁₀.

I’m sure it’s un-American to suggest that one’s freedom of choice should be so infringed. But I can’t help thinking that liberty might be better used in some other pursuit than parsing out the ontological implications of the Dakota Round Knob versus the Dakota Button Knob. 

The Myth of Tantalus

The myth of Sisyphus, that devastatingly concise reduction of the drudgery and futility of ongoing existence, is well known – in part because he had a good modern publicist in Camus, but also because his grim experience is immediately understandable to us all.  We all put in our time behind that boulder.

Less frequently invoked is the tale of Tantalus. For his crimes – and biggies they were – he was punished in Tartarus with unending dissatisfaction, the objects of his desire forever just out of reach. He was immersed up to his neck in water, but when he bent to drink, it drained away; luscious fruit hung on trees above him, but when he stretched for it the winds blew the branches away from him. His suffering was not for nought, however, as it gave us the splendid word, “tantalize,” meaning “to torment with the sight of something desired but out of reach; tease by arousing expectations that are repeatedly disappointed.”

Which brings us to the end game of our project.  They’ve made terrific progress.  So much so that it’s now all in sight.  It seems as though there are just a handful of items left to tick and we can move right in.  Yet . . . yet . . .

Somehow, there’s still a good month to go.  The garage is full of appliances waiting to be installed.  The walls are primed and ready to paint.  The countertops are being cut.  It seems that a concerted week’s worth would get us there.

But no.  This has to happen before that, and things need to dry, and inspectors have to come, and they actually have some other jobs than ours to worry about, too. So, it’s a month.

We really haven’t room to complain, actually.  Jefferson originally said eight months, and that’s just what it’ll be if we’re in by the end of March, as it appears we will be.  As always, it’s the wishing that gets you.  It seemed like we might be in earlier, therefore it’s a loss when we aren’t.  Self-inflicted, of course.  As John Cleese said in the little remembered “Clockwise,” (1986) in which he portrayed an English school headmaster, thwarted at every turn as he simply tries to travel to receive a longed-for award: “It’s not the despair.  I can take the despair.  It’s the hope I can’t stand.” 

If Jefferson had said 10 months, we’d think ourselves lucky right now and be absolutely delighted with the progress.  Since he said eight we hoped for seven, and it’s the anxiety of the race, instead.

But we’re close.  Tantalizingly.

O, Pioneers

Appeared in Pioneer Press newspapers,
December 23, 2011

“Every church has at least one Grand Lady,” wrote Pastor McPeek of the Millburn Congregational Church, “a person whose wisdom, wit, generosity and dedication is an inspiration to everyone.  At Millburn we are fortunate to have several women who qualify for that title.  Certainly Beatrice Anderson, leader, worker, historian, and inspiration, qualifies for our title of first grand lady and gracious friend.”

Mrs. Anderson was the longest resident of our new old home, occupying it for some 60 years. And she seems to have been the very spirit of the town, having seen, and embodied, so much of its history.  She also wrote that history, as one of the area’s foremost chroniclers (of, apparently, two).

She was born Beatrice Low in 1897 in Waukegan, where Low Avenue commemorates her family’s early connection to Lake County.  Her mother was a member of the Bonner family, among the county’s original settlers (also recognized in our geography, with Bonner Road in Wauconda, among other commemorations). 

She purchased the house from its builders, the Strang family, the original thanes of Millburn, which was first known as Strang’s Settlement or Strang’s Corners.  The name Millburn – Scots for mill creek, the current name of the waterway that trickles through our land – was suggested by George Trotter, whose daughter, Helen, married Jake Strang, builder of our house.  Beatrice sold the house to Bonner relatives, from whom we bought it.

According to Beatrice’s history (which can be found on the Web site of the Historic Millburn Community Association: http://www.hmca-il.org/default.htm), many of the early Scots and German settlers of the area, headed west long before Horace Greeley’s exhortation, fleeing New England’s economic Panic of 1837.  They arrived in Lake County, then populated primarily by the Potawatomi tribe, found in it rich soil, game and fish, and began building. By 1856 the Strangs, who came south from Canada, were prosperous enough to construct the fine brick store at the corner of what are now Grass Lake Road and Route 45 – the epicenter of the famed Millburn Strangler -- as well as our house which, as Esther Foster, the area’s other historian, describes it, “stands beside the stream [Mill Creek] in nineteenth century magnificence today.”

I thank Mrs. Foster for the kind words, but “magnificence” may be a stretch.  It is, as the song says, a very, very, very fine house – strong and honest, lovely in a way that bespeaks good character.  Its building signaled, perhaps, the end of the town’s frontier days and a new degree of establishment and prosperity.  But it’s very much a provincial beauty; one that speaks to its time and circumstances, the people who made it, the way they thought and the things they valued, foremost among which were commitment and perseverance.  They built a house that, 150 years later, is standing strong and still telling their story.

So, we’ve set down new roots among the deep ones of these families that pioneered this area.  A different kind of pioneer, meanwhile, is pulling its roots up, as the Pioneer Press newspaper chain, unfortunately, is discontinuing its North Group of papers, serving the communities around Old Mill Creek – Gurnee, Grayslake, Lake Villa and Antioch. 

And that, too, is in the pioneer tradition.  The Strangs and their neighbors came here out of economic necessity; in another difficult time, Pioneer Press is leaving for the same reason.  It’s a pity these towns will be left without the papers that helped form their identities and gave them a sense of community.  But I suspect that gap will be filled before long

Personally, I’ll emulate the original settlers who came here and stuck it out – the Strangs and Bonners, and, especially, Beatrice Anderson, the teller of the tale.  While this will be the last installment of this column to appear before this paper is shuttered, I’ll continue it online.  If you’re interested in coming along, please join me online at http://talesoftumbledownfarm.blogspot.com/.  Hope to see you there.