Errands

Nicholson Baker’s debut novel, The Mezzanine, takes place, in its entirety, during a lunch hour escalator ride of an office worker who is returning from an errand to buy new shoelaces—if I recall correctly.  Several hundred pages of ruminations on all sorts of subjects unfold in this short span of time, demonstrating beautifully how our entire lives—inner lives, anyway—occur while we’re doing the most mundane of things.  These little errands make up the outward substance of our lives; meanwhile, all our thoughts, dreams, hopes, fears, memories, idle fantasies, and so comprise what’s happening on the inside.

That’s where the real juice is.

So, I try not to be too concerned that my summer days often involve nothing more than one or more small errands.  Maybe, from the outside, I do little else than cycle to the grocery store for coffee and butter, or pedal over to the library to return a book, but on the inside, lots is happening: I’m writing novels, solving the climate crisis, and coming up with a strategy to ensure that the Mariners will make the playoffs.  

You can’t see this happening, but it is.

Besides, after all, what else do most of us really do with our lives, anyway, other than run errands?  Sure, old Will Shakespeare wrote those plays, and Albert Einstein invented spacetime and the atom bomb, but didn’t they still have to buy toothpaste and dishwashing soap or its Elizabethan-slash-Edwardian era analogues?  And wouldn’t that be where they got their best thinking done?

Of late, I’ve spent a morning buying new tires for my daughter’s car; I’ve ridden to the one pharmacy in the entire Seattle area that sells Old Spice aftershave; I’ve pedaled across town to purchase handstand slabs for yoga from the Friendly Foam Shop; I’ve gone to the library at least a dozen times to pick up and drop off books; I’ve checked out a baseball card shop to see if they’d buy some collectable cards I inherited; I’ve gone shopping by bike almost every day; I’ve been to the wine shop, the fish store, the farmer’s market, the co-op, the supermarket, the Asian grocery, the Indian grocery, the liquor store, the weed dispensary, the bike shop, the optician, the medical clinic, the hardware store, the pet shop, the watch repairman, the barber, and even Trader Fucking Joe’s.

So many errands; so much thinking.