I Think I'm Going to Call the Deli About This Bread

One night I was drinking at a bar with a friend of mine and the topic of CPR came up. He mentioned that he wouldn't feel comfortable doing it, to which I responded opposite. Not that I would ever want to perform CPR on someone, but I would feel a little better if I did it than if the average person did. This is to say nothing of my supposed skill at it, but I've done at least three separate CPR training sessions in my adult life and I really do feel like I'm roughly above mean in resuscitation acumen. I've considered before whether this isn't truly the case, that what if all the training really did was make you, not necessarily skilled or even baseline competent at chest compressions, but rather simply more likely to act. Cardiac arrest seems like one of those things where doing something is going to be better than doing nothing.

All that aside, the next day I was sitting in my apartment when I got a concerned call. A family member had been on the phone with my 86-year-old great uncle and he had seemed like he suddenly could neither breathe nor talk. So I rushed over to his unit (we live in the same building) and throughout the whole wait for the elevator I'm simultaneously dreading the absolute worst and trying to get myself amped up in case I have to put my money where my mouth was and attempt to breathe life into Uncle Louis for the ~5 minutes it would probably take for paramedics to arrive.

I never did have to test my mettle that day because when I entered his apartment, he was sitting on his couch eating a sandwich, watching basketball. All seemed well until I noticed his face was absolutely drenched in what I had thought was sweat. But it wasn't.

"Oil." He said. "I've found that oil is the best moisturizer. I think I'm going to call the deli, the bread is stale."^[1]

I was and remain relieved that when I arrived at Uncle Louis's joint, he was not lying unresponsive on the floor. And here's the thing: I didn't even have a key to his unit, so even if the worst had been true, it wasn't like I could have done anything, anyway. The question then must be whether the distinction between being skilled at something or merely willing to act matters at all if there was always going to be something blocking the path to action.

Imagine my goal is to make an omelet, but I have no eggs. If eggs exist anywhere in this world, whatever it would take to obtain them is well beyond my means. As a result, I cannot make an omelet.

A more dramatic example: You decide today that you want to go on a date with Lorna Doone. You are neither completely revolting nor lacking in courage.^[2] Just as you're about to cross the rubicon to her house and knock on her door (in an old-fashioned way rather than a creepy one), a meteor falls from the sky, destroying her house and permanently incapacitating Ms. Doone.

Nothing that had anything to do with your conduct mattered at all. That meteor was coming whether or not you had remembered to pluck your unibrow that morning.

A decade ago, I lost a job via circumstances that, at the time, I could rationalize only as having little if anything to do with my conduct or character. Even if this were not really the case, I am possessed of merely enough introspection to understand that if my conduct or character truly were implicated, I simply lacked the capacity to be any way other than the way that I was.

The next day, Uncle Louis took me out to dinner at his favorite, Very Famous Italian restaurant. We're standing at the bar waiting for our table and I'm telling him all about what had happened at work the day prior. There's this cacophony of Billy Joel playing over the jukebox and I'm utterly distraught as we sit down at the table and he starts barking instructions at the server. I don't remember what he ordered— meatballs, probably a bottle of red wine. Midway through he turns and points out that Bo Dietl was seated nearby and "Wow! Look at that woman he's with. Is that Carol Alt? She looks great."

Suddenly the maitre d' is sitting next to me in the booth with his arm around my shoulder explaining what was for dinner because that's apparently just how they did things there and I didn't understand because I thought Uncle Louis was already ordering with the other guy who wasn't listening to him because he had the Yankee game playing in his earpiece.

It didn't really matter what we ordered anyways because it's always some configuration of red sauce and pasta; the distinctions between most classic Italian-American dishes are, at best, academic.^[3]

Midway through his gastronomical soliloquy the Uncle turns and speaks directly to me:

"There is no lesson to be learned here. Move on."

Uncle Louis was right— there just isn't always going to be something to glean. Sometimes meteors fall, or you can't help but be who you are. You would similarly be unable to summon the hysterical strength necessary to tear down your uncle's door should the occasion warrant such conduct.

But it could be that one day there does come a time when the path to action is unobstructed. That the door is unlocked and something requiring your attention will be lying there just on the other side. What would you do then? Just let things go the other way?