That is how I actually think, after all: If something is in the future, I can plan to do it because it's in the future. That's the flip-side to my wanting to do stuff now when I have energy: I can plan to do anything in the future, because it's not now, so I don't have to worry about whether I'll have the energy or the time to do it, and I don't have to worry about things like "Are you really going to take a couple of two-year-olds to Florida on a plane," which, if you don't bother to think about that, makes it amazingly easy to use your tax refund to sign you and your family up for a package-vacation you bought online at a discount while your wife and the older kids were out at a movie and you were babysitting the then-one-year olds: After all, the vacation itself was nearly a year away, so I could worry about things like "two year olds, especially mine, don't travel well" and "how to tell Sweetie I just blew $2,000 but at least we'll have a rental minivan out of it" later on.
I plan
all kinds of things for the future, and then am dismayed when the future arrives and I'm expected to
do those things. I'll say things like "
Sure, that's okay that you said your family can come here for ice cream and cake to celebrate the twins' birthday the Sunday night before their birthday" because "
the Sunday night before their birthday" might as well be Earth
Two, for all the likelihood I place on ever seeing it, but then suddenly it's
there and I'm assembling a wagon with my brother-in-law.
Long story.
So when I emailed back to the director of the Autism Society that "
Sure, I'll go ahead and volunteer that Sunday," I was being sincere in wanting to volunteer and also being sincere in thinking "
that Sunday" was never going to get here, but
get here it did, and there I was, confronted with the fact that at 11:00 a.m. I was expected to be at an apple farm somewhere near Madison, and also confronted with the fact that it was Sunday morning and what I really wanted to do (in order) was (a)
nothing, (b)
nothing, plus
have a second toaster-based breakfast pastry, or (c) incorporate that
toaster-based breakfast pastry idea into
also, take the boys downtown to watch the start of the Iron Man race.
The Iron Man race was in Madison that day, see, and I thought it would be neat to take the boys to watch a bunch of superfit people who I secretly way down deep hate with a burning passion for how healthy they are jump into Lake Monona and swim around in it for a while b
efore they went off to run an entire marathon.
I thought we could also stop at McDonald's for lunch.
But I couldn't do
any of those things because I had promised to be a
good person and volunteer for the Autism Society at an apple farm, and who ever
heard of such a thing, really? As I got ready to drive down there -- me in one car, Sweetie and the boys in the other, so that we could take them to the apple farm before I actually had to volunteer-- I found it actually amazing to me that apples grew on
farms, let alone that apples grew on
farms around where I lived.Don't get me wrong: I know all about apple farming, in that I read
The Cider House Rules and also maybe saw the movie with Sweetie. I say "
maybe" because, to be honest, I get a little confused about which movies I've seen and which I haven't. In fact, more and more, I get confused about, well,
everything, as evidenced by this conversation I had with Sweetie about the outfit she wore when we went to our friends' house Friday night. It was the next morning and it went like this:
Me:
I really liked that outfit you wore. You looked pretty.Sweetie:
What did you like about it?Me: [thinking for a minute]:
I'm not sure. What did you wear again?Sweetie:
A tiger-striped sweater and red shirt and jeans.Me:
No, you had on a striped shirt. It was red-and-white stripes, horizontal. I liked it.Sweetie:
That's not what I wore.So when I say I
might have seen the movie version of
The Cider House Rules, that's exactly what I mean, because in
my life, I:
1. could have actually seen the movie but forgot that I did.
2. could have dreamed that I saw the movie and taken that as a real memory years later
3. could have
intended to see the movie and eventually just assumed that since I
meant to do it, it had gotten done. (See also: housework, and "stuff I'm supposed to do at my job.")
But based on for-sure reading
The Cider House Rules, I know exactly how apple farm
s work provided that all apple farms employ Tobey Maguire and also are chock full of symbolism. I just never thought there were apple farms
around where I live, but, then, I'm surprised that
anything grows where I live because I live in Wisconsin, where it's winter more or less year-round except for two weeks in the summer when Wisconsin is connected directly to the surface of the sun and people drop in the streets from heat exhaustion.
So until that Sunday morning driving out to the actual apple farm... or
orchard, as we apple-pros call it ... I'd never really given any thought to the fact that there might be actual apple farms/orchards around me, even though one time in fact Sweetie and I had taken the twins to an apple farm near our house to pick apples; I'd just assumed that was a tourist trap fake apple farm set up to lure in city slickers like me with the promise of a rustic fall afternoon.
But EpleGaarden, as the apple farm was called in that language that I secretly get annoyed with people for speaking because I don't like it when people act all old-worldy, was a real apple farm with real apples and a barn and a little pathway up into the orchards where people could go pick apples, for fun (and by paying money) and where they also had two goats that would walk up to the fence and look at you as you walked by, something we discovered when we got there.
We got out of the car and looked out at the scene -- a red barn, a little apple store, some people sitting around fields of things that other people would pick and put in grocery stores, where I would buy them and eventually they would go rotten sitting in my refrigerator ("
The Life Cycle Of Healthy Food, by Briane Pagel") -- and I said hello to the director of the society, letting him know I was here, and
early -- I like to get credit not just for doing what I say I'm going to do, but also for doing it
punctually -- and then we tried to figure out just what it is you do on an apple farm when you're trying to kill time before you volunteer.
What you do, on that apple farm, if you're us, is you walk up the pathway a little to where the goats are, and you have Mr Bunches pull some grass up to feed the goats, because this apple farm hasn't provided anyone to sell us little cones of goat food the way a truly
classy apple farm would. But the goats were more than happy to get the grass, because goats are stupid and didn't realize that the grass just
outside the fence, held up by Mr Bunches so that the goats could stick their mouths through the fence and awkwardly eat it, was the same as the grass
inside the fence.
Mr Bunches, then, was happy to feed the goats, but Mr F took issue with that and began
trying to stop the goats from eating the grass, going up to them and pulling the grass from their mouths as they were chewing it, which was really remarkable in that Mr F is usually afraid of animals -- all animals, including "
Scrotsby," which is what Mr Bunches used to call Middle Daughter's elderly cat (real name:
Scruffy), a cat that was more of a stuffed animal than a living cat really, but that didn't matter because Mr F was afraid of
Scrotsby,
too. For whatever reason, Mr F was
not afraid of the goats at EpleGaarden, but he was determined to
not them eat the grass on this side of the fence, and kept trying to pull the grass out of the goats' mouths until we decided that was enough apple farm fun for the boys and anyway, it was almost 11 o'clock and I had to report for volunteer duty.
After a quick sweep through the shop to see what was in there --
surprise! It was apples! -- Sweetie and the boys headed out to their day of relaxation and probably french fries from McDonald's while I went off to save my soul by heading up, I imagined, the table where people could get pamphlets, or maybe the thing where the kids could try to toss wooden blocks through a hole in a board.
Surprise! again! I wasn't doing that
at all. While I was waiting for all the volunteers to gather around, I'd been thinking that the worst thing they could have me do was man the
face painting table because I'm not much of an artist, and I didn't want kids disappointed that the apple on their face looked more like a big bruise, or a ghost, although I figured actually I probably
could paint a ghost on a kid's face, if that was required of me.
But it turns out that the worst possible job wasn't
face painting at all; it was
apple-ing, or whatever it is the official apple farm people call what it was that I and some other volunteers were going to do that day.
The deal, unbeknownst to
me prior to volunteering at EpleGaarden that day, was that for every hour a volunteer worked, the orchard would donate $12 to the Autism Society. The deal, in return, was that volunteers, like me, would be, you know,
working.So in a matter of moments, I learned that I was
not going to be painting faces or handing out brochures. I would be
sorting apples.The head of the orchard, a guy who goes by the name of
Rami, although that may not be how he spells it, was told by the head of the Autism Society that me and another guy were his workers, and Rami quickly took us off to where we were told we'd be sorting apples into bags -- moving apples from a crate of apples to the bag of apples, or perhaps a nearby bin based on our judgment.
Our judgment! A couple of rank amateurs who'd been in the apple business only
minutes, and who just seconds before being drafted into the apple business had been potential face painters!
The task was to take crates of apples that had been deemed
number twos and sort them out. To understand what that means and stop people who, like me, snorted a little at
number two from doing that, you'll have to understand how apples are classified, and so I will share with you my inside knowledge of
How Apples Are Classified:An Essay, By Briane PagelApples are classified by number. There are number 1s, and number 2s. A number 1 is a good apple, the kind of apple you would want to eat if you saw it in a store and were the kind of person who likes apples. A number 2 is any apple that's not a number 1. You would not buy a number 2 apple if you saw it in the store, unless you're the kind of person who does that sort of thing. You know, the kind of person who might go to the Humane Society to get a kitten, only then you get all softhearted and adopt that old, blind Basset Hound? We almost did that, once, when we went to the pet store to get a kitten and were briefly sidetracked by a full-grown cat named Lily that had been returned to the pet store, and we felt sorry for Lily and were going to buy her, instead, but the pet store owner told us that Lily was not good with children, and as we have a lot of children -- I'm too busy to count them all -- we didn't buy Lily after all but instead got Herman The Wonder Kitten, and look how that turned out for us. (Not very well.)
Also, number 1 apples are the kind without bruises at all and without too many blemishes on them.
So for our first job, me and this old guy had to take apples that had been pre-sorted, whole crates of
number 2s, and sort them a little further by deciding which ones were
sauce apples and which ones were
cider apples, a sorting that was done by picking out the
really small apples and putting them in a different crate while taking the rest of the only-kind-of-small number 2 apples and putting them into paper bags, the idea being that some apples were so small that you wouldn't want to waste time turning them into apple sauce because it would take effort to peel them but you wouldn't get hardly any sauce out of them. (Or so I imagined. I didn't ask Rami, as for some reason I felt embarrassed to not know anything about apples or what they were used for. I don't know
why I felt I
should know those things, except that something like 60% of my life was spent in school, and I'll be paying student loans for the rest of my life, so I feel like after all that money and time I should know, well,
everything.)
Me and the old guy began doing that, and the old guy was really very good at it, whereas I was not really very good at it at all but I tried my hardest to
be really good at it, and pretty soon we had two crates of
cider apples and a bunch of bags we'd made up to put on the shelves of the apple store for people to buy and make their own apple sauce because apparently people
do that even though giant jars of applesauce at the grocery store are like
one dollar and also at the store you can buy applesauce flavored to taste like just about every other kind of fruit.
Then we had nothing to do for a few minutes until Rami came back and gave us even
more to do.
What we had to do next was to sort apples into
1s and
2s -- crate after crate of apple that we had to go through and decide if they were
1s or
2s and treat them accordingly by putting them into
this crate or
that crate, or, as you'll see in a minute,
a plastic bag -- and that's where we learned what a
1 or a
2 was, and also what kind of apples we were working with. The apples had an actual name that Rami told me, but I can't remember what kind they were, so let's just say that Rami told me the apples were "
green apples," even though every time I hear the words
green apples all I can think of is that old song:
God didn't make
no little green apples
And it don't rain
In Indianapolis
in the summertime.
That's all I know of that song, which is a nice song but it kind of implies that green apples are a tool of the Devil, like fossils, so I've always been a little suspicious of green apples.
Sorting the green apples, as we're pretending Rami called them, involved using a
machine, which, quite honestly, was
awesome and made me love America.
The machine is not very hard to describe. It's a big conveyor belt, and you pour apples into one end of it and they then travel down the belt until they fall out one chute or another -- little apples getting pushed aside early on, bigger apples traveling farther until they get put into one of three large circular areas where they can be further sorted out. Along the conveyor belt are rollers so the apples don't get all bruise-y, and then things that look like those six-pack containers you're not supposed to use because they kill sea lions, only a whole chain of them, that carry apples of a certain diameter but let smaller apples fall through.
The machine looked like this:
That's taken from the start of the machine, and what you do is you take a big crate of apples and pour it into the start of the machine, using a special kind of lifting platform with a canvas cover on it that helps the apples not go all pouring out at once all over the place.
That was
my job. Rami put
me in charge of taking the crates and pouring them on there, a position of power which meant that not only was
I, and
I alone, charged with determining
when to add another crate -- you don't want to put
too many in there or the apples pile up, but too little and your workers have nothing to do and will eventually revolt -- but also I was in charge of monitoring the small-apples crates along the side to make sure they didn't overflow
and I got to hit the switch on the wall that started and stopped the conveyor belt.
I'm pretty sure that Rami had sized me up and said "
this is a guy who's clearly a leader" and that's why he chose me. Plus, I was on the side of the switch and at least 20 years younger than my two coworkers, the old guy and the lady with the crazy bandanna who had
also volunteered but who had arrived
late because she wasn't as good a volunteer as I am.
And so we began: I dumped some crates of apples, got them rolling down the chutes, and moved over to my circular area, where I decided to take my responsibilities
very seriously. I eyed up those apples with a keen stare, determined that
nobody was going to get saddled with a
number 2 green apple in the grocery store. I pictured a housewife walking through a produce section, planning on getting some apples for the kids to use in school lunches, and heading over there, only to pick up what she
assumed was a number 1 apple, only
there it was: a blemish! marring the surface! She'd put the apple down and go get Twix bars and America would end up communist.
I was very big on America that day, not only because it was September 11th and there'd been a moment of silence before we began all this but also because, as I said, I was
way impressed by the apple machine and the ingenuity it represented. I imagined that for years, apple workers had had to bend over crates and laboriously make these judgments themselves, sorting the apples by
small,
medium, and
large, with everything all haphazard and slow moving, but then one day, the Eli Whitney of apples had come up with the sorting belt and from then on, America took its place as (I imagined) the number 1 apple-producing country in the world. That's the kind of effect things like the apple sorting machine have on me, especially when I'm already impressed with my own general goodness as a person, giving up a beautiful Sunday afternoon when I could have been eating a McFlurry and watching people compete in athletic endeavors to go and volunteer
my time helping
others.
So I
worked it, and for twenty minutes or so, I was a whirling dervish of appledom: Sorting, moving crates, flicking the switch, helping others. I thought to myself "
This isn't so bad. Not a bad way to spend some time."
After twenty minutes, I was
exhausted. And I still had over an hour to go. I stopped thinking
"This isn't so bad" and instead wondered how people do this
all day long every day for a living, and decided that from here on out, my stance on immigration was going to be
even more liberal, because if sneaking across our borders to do
this kind of work was worth it, then how bad were their lives back home?
(I should note: I had it easy. Other volunteers who were also not assigned to face-painting were assigned to
pick gourds. Did you know that gourds
actually grow? I didn't, either; I just assumed that all those dried gourds got passed around from craft fair to craft fair and that they had all been produced at some point in the past, by pioneers, maybe, because pioneers did a lot of crazy things like building houses out of sod. But it turns out that gourds are grown, as I quote from the North Carolina Gourd Society's "Tips On Growing Gourds":
Gourd vines don't have to be trained. They climb as naturally as monkeys.
Good to know. The other volunteers had to go out into the fields and pick gourds off the vines on the ground, and it was
hot -- mid 70s, which was no picnic inside the barn but at least we were in the shade and not crawling through gourd vines, which I assume are covered with spines because 90% of nature is covered with spines.)
The other thing going through my head, after about an hour, was "
Man, apples really do have a smell." "Scent" is not something I usually associated with apples; sure, I knew that apples smelled like
apples, but it's not like you
smell apples, easily. Nobody ever walks into a house and says "
Hey, did you just eat an apple?"
But in the apple warehouse where we were, the apples outnumbered us by a ratio of probably 1,000 -to-1, and so you could
smell the apples. You could practically
taste the apples, when you breathed, but by the time I came to that realization, I'm going to be honest with you:
I hated the apples.I'd been there an hour, plus, and all I'd done was
see and
smell and
think about apples, and that time probably equaled the total amount of apple-ing I'd done in my
entire life, plus I was getting a little tired and my hands were kind of sore because, let's face it, I'm not in good shape
at all.
But I kept at it: sorting apples, pouring apples, deciding which apples were
2s or
1s, helping bag the smaller apples into plastic bags so that you could buy three pounds of smaller apples all at once instead of having to pick and choose them, because a
deal is a deal and also I didn't want to be
that guy who walked out on volunteering for autism.
Then I got a change of pace: Rami, perhaps sensing that my apple-thusiasm was flagging but still wanting to take advantage of my natural leadership qualities, asked me if I could do something else for him.
I resisted the urge to check my watch, and said "
Sure, what is it?"
"
You know how to use one of these?" he asked, pointing to a handcart.
"
Sure," I said, because I did.
Rami looked at me. Have you ever actually had someone size you up to see if you're lying? I did, right then, and I failed.
"
You sure?" he asked.
"
Yes," I said, and thought of a way to
prove I knew how to use a handtruck. Then I said: "
My dad used to be a delivery guy for Coca Cola, and I would help him haul soda on these on the weekends when I was a kid."
That's true. It's absolutely true, and even though I hated it as a kid, I suddenly realized that all that
character-building and
not-watching-Saturday-morning-cartoons-this-week had paid off, in that I was able to convince a guy that I was capable of doing a job I really didn't want to do -- and the kind of job I'd specifically gone to college and then law school to
avoid doing.
Rami looked at me again, and said "
Well, okay," which is not a ringing endorsement of the kind of confident authority I'd hoped to be projecting, but whatever. He took me over to the cooler over by the other barn, and pointed to stacks and stacks of apples -- we'll say, again, that he called them
green apples -- in the sun, and said:
"
We've got to get these apples out of the sun and into the cooler." He showed me where the cooler was and pointed out where I should stack them,
six crates high, and then showed me again where the apples were, and then showed me again where to stack them.
(Rami was clearly impressed by me.)
Rami then pointed out that on the hand cart, I could only stack the crates
four high, and gave me further indication of his assessment of my abilities by saying this exact quote:
"
So you'll have to haul them in four at a time
, and then stack them six high
, which means you can haul four in and then haul another four, and take two off that second load and complete the six-crate stack, then do that with the next one, too. So they're all six high. Got it?"
I assured Rami that I understood what he was driving at, and he looked at me for a second longer and then
almost visibly decided that I probably couldn't do much harm here, and said "
All right then," and began to walk away, but he stopped a few feet away and said "
Just haul four at a time," and then left me to haul four at a time into the cooler, which was actually nice because by then it felt like it was about a hundred degrees outside and I was pretty sweaty, which I found surprising because I work out 2 or 3 times a week, but, then, maybe jogging slowly on a treadmill while watching
South Park doesn't really put you into Olympic-caliber physical fitness.
I noted that the
other stacks of crates in the cooler were
way taller than just six, and debated whether I should try to impress Rami by going ahead and stacking the crates up as high as the
professional apple-ers did, but decided against it for three reasons:
First, I thought there might be something about
this particular kind of green apple that it ought not to be stacked more than six high. Improbable, but still...
Second, just lifting the crates up
six high was nearly impossible for me, as I'm not what you'd call "
strong," and
Third, I didn't want Rami to think that I'd actually
not understood what he said when he said to stack them
six high.
So I went six-high and kept doing that until I finished, even though that took me
past one p.m., and I'd only formally committed to an 11-1 shift, so by the time I was done with the stacks I'd
more than done my duty to Rami, and autism, and apples, and decided that I'd find the head of the society and let him know I was heading out.
Sweaty and tired, I saw Rami coming towards me, and thinking quickly, said "
Well, that's it for me, Rami! Thanks!" before he could guilt me into doing more work for him, but Rami didn't even
try.
"
Okay, thanks for coming out," he said, and that made me kind of upset, in that I thought I'd done a pretty good job, so
why wouldn't he at least try to get me to do more work? I mean, I
wasn't going to, but would it kill him to at least take a shot at it?
Before I could do something stupid, like volunteer for
more work just to prove to Rami that I
could, I decided I'd best get going, because I'd done what I came there for, after all. And even though I paid a heavy price for my volunteering, in that I would be sore and stiff for almost two days after my Apple-venture, I felt it was worth it, because not only was it all for a good cause, but I'd also gotten out of doing any of my
own work that day. Which made it
win-win, unless you think about that, which I adamantly did
not do. So:
win-win.This isn't a paid thing at all, but I thought it important to mention: You can find out more about the Autism Society of Greater Madison by clicking this link. And they will give you a t-shirt if you sign up!
n spun off its own chore, in that while cleaning the closet we found (I'm not making this up) two giant tubs full of pictures, and not just pictures but art projects and photo albums and old school projects from the kids that if you just throw them away someday you're going to have a 40-year-old Oldest Daughter crying on Christmas Eve and saying "You never loved me, that's why you through away the picture of the panther I drew in ninth grade art class" which meant that after finishing the closet, I now had "organize photos" as a new project, and the list of chores around the house had not gotten any shorter, plus there was the distinct prospect that each new chore would spawn its own set of other related chores.
