The Tree Doesn't Fall Far from the Car

“If you find it hard to laugh at yourself, I would be happy to do it for you.”  - Groucho Marx

In my opinion, there are items necessary for survival, and then there are items necessary for sanity.  We pretty much share the survival items as a species: food, water, shelter and procreation.   The things we need for our individual sanity are more a reflection of our personalities, and while there’s overlap, we can each give or take a few.  My items of sanity (their order of importance waxes and wanes with the time of the month): music, books, chocolate, coffee, sarcasm, irony, banter, cynicism, satire, and sex.

Note: for those grown-up children of mine who might secretly be lurking on this blog – don’t worry – I’m not going to talk about the sex part.  Since there are five of you in all, one might argue that I took the procreation part a little too seriously, but then again, I truly didn’t count on getting two for the price of one at the tail end of it all.

No, today I’m thinking about sarcasm and its close relatives; irony, banter, cynicism and satire.

Actually, to be honest, I think about sarcasm most days.  I view the world through a lens of irony, banter facetiously, speak with a sarcastic overtone, act satirically, and listen with cynical ears.  Hell, I’ve even been known to play music with a sarcastic tone when the music is predictable, sappy or clichéd (i.e. John Williams).  Photoshop is my god of visual sarcasm: just the other night I spent way too many hours arranging my conductor’s face on an image of a Napoleon costume and posting it to my profile.  And my eyes – well, my mother used to warn me that my eyes would get stuck – rolling like that all the time.  Perhaps if they had, the next generation wouldn’t have refined the eye-roll to quite the art they have in retaliation.

My sarcastic nature is part of an overarching cynicism; a general suspicion about the world, and towards those of us who inhabit it.  I find biting humor and a blackly funny outlook necessary for sanity in a world that is often sad, and frequently ridiculous.  After all, if you anticipate the appearance of the dark side, you can’t be as disappointed when it arrives.  Which leaves you free to enjoy the humor of it all, by cutting it open with a sharply worded scalpel, and eviscerating the contents, piece after rotten piece.

Larry and I herald the frequent appearance of the dark side as “the tree falling on the car.”  This inside joke refers to an episode that took place thirteen or so years ago, when I was teaching preschool.  It was a windy, blustery spring day.  My car was parked in the parking lot behind the school – one of about twenty cars in the lot.  As we teachers stood shivering in the wind on the playground, watching the students run about and swing, a large gust of wind blew through, and we heard a giant cracking sound coming from the yard next to the school.  We watched incredulously as an enormous old maple – the kind with a trunk about three feet in diameter – proceeded to topple over the fence and into the parking lot.  Though our view of the parking lot was blocked by a number of trees, I was absolutely certain of the outcome.

“That tree just landed on my car.” I said, calmly. 

We walked through the playground and to the parking lot to see my Mercury Villager minivan completely crushed under the weight of the giant tree.  The cars parked on either side of me were, of course, completely unscathed. 

Now I do realize that there is nothing overtly ironic about a tree falling on a car.  It was a major, but straightforward annoyance.  And if I were one of those people who view the world optimistically, - a (gasp in horror) Positive Thinker - I could congratulate myself on the wonderful news that no one was in the car at the time the tree fell.  I could even, if I were a religious fundamentalist, be deluded into congratulating myself on saving my family from Death By Tree by embracing an almighty god, and tithing to his one and only church. 

But I truly believe that the potential irony of any given catastrophe is dependent upon one’s reaction to it.  I fully expect the tree to fall on my car, and plan my response accordingly, digging and sifting through the event for irony, sarcasm, and black humor when and wherever I can find it.

In this particular situation, the irony was in the details: of the twenty cars in the parking lot, nineteen were gleaming, foreign automobiles, mostly luxury models, dent and scratch free.  They belonged to the school’s upper class mothers, and a few teachers who began as upper class mothers and became teachers in order to maximize the amount of time they could spend hovering over their children.  I was the sole outlier: my secondhand minivan, with seventy-five thousand miles on it, bore the evidence of three small children.  The car was vibrantly decorated with chalk drawings and wobbly signatures, and the sides were covered with dents and scratches from madcap tricycle races in the driveway.   I was not in a position to afford the deductible on the car, much less new wheels.  That the enormous old tree picked my car to fall on was an example of situational irony that did not escape me at the time, and became the standard by which all other bleakly humorous episodes would be judged.

Sometimes, the falling tree is on the smaller side - small enough that the noise from its fall would be easy to miss, if you weren’t looking for it.  Just today, one of the passenger doors on my car (a Honda Pilot replaced the Villager) became mysteriously and permanently locked.  It will not open from the inside or the outside.  The Right-Side-Of-The-Car twin, Chloe, cannot be removed, or ejected from the vehicle, without crawling over the trash can, ten empty Peets coffee cups rolling around on the floor, and a giant book bin.

On the rear of my car, I have a bumper sticker that reads, “Honk if the twins fall out.”

And sometimes, the tree is so large that it could pass for a Giant Sequoia. 

Five years ago, I married a man who had no biological children of his own, and thought he might want one.  I, on the other hand, was long done with procreation, and perfectly happy with the three teenagers I had.  But I loved Larry dearly, and the desire to share something this important to him was strong. After seventeen years of child rearing and twenty years of teaching, I figured I had this parenting thing down.  “Hell, what’s one more?” I asked myself.   I reasoned to myself that the triple threat of a 42 year-old woman, a 51 year-old man, and no medical intervention wasn’t a particularly dangerous combination.  Why overanalyze the wisdom of an outcome not likely to transpire?

A whopping eight weeks after our wedding, I found myself lying on an examination table, my shirt tucked up under my arms, and my belly covered with goo.  Larry sat in a chair next to me, holding my hand.  An ultrasound technician, waving her magic wand over my abdomen, turned to my husband and said, “It’s a good thing you’re sitting down.” 

It’s been just over five years since that day, and four years and eight months since the twins were born.  Larry hasn’t sat down since.