The Math of Little Things

Friday, November 7, 2003
The Math of Little Things
By Jim Belshaw
Of the Albuquerque Journal

Ginny gets into the details of the black cloud that has lingered over her life for a few weeks. The frustration grows and her voice rises, cracks a little somewhere near tears, then settles back into anger. In the big picture, everything she talks about is a small thing- vandalism, boombox cars- the incivilities all around us.
As she talks, I try to locate the point at which a lot of little things become a big thing, the point at which you wonder how much more you can take.
She is 52. She lives alone. Someone paintballed her house on Halloween. Got it good.
"It was all over the sidewalk, the walls, eaves, roof, my herbs," she said. "There's an area on my garage the size of a lemon where the paintball hit so hard it detached the paint from the aluminum."
They paintballed her car and egged it, too. She was surprised that eggs could do so much damage. Leave an egg splattered on your car long enough and it will eat the paint.
She said the cops came four hours after she called. She said she understands priorities, but she is convinced they would have come sooner if she lived in a ritzy neighborhood.
I try to commiserate with her. I tell her I had a small taste of mindless vandalism last week at a football game. Of all the people I could park next to, I chose the ones who took a disliking to my car and smashed in the driver's side mirror and "keyed" the door.
"You know, the usual vandalism," I said to Ginny.
She didn't much care for the phrase.
"The usual vandalism?" she said. "Listen to you. 'The usual vandalism.' Is that where we're at now? It's so commonplace we just accept it?"
She said the cop thought it was probably kids. She didn't like that, either.
"Don't tell me they were just kids," she said. "Don't tell me they have greater stressors than you and I did when we were kids. We had the Cuban missile crisis and the Berlin Wall and the JFK assassination and Martin Luther King and Vietnam and Watergate. Don't tell me it's just kids."
She makes the rounds of body shops and insurance estimates now. She worries about being dropped by insurance companies. This will be the second claim on the car in a short period. A door was dinged up in a parking lot. She's called the Attorney General's Office about insurance companies.
As she speaks, I'm thinking about my car mirror- $37- and the scratch in my door. I bought some scratch goop at Pep Boys and it mostly faded the gouge. A small thing.
But as I worked in the goop, I wondered how much it would cost to repaint and what the insurance company might have to say when one of its lawyers pointed out a small paragraph only lawyers read.
Ginny told the cop she was thinking about getting a gun.
"I was mad," she said. "I'm tired of being violated. The police aren't there when I need them. I used to think of them as the fine line between anarchy and safety. I don't think of them that way anymore."
Then she laughs and says, "But I can't do it (get a gun). I'm a Buddhist."
She says she is sick over the worry about the insurance; she is sick over the worry about the car damage.
She says the neighborhood is deteriorating. It used to be that only one "boombox car" rattled windows. Now there are three.
"Look, I'm not profoundly insightful," she said. "I'm not the Dalai Lama, I'm not Christ, I'm not the Buddha. But it seems to me that being kind lasts longer, takes less energy and makes you feel a lot better. Being cruel like this is like an itch you have to scratch. You have to do it over and over. And they're getting away with it."
It's hard to tell when little things become a big thing. It's hard to tell how long it will last and how you'll get past it.
"I'm on my own," she said. "And so are you, my friend."