Whenever I see old-time pictures of Eskimos in igloos in the snow it always makes me wonder: Didn’t they know just miles away they wouldn’t have to freeze all day? Or is it that deep down they understood it to be their life’s mission and therefore somehow silently agreed to bear it at all costs? Is it fear of the unknown or just comfort in the known even if it’s below zero? Or sometimes this and at other times that?
The other day I got a call from a girl. “Everything’s going wrong. Bad group of friends bad financial situation not the greatest health.” She’s also contemplating moving. “That’s enough ” she says with trepidation. She tells me she’s “out of this place.”
At eight the next morning she calls again. “Forget everything I said it was just a hard day.”
I call a friend. “So what do you think about my Eskimo question?” I explain what I’m asking.
“Just because houses with heat are our image of what’s good for a person doesn’t mean that’s good for them ” she answers.
The other day I saw a woman I’ve known for years. I know she grew up the daughter of a millionaire with their own helicopter that landed on their roof in Washington. But when I saw her the other day she was walking down the street with an old granny cart. She was passing an alleyway where a new building was going up and as I watched her coming toward where I was standing I saw a man get out of a black extra-shiny Mercedes. I say extra-shiny because it’s hard to keep cars shiny in the desert and especially near construction sites.
So this man got out of the car and he had that look the “I’m a millionaire” look. The one that he doesn’t have to try hard to show because he’s just it. And I watched as my old friend passed him in the alleyway and she has that “I’m a millionaire” look too — although she was shlepping quite a load of heavy stuff in that cart and I happen to know that times are hard for her and her family refuses to help because she became religious and moved to Israel.
And the two of them standing in such close proximity to each other just makes the point. It screams out that that was supposed to be her life. And I think about the old-time Eskimos and didn’t they know that right around the corner they could have a house with a roof and heat? Have fruits and vegetables instead of whale all day long? And how my friend knows that across the globe she could have a helicopter carry those packages home for her. Yet she chooses to push the cart.
And I start all that wondering again about chance and destiny.
So I ask the first person who comes over to our house that day my son’s friend the Eskimo question and he answers “Same reason Chinese people still use chopsticks when they know the fork was already invented.”
And I laugh because somehow it says it all and even explains the Eskimos.—