My Role in Society

Darrel came into my room. “You sleep with a bag on your head most of the day,” he said. We stared at each other a moment. “What?” “You sleep with a bag on your head most of the day,” he said. “A few hours a day I take it off and talk to you and you can have lunch. The rest of the time you sleep with the bag on your head. That’s your role in society.” No one—no one at work, none of my friends, certainly no one in my family—had said anything about this to me. I asked Darrel if he was being literal. “Absolutely,” he said, putting a bag over my head.

My wife was a very dear woman who went to swim classes where, no matter how correctly and forcefully she performed the classic swimming movements, she stayed in one spot in the pool. The instructor worked with her constantly, but she could not move through the water. Toward the end of class, to save her from too much frustration, the instructor would tow her a little way while she swam, on the principle that perhaps momentum might help click into place whatever was so stubbornly not clicking into place. It did not. On the day of the diving test, she struggled aimlessly at the surface. No one could diagnose the exact difficulty, but everyone involved wanted to overcome it. More and more of my wife’s time was devoted to swimming lessons. “You’re so busy anyway,” she said, “with that bag on your head all the time.”

A priest came to visit me. He was there to comfort me and I was eager to be comforted. He told me he’d had a headache his entire life. Literally, from the second he was born, and so he had no idea that he had a headache. He just thought that’s what heads felt like. The word “headache” meant nothing to him. The only way he knew he had a headache was that on the morning of 9/11, just before the first plane hit, the headache went away. It was gone for about five hours, and they were, he said, the happiest hours of his life. He couldn’t even really pay attention to the horror unfolding in New York and Pennsylvania and DC. He still, to that