 |
|
|
|
|
 |
 |
|
||
 |
 |
|
||
|
||||
 |
|
|||
|
||||
|
||||
Bottle BillNovember 27, 2009 To Be Rather Than to Seem is sucking in bits and pieces of other things I've written; or maybe other things I've written are leaching into it. Last spring I wrote a short essay about how training Travvy reminded me of the bottle bill that Massachusetts passed in 1976. It was a little undercooked, so I didn't try too hard to get it published. Here I approach the bottle bill from a different angle. Just before Thanksgiving 1975, I returned from fifteen months in Britain. Grandma died in February, my uncle Neville cracked up, and I moved into Grandma's house to look after it and her dog, Max. I was in a serious funk. I had a magna cum laude college degree, no useful skills, and no clue about how to find a job. Even worse, I had come adrift from the young woman with my name who'd displayed some competence and done some interesting things in college. Some other me had lived that life. I couldn't take credit for anything she had done; her achievements had been wiped from my ledger. Low-level depression was so normal in my family that my lethargy didn't strike anyone as noteworthy. Or possibly it did but there are already so many elephants in the family living room that no one noticed one more. My father's girlfriend, Linda, was the only one who realized how messed up I was. She was into Freudian analysis and thought I should see a psychiatrist. I didn't, but the suggestion triggered an alarm that got through the thickening fog. As long as no one noticed, I could convince myself that I didn't really have a problem -- or that it wasn't necessary to consider the possibility that I might have a problem. Linda noticed. Linda also seemed to think that I was capable of doing more than playing solitaire, reading the newspaper, and taking walks with the dog. She enlisted me as research assistant for an article she was writing about Britain in 1776. I got to spend a few hours in the Widener Library at Harvard, reading very old newspaper articles on microfilm. Doing research was good. Getting out of the house was good. Interacting with human beings was good. Most of all, momentum was good. A state equal rights amendment was question 1 on the ballot that year, and the "Vote no on Question 1" people were raising the specter of unisex toilets. I started volunteering for the "Vote yes" campaign. It was like having a real job only without the paycheck. I did office work, ran errands, and helped with mailings -- for a few months I knew most Massachusetts zip codes by heart. Question 1 passed, Jimmy Carter was elected president, but the electoral event of the bicentennial year that made the deepest impression on me was the passage of my state's bottle bill. In the mid-1970s, recycling was catching on. The bottle bill provided that when you bought soft drinks or beer at a store, you had to put down a nickel deposit on each container. When you returned the empty container, you got your nickel back. The beverage industry and big retailers were dead set against the idea. It's an unfair burden on business! they cried. What were they afraid of? If what I do produces a pleasant result, I'll do it again. Ginger ale, Coca-Cola, and beer produce pleasant results, so I keep buying them. But if I touch a hot burner I pull back quick. The big companies were afraid that consumers and retailers would find the nickel deposit so unpleasant that we'd stop buying their stuff. What they didn’t realize was that we'd hardly notice giving up the nickel, but we would definitely notice when we got it back. Even in 1976, a nickel wasn't worth much, but in the weeks and months after the bottle bill went into effect the commonwealth's roadside landscape was transformed. Almost overnight a five-cent deposit made a visible difference where the threat of a $100 fine had been failing for years. Sure, you could still see mashed-up potato chip bags, Styrofoam coffee cups, and cigarette butts galore along the highways and byways. What you didn't see was Coke bottles and Budweiser cans. Where had all the beer cans gone? Back to the package store, every one. Well, not quite every one, but it seemed that way. For one lousy nickel. Many, many years later -- thirty-two, to be exact -- I took a basic obedience class with my eight-month-old Alaskan malamute puppy. I'd heard about clicker training, but I'd never seen it in action. Our instructor clicked her clicker and gave Travvy a treat. She did it again. By the third click, Travvy knew that the click of the clicker meant a treat was coming: at the sound of the click, his eyes, ears, and nose were 100% focused on Karen. Once the click-treat association is established, you can start using the clicker to tell your dog what to do. The clicker tells the dog he's on the right track; it marks the instant when he does the right thing. Remember hunting for treasure blindfolded with your friends on the sidelines are yelling, "Getting warmer! Warmer, warmer, now you're really hot"? That's how it works. Your dog figures out PDQ what he did that made you give him a treat, and he can't wait to do it again. If the word "treat" suggests juicy chunks of meat or organic biscuits from the upscale feed store, think again. My puppy worked for bits of kibble -- the same stuff he ate for breakfast and dinner. Every day part of his daily ration went into my vest or jacket pocket instead of into his food bowl. I doled it out bit by bit to reinforce the behavior I wanted. As soon as my hand moved toward the kibble pocket, I had his undivided attention. All for little bits that measure a single centimeter in diameter. My puppy, I thought, was one cheap date. Then I considered how zealously I save beer bottles and drive them to the redemption center every few weeks, all to get a few dozen nickels back. I stopped making fun of my dog. Back in 1976 it didn't take much to arrest my slide into depression. A task. A purpose. Some structure and a few congenial colleagues. Click. Click. Click.
|
|
|||
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
 |
|
|||
 |
|
|||
Home - Writing - Editing - About Susanna - Bloggery - Articles - Poems - Contact Copyright ©
Susanna J. Sturgis. All rights reserved. |
||||