I recently spent an entire morning trying to retrieve a password. After entering my 3,795 most common variations, the email system I was trying to enter — which was increasingly concerned I was not Matt Geiger — locked me out and told me I needed to go through several steps to retrieve my password.
As if I was a drooling Labrador and it was a saliva-coated tennis ball bobbing on the surface of an autumn lake.
When I answered the security questions incorrectly, since apparently I don’t know where I attended elementary school, it made the clanking sound of a steel vault door closing and locking. This was all very suspicious, it told me. Now I needed to go through several more steps — this time to reset my password.
“This is ridiculous,” I thought. “Why is security so tight?”
“Ridiculous,” incidentally, is the exact word I would have used to complain if they had lax security and I got hacked.
After traveling through the Fireswamp, killing a Rodent of Unusually Large Size, besting a Giant in a feat of strength, ingesting some iocane powder and climbing the cliffs of insanity — not in that particular order, obviously — I reached the finish line. I had completed the tasks leading up to the resetting of my password.
I was asked to type, and then retype, my new password.
I did, gleefully smacking ENTER and breathing what turned out to be a premature sigh of relief.
“Your new password cannot be your current password,” the screen told me.
“*&@%$!!!!!” I muttered.
It was the latest in a string of clues in the Case of the Almost Middle-Aged Midwestern Man. Yet another was that the dentist recently prescribed special toothpaste – sensitive toothpaste – for me. Toothpaste so sensitive you need a prescription from a doctor to use it. It made me feel like my teeth are wimps who can’t handle the rough and tumble off-the-shelf varieties of toothpaste. Instead, I have to use a special kind of toothpaste, which has soothing pastel colors on the label and won’t harm or offend the cowardly teeth that inhabit my mouth.
If this keeps up, I’ll soon be one of those old people for whom everything in daily life is simply a thing they used to be able to do.
“Look at that kid, just taking a bite out of an apple,” I’ll exclaim. “Like a crazy person!”
Later in the day, a friend sent me a funny, but gross, text message. I laughed, swiftly typed “uugggh” in reply and hit “send” just a millisecond after the text message autocorrected to something completely different.
My friend glanced down at his phone and was puzzled to see that my response to his message was an enigmatic: “Hugh.”
What makes it all strange is that I’m not yet old. Many of the people I interact with are ten, twenty, thirty or forty years older than I am. It’s just that I’m no longer young. I’m just kind of an average age, in which I can do some things — like drive a car and stay awake all day — but not others, like remember a password, use normal toothpaste or send a text message.
I’m still young enough to understand the fundamental nature of this world. Older people often complain that the world is in a state of flux. “Everything is changing so fast,” they complain.
It’s not.
The earth, as Hemingway and the Book of Ecclesiastes and about a million other sources much smarter than I have pointed out, abides. It is us — the individual little people — who come and go in little, dramatic frenzies of activity.
The earth is the earth, and people are people. Each individual person, however, is always changing, always growing, always passing by the things that inhabit our world. And then, each individual is no more.
There is such peace in that idea — that our individual lives are fleeting, and insignificant. I try to remember it when my emotions — fears in particular — start feeling big.
One morning last week, my four-year-old daughter was getting ready for school when she asked her mother, who also happens to be my wife, a question:
“When you die, is the world still here?”
My wife called to me, as if she had been bitten by an adder and I carried the anti-venom in an elegant glass vial around my neck. This, after all, was the answer to the question people always posed to me when I was studying philosophy in college: “Will your degree ever come in handy in real life?”
I was like a pine-riding athlete, finally being called into the game at the very end, when everything was on the line. But I still didn’t know what to say.
I crouched down and looked into my daughter’s serious, brown, expectant eyes.
“What’s your question?” I asked.
“Daddy, when you die, is the world still here?” she restated. Her tone was so practical.
“I, I … hold on.”
I ran into my office and grabbed a book, My Struggle: Book 1 by Karl Ove Knausgaard. Sprinting back up the stairs, I flipped it open to the final paragraph, which is the most beautiful I’ve encountered in literature.
He stares at the body of his dead father.
“Now I saw his lifeless state. And that there was no longer any difference between what once had been my father and the table he was lying on, or the floor on which the table stood, or the wall socket beneath the window, or the cable running to the lamp beside him. For humans are merely one form among many, which the world produces over and over again, not only in everything that lives but also in everything that does not live, drawn in sand, stone, and water. And death, which I have always regarded as the greatest dimension of life, dark, compelling, was no more than a pipe that springs a leak, a branch that cracks in the wind, a jacket that slips off of a clothes hanger and falls to the floor.”
I don’t know how much of it sunk in. She smiled and nodded, but who knows, really. I tried to give her an honest answer, one that was true, and that often means simply offering a different way of looking at a problem, but not really providing a solution.
But as she headed off to school, where she would play with her friends and teachers and continue becoming more and more fully herself, rather than simply an extension of me and her mother, I couldn’t help but think that she is practicing for a day, which will surely come, when I will be the leak in the pipe, and I will be the coat that falls to the floor. And she, and the world she inhabits, full of email passwords, a staggering diversity of toothpastes and families, will continue on.
It made me feel small, no different than the clutter of everyday life, and enormously happy.
Matt Geiger’s debut book won First Prize in the 2018 Midwest Book Awards and was named as a Finalist in the Next Generation Indie Book Awards and the American Book Fest. His most recent book is a collection of stories and essays. He is also the winner of numerous journalism awards and one axe-throwing competition. He has an abnormally high percentage of Neanderthal DNA. He currently lives in Wisconsin with his wife and his four-year-old daughter.
Photos by Matthew Jefko.