A Worthwhile Day

I was feeling a little guilty last weekend to be sitting inside on a beautiful day with the shades drawn, watching a Yankees game on TV. It’s really all I wanted to do, but there was a part of me that insisted on criticizing the choice, a voice in my head that carped away like the proverbial nagging spouse. “What are you doing just sitting there? You should be out riding a bike/jogging around the reservoir/walking across the Brooklyn Bridge”—in short, doing something worthwhile. 

But, I had spent the previous weekend on worthwhile activities—cleaning out two closets at my wife’s request, that had become over full—and wasn’t really feeling inclined toward any additional worthwhile behavior.

However, I remembered a box of old cancelled checks I had discovered during my cleaning the previous week that had been stashed away for some reason in one of the closets. I had pulled out the box, with the intention of throwing all the checks away, but heeded my wife’s warning that they needed to be shredded, not just tossed into the garbage, and had put them aside to be dealt with later.

So, as I sat on the couch watching the ballgame, I decided to assuage that critical voice inside my head, and retrieved the box of old checks from their hallway purgatory and pulled the shredder out from under my desk. Since I don’t much like listening to the TV commentators anyway and always turn the sound off during the game, the grinding maw of the shredder wouldn’t be a bother of any kind.

Positioned in such a way that might normally have been occupied by chips, dip, and a nice cold soda, the cancelled checks, the shredder, and a large garbage bag to empty everything into were all conveniently within reach.

Feeling more and more worthwhile with each passing moment, I took a stack of checks out and began feeding them through the shredder. The checks were all at least five years old and, as the process continued, out of simple curiosity, I began to slow down, glancing over each check before shredding it into a million green-papered particles.

There were the usual checks, the ones for the mortgage or the credit cards or the phone company and Con Ed. There were also a bunch made out to various clothing stores, bookstores, and department stores, some of which are no longer in business. And every so often, I’d come across one from the little grocery store we visit when we’re up in Maine. It was an odd feeling, especially when considering I was looking through a pile of old checks, but I found myself smiling as if I were looking through an old photo album.

Every so often, though, a check would pop up made out to the New York City Parking Violations Bureau. It was sort of like leafing through a deck of cards and finding a Joker that had somehow remained embedded in the deck.

The first few such checks were amusing, but as the string continued over the course of a couple of years’ worth of checks, I realized starkly how much money I had spent paying for parking tickets. 

At the time the parking tickets were issued, I justified it all by saying it was simply the price one had to pay for having a car in New York City. But I also remember that surge of anger I would experience just seeing the familiar orange and white ticket on my windshield and how I would often be so angry I would refuse to pay the ticket, citing the ultimate stupidity of the regulations I was in violation of. Of course, this simply made the fines bigger, as late charges continued to accrue whether I ultimately approved of the regulations or not.

Seeing check after check popping up before my eyes was like watching the rise and fall of a character defect and as the shredder whined I was pleased to see that while there were far more tickets paid than I would ever have expected, as the years represented on the checks moved on, the number of violations began, finally, to decrease.

Looking at it from a purely fiscal perspective, I’m amazed that it took as long as it did to get this defect under control. But, with the alcoholic nature that I have, it’s rarely the practical things that scare me about negative behavior. For instance, I knew for years on an intellectual level how dangerous it is to drive drunk and even had a number of accidents that you’d think would reinforce that message, yet it had virtually no impact on my behavior and I continued to drink and drive unceasingly, telling myself it wasn’t a problem. Or the blackouts. You’d think that might have been a tip-off, too, that something wasn’t right with my drinking, yet I passed them all off in the same way as the parking tickets: it’s just the price you pay for doing what you want to do.

So, as I sat there watching the game and shredding checks, I was slowly overcome with a sense of gratitude—gratitude that I no longer drink, and gratitude that while many of my character defects have followed me into sobriety, it is possible that they can be altered for the better, sometimes only gradually and over a long period of time, as the rising and ultimately declining arc of parking tickets made clear to me. 

Recognizing that it had been quite some time since I had gotten a parking ticket, though I still do get them from time to time, always now the result of my own forgetfulness instead of angry defiance, the idea of staying shut up in the dark with the TV on didn’t seem like such a waste of time, after all. 

Besides, the Yankees won the game, and after it was over, I went out to move my car. Of course, the regulations still annoy me, but somewhere along the line I finally realized the only one I was hurting by disregarding them was myself.