The Dandelion Theory of Life

I recently had lunch with an acquaintance who'd caught some bad breaks. He was down but not out, and was consoling himself in part with a phrase I often hear:

"Well, everything happens for a reason."

Does it really? That kind of thought can seem comforting in the face of otherwise inexplicable bad fortune. But it bothers me because I hear people saying it all the time, and I can't agree that it's an effective way to explain the complete and utter randomness and absurdity of life as I see it. Nor is it a way to explain any kind of fortune, either good and bad.

Everything happens for a reason? Then what was the reason my father died in a plane crash when I was four years old?

At the time, I was told by well-meaning relatives that God needed him for something more important. That's nice spiritual poetry, I suppose, but it's not a reason that I could understand, then or now. God has a reason, but other than that we got nothing, kid. Trying to relate to a God like that is like walking into an Advanced Particle Physics Class midway through the semester at Harvard University and expecting to get anything out of it.

Instead, I have my "dandelion" theory about life that I've been working at and nurturing all these years. It comes from the childhood experience of picking those white fluffy dandelion seed heads and blowing the seeds off so that their little natural parachutes carry them to wherever the wind takes them.

Some are lucky and find a good spot with just the right shade and water and soil to take root and grow into next year's dandelions. Others drift about and land on inhospitable places like rocks or parking lots or whatever, where they fail to take root at all and just crumble to dust.

And still others find themselves in fairly unpromising places: bad dirt, no sun, whatever. And yet they make a go of it, and perhaps get as far as producing a respectable yellow flower head, only to have it get eaten by a passing deer before it has a chance to turn into a seed head. (This process happens overnight, by the way. Life is like that, too.)

And that, it seems to me, is the condition that most of us face in our own lives. We are asked to do our best in imperfect conditions, and there's no guarantee that the expected results will happen.

Okay, so here's the context. Each spring, at least where I live, there are more than enough dandelions producing more than enough seed heads so that at least some seeds have a chance to be carried by their little natural parachutes to a place where conditions will be just right for them to go all the way in terms of fulfilling their destiny. But it's completely by chance, with no moral component: no seed has any chance of making any choices that make it more worthy than another. They all just drift about and then do the best they can.

So it's all about the numbers, really—with enough dandelions and enough seed heads, there's bound to be a few that turn out to be champions, at least in terms of what a dandelion is supposed to be. And in human life, given enough of us, there's bound to be a few of us that survive the traumas of childhood and adolescence and the economy and education and so many possible uninformed or bad decisions and personality traits, and in spite of it all we become the best bricklayer in town or the person who writes the Great American Novel.

Does any of it happen for a reason? Not that I can tell, though the utter randomness of life can certainly generate some surprising and unintended consequences. But does that make for an actual reason for things to happen? Is what happens to us tied to some kind of cosmic logic or fate? Only if we're prepared to make a "leap of faith," as they put it, which I can't bring myself to do.

Where does that leave this former altar boy? Well, instead of cathedrals and churches, perhaps casinos are a more appropriate place for worship. Stripped to their basics, they celebrate the same principles which seem to govern life and success and happiness and fulfillment. You might just get lucky. Plus there's low-priced drinks and food, which is nice, and in my book beats out the free wine and wafers I remember getting, one meager serving per visitor.

So, in terms of coping with life's realities, rather than bringing your children to some church and having them attend "Sunday school," wouldn't it instead be more instructive to bring them to places like the Mohegan Sun resort in Connecticut or to the Bellagio in Las Vegas, and have them learn the ins and outs of blackjack and how to play the roulette wheel?

I don't know. But all of this leads me to a larger question of the consequences of a random world. If the world is fundamentally without sense, where no kind of "reason" really guides anything and we're all in a sort of cosmic pinball machine, then what do I use to guide my own actions and decisions and behavior and conduct?

This question forms the basic premise of 'Crimes and Misdemeanors' (1989), perhaps Woody Allen's best film, which depicts a world where bad deeds are not punished in any obvious ways, where justice is not done, and where an act as unthinkable as having another person murdered brings not consequences but prosperity. In such a world, what standard can people rely on to make their own decisions?

I can't answer that just yet, and perhaps will never be able to. It's really the ultimate paradox, isn't it? The more we seek the answer to such a question, the farther away the answer becomes. This is at the root of my appreciation of paradoxes as perhaps the most poetic expression of the life condition, especially those that happen accidentally, such as the fuel tanker truck by the side of the road because it ran out of gas. There's your spirituality, right there!

But I think good-naturedly dismissing the idea that everything happens for a reason, and instead looking at the example before us of dandelions and so many other natural processes all around us, is a good start at clearing the decks for a discussion that's honest, if ultimately incomplete.

Chinese restaurants reconsidered

One recent Saturday afternoon, I found myself the sole customer of the "China Taste" restaurant in Rockville, Conn. Located in a strip mall off Interstate 84, it's an old-style American-style Chinese restaurant heavy on the fried rice dishes. With 15 minutes left before lunch specials expired at 3 p.m., I took the path of least resistance and chose pork fried rice for $6; the teenage server, Li, returned from the kitchen with a gigantic mound of the stuff, plus egg drop soup and a bowl of crispy fried wontons.

Looking around, the place was well-worn and unpretentious and I somehow felt rather warm and cozy, like I was at home, surrounded by the usual clutter. A lot of the prep for the evening dinner hours was apparently being done out in the dining room: silverware cleaning, soy sauce refillings, etc. The placemat was one of those "year of the animal" things, but it covered the years only up to 2002 and no further. Somewhere there must be a warehouse full of these, I imagined.

And that got me thinking. How much of this place is really what you might find in China? Almost nothing, I figured: what I was seeing (and eating) was the sum of a century and a half of adaptation to American tastes and prejudices and habits, starting from the days in the 1860s when large numbers of Chinese laborers were brought to this country to work on the western part of the transcontinental railroad, and Chinatowns began springing up in places such as San Francisco, and eventually most cities of any size.

For all that time, the restaurant business (and the laundry business, for a long time) was a natural, but restaurants had to adapt to American tastes. Sure, some eateries in a Chinatown in, say, Boston or San Francisco could still be authentic due to the size of the Chinese customer base. But in a place like my hometown of Nashua, N.H., the one Chinese family running the local restaurant in the 1930s and 1940s (a guy named Sam, who sold my father his first car, I understand), the menu had to be adapted to suit local tastes. And so the whole experience gradually morphed into something of a caricature of what a Chinese restaurant was: MSG-laden meat-heavy dishes in places with weird decorations and traditions that had little or nothing to do with the real China. One example: fortune cookies, totally unheard of in China, and which all seem to come from someplace in Brooklyn. (Undoubtedly one of the last outposts of actual manufacturing in NYC.) Also, I just read that several staple ingredients in "American-style" Chinese food, such as onions, broccoli, and carrots, aren't even grown in China!

So I got to wondering. With the rise of the middle class in China, and with an increasing amount of disposable income there, wouldn't it be possible for American-style dining out to become popular in China? And wouldn't it be interesting if truly American food had to be modified to be appealing to local tastes? Over time, the whole thing would morph into a caricature of America, and it might say a lot of how we're perceived as a nation and as a people.

For instance, in terms of payment, instead of cash, payment at the new "American-style" restaurant could come in the form of temporary credit cards. As part of the experience, you'd pay by maxing out your credit cards, something commonly done here in the U.S.A., right? All part of the American experience, just like fortune cookies are Chinese!

The way things are going, with the United States running a ridiculously high trade surplus every year by importing everything from China, and with China quickly becoming rich and investing for the long-term in its infrastructure while we let ours rot, who's not to say that American citizens won't eventually be emigrating to China in hopes of a better quality of life?

Well, if it ever comes to that (and I'm just jokily supposing here, folks), then maybe we'll have the same thing there as we have here: American families will set up "authentic" restaurants in Shanghai, with dishes like southern pit barbecue and New England clam chowder, and soon they'll pop up all over the country, though outside the big cities we'll have to adjust the menus to accommodate local tastes: chicken feet in the clam chowder, for instance, or hot dogs with bok choy and bean sprouts, for instance.

And instead of fortune cookies, the end of each meal can come complete with a fake voting ballot or maybe a losing lottery ticket, both of which might be considered emblematic of the American experience.

And heck, if the restaurant thing doesn't work out, we can always try the laundry business.