Beware: Breakfast with Audrey
Is Not Dinner with Andre
TM
There is a parable about a frog who allows him (or her) self to be boiled alive.
Put into a pot of cool water he doesn’t notice when the temperature increases
slowly one degree at a time. Finally, when the frog does notice that his life has
become unbearable, it’s too late; he’s as good as dead and dinner. When he could
have jumped and saved himself, he wasn’t uncomfortable enough; when he was,
he couldn’t.
We humans are hardly immune to this same incremental self-destruction. In
the short term we readily accept whatever it is that keeps us comfortable (or promises
comfort). In the long term we compromise our ability to take action on our own
behalf. We have only to look at such things as urban sprawl, global warming or
fast food to know that this is true. Getting through the day is what concerns us
most — what we eat, where we live, where we work and how we get from here to
there are decisions that condition the next day’s slightly more agitated and slightly
more constrained choices. We, especially those of us who live in the industrial and
materially privileged North, literally work ourselves into a snarl, proudly and
apologetically declaring “I really don’t have the time” and “I know it’s not what I
should be doing, but...”
Still, as self-conscious creatures we also have the ability to understand much
of what is going on within us and around us. We may be overwhelmed by the
global, but we can, if we look about, find lessons in the familiar and the local.
Familiar images have great power. They can, on the one hand, keep us from jumping
out of the pot, from questioning small changes and seeing large ones. On the other
hand, they can, when placed a degree or two off-center, startle us and cause us to
reflect on the choices we have made and the hot water lapping at our flanks. In
other words, the familiar can insulate us from ourselves and the world we inhabit,
but it also can provide us with some rather essential insights into the way we live
our lives. This was the case with a set of images I recently found in the form of a
two-page magazine advertisement.
On the first of two facing pages was a colorful picture of a refrigerator framed
by kitchen clutter. On its doors was the usual assortment of family paper, whimsy
and memorabilia. Refrigerator magnets in the shape of animals, insects, letters,
fruit, heavenly bodies, and breakfast foods held up announcements, party invitations,
children’s art work, photographs, recipes, business cards, practice schedules,
shopping lists and calendars. It was a familiar scene, one that still plays well in