21st January, 2007

NITPICKERS 

All of us have had the experience of meeting with nitpickers. They are the ones who always see what is wrong in something rather than what is right. Many people have perfected this form of persecution so completely that they feel compelled to demonstrate their skill on every occasion. “The wedding was really beautiful. Wasn’t it a shame that the groom couldn’t have lost a few more pounds for the occasion?” Congratulations on your new promotion, but you still have an awfully long way to go to get anywhere, don’t you?”

Erma Bombeck was an American humorist who was able to write about human life with great insight. One of her nitpicking stories is bout the grandmother who took her grandson to the beach one day, complete with bucket and shovel and sun hat. And the grandmother just happened to doze off. As she slept, a huge wave came and dragged her grandchild off into the sea. The grandmother awoke and was devastated. She fell to the ground on her knees, and she prayed, “O God, if you save my grandchild, I promise I’ll make it up to you. I’ll join the club you want me to join. I’ll volunteer for work at the hospital. I’ll give to the poor. I’ll do anything to make you happy.” And suddenly a huge wave tossed her grandson back onto the beach, right at her feet. She noticed the color on his cheeks, his eyes were bright, he was alive. As she stood up, however, she seemed to be upset. She put her hands on her hip, looked skyward, and said sharply, “He had a hat, you know!”

Nitpicking takes many forms. Besides the put-downs mentioned above, besides seeing the negative and being blind to the positive, there are the wound lickers. Remember when you got a bug bite when you were a kid, and your Mother said, “Don’t pick at it,” because she knew if you did, it would get infected and you would get sick. Picking at old wounds is a specialty for some people.

James Michener, who made his mark on the literary would with his interesting books, was a man without a birth certificate. He was abandoned as an infant. He never knew, he never met, his biological parents. He was raised as a foster son, therefore, in the Michener family, which was headed by a widowed woman. While he claims to have come to some peace with the vacuum in his life, it is easy to understand why he finds pleasure in creating characters with the deep cultural roots and a large, extended genealogy and extended family he never had.

Well, his accomplishments have raised the anger of one of his adopted kin. In a rage of jealousy, mean-spiritedness and small-mindedness, some anonymous relative who never signs his or her real name but only signs as the “real Michener,” feels compelled to send him notes whenever he gains a little bit of fame. Even after he won the Pulitzer Prize, this poisoned-pen Michener wrote to him and said, “You have no right to use the name of Michener,” and denounced him as a fraud. His closing line is always, “Who do you think you are, trying to be better than you are?’

ichener has said that those words are a cry that has been burned into his soul. But, he has turned their negative thrust into a positive power. He said, “He was right in all of his accusations. I have spent my life trying to be better than I was, and I am brother to all who have the same aspiration.”