You know that sound: dead battery. You turn the key, and instead of the full-grown lion’s roar you were hoping to hear, you get the pitiful squeal that sounds like there’s a tiny baby seal yelping under the hood. Quickly you find yourself reduced to begging and pleading with an inanimate object. You turn your head to the left and lean forward against the steering wheel as you crank, hoping somehow that if you can hear the engine better, you will have greater chances of success.
But a dying battery is not a hearing problem, and with each muttered plea and attempt at ignition, the yelp only gets weaker and weaker. Then there’s the click—the definitive advisory that your battery has abandoned you and that your day, like your vehicle, is not starting the way you had hoped it would.
It’s always in winter. That’s when those little cubes that store electrical power under our hood are most likely to give up the ghost. It happened to me recently one early morning. I had a parking lot full of snow to move and a rusty old truck that had no get up and go.
Time for the jumper cables, and a friend whose battery was in a better mood. Positive to positive. Negative to negative. Eventually the engine caught, and we could get on with the job of pushing winter back into its assigned place.
I hear the word “positivity” a lot these days. Especially around the time of the New Year when we express our hopes for a bright year ahead, friends send along wishes. Lots of people urge us to be positive, to look on the sunny side, choose “positivity” as our mantra. Everywhere in the culture, from Oprah reruns to sales seminars to pop psychology books and not a few pulpits, we are told that our job is not so much to observe reality, but instead to smile until we see it differently.
Our friends mean well, and I get what they’re saying. Truth is that we can make or break how we feel about something by the attitude we bring to it. The atmosphere inside the cab of that truck on a cold morning can be affected by the battery’s failure, but it can be turned around in an instant if I choose to laugh, or to hum a tune, rather than just curse my bad luck. But that won’t start the truck. For that to happen I’ve got to figure out what’s wrong and get some help.
Syracuse Winter. Michael Davis photo.
