Advice, Like Youth

Life ain't exactly fast-paced for a security guard at the Greenwich Country Club. I have doors to lock, rounds to make, and so on, but mostly I'm just paid to monitor the security cameras, which rarely show anything interesting, and the phone, which almost never rings. So I typically take a couple of DVDs to work with me, so I'll have something to occupy my time. Hey, it's a living.

Usually, Netflix keeps me in new DVD rentals all week, but tonight I was out of Netflix movies, so I chose two DVDs off my shelf randomly. I have probably a hundred or so to choose from. That's an important point, that I chose two DVDs randomly out of a hundred.

When I got to work, I saw that someone had left a shopping bag behind the desk. Not a grocery store shopping bag, mind you, but a fancy-shmancy shopping bag from some store that probably sells women's shoes and expensive handbags and whatnot. The reason the bag caught my eye was because it had words printed on the side -- a lot of words: "Enjoy the power and beauty of your youth . . . Do one thing every day that scares you. Sing. Don’t be reckless with oher people’s hearts, don’t put up with people who are reckless with yours." Etc.

If any of this sounds familiar, it's Mary Schmich's famous essay "Wear Sunscreen," also published under the titles "Sunscreen," "Advice, Like Youth," and its full original title, "Advice, Like Youth, Probably Just Wasted on the Young." The authorship is usually falsely credited to either Kurt Vonnegut (due merely to Internet rumor) or Baz Luhrmann (who produced a spoken-word "song" version of the essay) but Schmich is the author.

But I didn't know any of that as I read the words on the shopping bag (which doesn't mention either the author or the title of the essay, or even that it was an essay, and not just some random b.s. somebody printed on the side of the bag). All I knew was that it all sounded really, really familiar, but I couldn't place where I'd heard these words before.

After doing my rounds, checking the cameras, locking everything up, etc., I settled down to watch the first of the DVDs I'd brought along. It was The Big Kahuna, a very well-performed, and wonderfully, brilliantly written one-set drama starring Danny DeVito and Kevin Spacey. I highly recommend the movie. I vaguely remembered enjoying it when I first purchased the DVD over a decade ago, but after that, I simply forgot I had it, until I picked it up off the shelf tonight without giving it too much thought.

During the closing credits, guess which song was playing? Luhrmann's musical version of "Wear Sunscreen," the same essay I'd just read on the side of the shopping bag.

Now at this point, you may be thinking "ho-hum, so what, minor coincidence, you're boring me." But to me, it was really striking. First of all, out of the dozens and dozens of DVDs, I just happened to choose this one, which I hadn't watched in years. Second of all, how many stores print Chicago Tribune essays on the sides of their shopping bags? I actually have no idea, but I imagine the answer is, "not many." Third of all, just to put things in perspective, how often do you randomly encounter the same piece of literature on the same night? I mean, okay, yeah, maybe the Bible. But aside from that, maybe, just maybe, you might hear two or more quotes from Shakespeare or Conan-Doyle in one night (although most likely not from the same piece of work). But how often do you randomly encounter and read an essay, without knowing its source, author, or title, and then, just a few hours later, just as randomly hear that exact same essay read back to you?

And if you still think I'm reading too much into it, here's a link to the essay itself on the Tribune's webpage. Tell me what you think.