Head in the Sand ... and other unpopular positions (11 page)

But, before I had time to mull over possible
solutions to the culinary dilemma created by my darling son, he’d
solved the problem for us, announcing with the pride of the naive
and inexperienced:

“I’ll just have a hamburger instead.”

We looked at each other across the table.
Should
we? No, not today.

I was driving home from work today—well, driving to
the Barnes & Noble, really, since I had a ton of writing to
do—and I started to think about stray objects I have in my house,
especially the things that have no discernibly logical purpose. My
mind immediately leapt to the crossbow sitting in the hallway near
our downstairs bathroom.

Yes, dear reader, I have a crossbow in my hallway.
Yes, one of those zany weapons that looks like the bastard
lovechild of a bow-and-arrow and a rifle. It’s currently in its
original cardboard box, properly labeled with a color picture and
the word “crossbow” and all that stuff, and the whole box is
leaning up against an unused treadmill. Where else would it be? The
slogan under the photo of a man with the crossbow is: “The
Adventure Starts Here.” Well, the adventure might start in the
woods
, or the
gamelands
in the neighboring county,
but I assure you the adventure doesn’t start here. Not in my
hallway next to a treadmill.

I’m still not entirely clear why this medieval
apparatus is leaning against the treadmill in the hallway, but it’s
been there for a while. When I stumble bleary-eyed to the bathroom
in the middle of the night, I walk right by this torture-machine as
if it were the most natural thing in the world. Do all my friends
have to endure things like this? Perhaps other women meander past
guillotines in bubble wrap at two a.m., or saunter by wooden
catapults in Tyvek envelopes near dawn . . . but I walk past a
crossbow in a cardboard box, because the adventure starts here.

One of these nights I’m going to accidentally bump
into the box, setting off the crossbow and having to explain to my
husband the next morning why there is a T-shaped hole in the
hallway ceiling.

He should understand, though. He’s the one who put it
there in the first place.

Not that any of you were surprised to hear that.

I was driving on Route 65, minding my own business,
which isn’t difficult to do in a nondescript Ford from the 1980s.
No one’s paying attention to me anyway, except when they’re right
up my back bumper, cursing at me in nasty little snippets of foul
language and then passing me in a huff as soon as that port
authority bus gets out of the way.

At a traffic light in Ambridge, I looked left at the
line of cross traffic waiting for its green light to click in. At
the front of the line sat a tow truck—nothing attached to its
hitch—with this painted on the side: “23-Hr. Towing.”

I had a few minutes to stare at this slogan while the
truck waited for the green light. I wondered what the guy did with
that last remaining hour in the day. Did he grab a quick catnap
during Hour 24, so he’d be only a
little
bug-eyed and
lethargic when Hour 1 rolled around again? Also, which hour didn’t
he tow things? Was it the same hour every day? How did he decide
which hour not to tow things? Was there a particular hour in the
day that was already light on tow-truck demands? I could only
assume that perhaps he took his nap from, like, three a.m. to four
a.m. I thought perhaps folks needed a tow truck mighty rarely
during that particular hour of the night.

Then again, if someone needed a tow truck between the
hours of three and four in the morning, they probably
really
needed that tow truck. Would our tow-truck driver
be losing a lot of revenue in grateful tips and added late-night
fees by not towing things between three o’clock and four o’clock?
This suddenly wasn’t as simple as it initially appeared.

I struggled to comprehend what would make a small
tow-truck company paint something as perplexing and
epistemologically curious as “23-Hr. Towing” on the side of its
truck. Was it a typo? Hard to fathom someone accidentally painting
the wrong number of hours in the day on the side of a truck—on both
sides—in big white letters, and not noticing the error before
taking the vehicle out on the road. Although the paint job looked
fairly new, it didn’t look
that
new. The guy had
been driving around with this inexplicable slogan for a while now.
It apparently meant something to other people. It just didn’t mean
anything to me.

I wasn’t sure I’d ever get up the courage to call
these people if I needed my car towed. I’m just self-esteemless
enough to know deep down that the very hour my car breaks down is
the one hour in the day that this guy isn’t towing things. Plus,
I’m the queen of worst-case scenarios. I’d love an excuse to call
these people to find out just what “23-Hr. Towing” means, but I’d
probably chicken out. We have a AAA membership and free towing is
included, probably even between the hours of three and four a.m.
Along with being a worst-case scenario person, I’m also cheap.

And, in my world of thrift stores and coupons and
Walmart, cheap beats curious every time. So, the mystery
remains.

I’m sitting here in the comfort of my own home,
upstairs in My New Office
^®
, typing on a nice computer
hooked up to the Internet via cable modem, listening to iTunes,
drinking coffee brewed right here in My New Office
^®
,
with creamer I got from the dorm fridge behind me on the countertop
in My New Office
^®
. Can you tell I just upgraded my
entire home office?

It’s raining outside and getting a little dark
already, and I’m cozy and warm and totally non-bored here inside
the house, with too many choices of what to do.

And, what are my parents doing? They’re sitting in an
empty house about fifteen minutes from here, with little more than
two fold-up camping chairs, a couple of cardboard boxes as end
tables, a lamp on the floor, a cooler in the kitchen, and an air
mattress in the bedroom.

Now, they could be doing this because they are
essentially boring, dull people with absolutely no sense of
adventure or hobbies. But that’s not entirely true. They’re really
sitting there all alone because:

1. I have work to do here (an article to write and a
song parody to compose), although obviously I’m not doing that work
at the moment.

2. They’re stubborn and they realize we’d all drive
each other nuts if we were in the same house on a rainy day for too
long. (Think
Cat in the Hat
.)

3. They’re waiting for the moving company truck to
show up with all their stuff.

If you chose number 4 (all of the above,
not
pictured
), you’re absolutely right.

Apparently my parents moved all the way from Las
Vegas to Beaver County, Pennsylvania, but their stuff decided to
make a detour through Maryland first and may not be here until
Saturday. This fits perfectly with my mother’s ongoing battle cry
of “What’s our last name again?”

There is evidently some sort of family curse based on
the two letters of our last name that accounts for every “Murphy’s
Law” type of occurrence in our lives (although our name isn’t
Murphy, so I don’t quite get the connection but my mother does and
that’s ultimately what matters when in this type of situation and
by the way where was I?).

I have experienced this curse firsthand and so know
it to be empirically verifiable fact; however, I also know that I
personally liked being an Au for the twenty-five years I was one
legally (twenty before my first marriage and five between the first
marriage and this one). So, either I so thoroughly enjoyed being an
Au that it offset the family curse, or the curse’s targets just
aren’t big enough things to dwell on.

This, from someone who dwells on everything.
Yeah.

So, with all this belly-button lint collecting on our
mutual contemplation of the situation, my parents sit in an empty
house in the rain, and I sit here writing about their wretched
existence fifteen minutes away from me. Something dreadfully weird
and unfair about that, but not enough to get up and go over there
for.

After all, they have the cable and Internet guy
scheduled to come tomorrow—but the TV and computer are somewhere in
Maryland.

They have a toaster oven, microwave and coffeemaker,
but no refrigerator. My dad was outside pulling up fencing around
their back porch, getting grimy and dirty—but they have no washer
or dryer yet.

Joker (their weird dog-like cat) is bored to tears
and keeps trying to find a comfortable spot on someone’s lap in the
camping chairs, which just ain’t hap’nin’. He stares out the
windows and wonders where all the cactuses went that used to be out
there. Indoor cats are really easy to confound.

My parents’ new hobby until their stuff shows up
seems to be driving around looking for Bush/Cheney signs (so they
know which neighbors to borrow things from) or going to Walmart to
buy brooms or window-shopping at the local hardware store for
kitchen cabinet handles.

Really, their lives sound infinitely more interesting
than mine at the moment, which consists of gulping down coffee,
listening to Linkin Park and Frou Frou, and staring at the article
specs for an upcoming Chicken Soup book I hope to contribute
to.

Did I mention it’s raining?

I’m starting to think my parents’ stuff—wherever it
is—is having more fun than I am. At least it’s off somewhere seeing
the world.

I like watching people, and the way I do it, it’s
technically not stalking. I do this a lot, even while I’m driving
the stupid little half-rusty Ford Escort home from work and I
should be watching the road a little more closely because I’m in
the smallest, least trustworthy car on the road. Statistically,
it’s in my best interests.

Today I spotted a man walking from one parking lot to
another in a small shopping center along Route 65. He must have
been around fifty, perhaps a little older. He was dressed in this
odd assortment of clothes that made absolutely no fashion statement
at all. I didn’t think that was even possible until I saw this man
today. I mean, everyone’s wardrobe makes some sort of statement
about them, even if it’s “I’m a total dweeb,” or “I couldn’t match
my clothes properly even if they were on matching Garanimals
hangers in my closet,” or perhaps “I don’t look like the kind of
person you want to get too close to without a can of Mace.”

But this guy was making no statement at all. I
couldn’t figure out how he dressed himself. Oddly, all his clothing
looked clean, so I didn’t get a sense of thriftstoreitis about him.
But nothing made sense. He was wearing rather white (okay, glowing)
sneakers, the kind worn by someone who normally participates in
athletic activity at least once a year. But he didn’t look like he
participated in so much as a chess match in the park with the old
guys on Tuesday afternoons.

Above the sneakers he wore a crisply pressed pair of
gray Dockers, but with too much pleating in the front to suit him
well. Plus, with the sneakers, the overly neat Dockers just looked,
well, out of place.

Above that was a silvery, shiny zip-up jacket. It had
that eighties tacky look that made me think back to the bad ol’
days. (There weren’t many good ol’ days for most people,
fashion-wise, in the eighties.)

Under the silvery, tacky/shiny jacket was a red
T-shirt with some sort of writing on it. Just a regular-looking red
T-shirt. A little bit wrinkly, in fact. And the writing on the
shirt was worn, as if perhaps it was a favorite shirt worn and
washed so often that it showed its age and then some.

He was carrying a paper bag sideways under one arm
and something that could have been a large car part under the
other. I don’t know why. He didn’t look like he was walking to his
car. He was out near the road, just walking. Who buys car parts
(large ones, at that) for cars they don’t have, or, at least, don’t
have with them?

To top off the look (or lack of it), he wore a red
baseball cap on his head—backwards. Now, I’m sorry, but no one over
twelve should wear a baseball hat backwards anymore, and certainly
no one who’s not into hip-hop. This guy was instantly disqualified
on both counts.

And yet there sat the ball cap on his head—backwards.
Defiantly backwards. And yet he didn’t even know he was defying
anything. I could tell. He just put the hat on that way.

While sitting at the light staring at this guy, I
fleetingly thought perhaps he had a story. I’m a writer; I should
be able to figure out this guy’s story, or make one up.

Just as I was contemplating the possibility of his
alter ego being L.L. Cool Walter or something, the Alpha Romeo
Spider behind me beeped. The light had turned green. I hate when
that happens.

I’ve been home from work for two hours and I still
haven’t figured this guy out. Do I lack imagination, or does this
man defy description because he fits into absolutely no category?
He’s probably just as boring as he looks. But I hope not.

In closing, in my own defense as an avowed
people-watcher, let me offer a chart of differences between a
people-watcher and a stalker, in case you find yourself in a
people-watching situation:

_{People-watching}

It’s an innocent activity.

_Stalking

Not so much, really . . .

_{People-watching}

You’re curious about all people equally.