Head in the Sand ... and other unpopular positions (13 page)

Somehow, the now-obvious fact that we should have
brought a boombox with batteries had totally escaped me while I was
popping popcorn and buying cans of soda (not pop) and generally
running around like an idiot a few hours earlier.

After a collective smacking of foreheads, we decided
to steal everyone else’s radio noise by setting up our camping
chairs by the car with the loudest radio. We set up the chairs
close enough to hear their radio but not so close that we’d have to
marry anyone in the morning. Worked quite well for
Finding
Nemo
. Had no trouble hearing anything. That was the up side of
having the place full of cars. Radios everywhere.

But, as usually happens with drive-ins playing two
flicks, a nice handful of people (the ones with little kids who
came mainly for
Finding Nemo,
which was pretty much
everybody within a two-mile radius) left at the intermission. Once
Tomb Raider 2
came on we had trouble finding a spot close
enough to hear someone else’s radio. Not without being so blatantly
obvious that they’d call the authorities. And once Addie ended up
in the back seat of the car half-asleep, we called it a night and
came home—about a half-hour into
Tomb Raider
.

For those of you not familiar with drive-ins and
drive-in etiquette: Don’t get the impression that we just chummed
up to strangers. Well, we did—a little. But most everyone brings
camping chairs, mosquito candles, coolers, and blankets and sits
outside their cars. I just love the atmosphere of the drive-in.

But I also love
hearing
a movie
I’ve paid to see, so it was best to leave early and learn our
lesson. (
Note to Self:
Beg husband to reinstall tape
deck.)

It’s been a long weekend.

My folks have been living here in western
Pennsylvania for a little while now. They grew up on the eastern
side of the state and raised my brother and me there, then retired
ten years early and moved to Las Vegas to gamble away our
inheritance. You know, like most parents do.

But, after a decade of living the high life, they
moved back east to be closer to the grandchildren. However, until
they moved here, I’d never lived closer to my parents than three
hundred miles. Having them five miles away is very, very
different.

So far, it’s worked out well. They know not to stop
by my house any time before ten a.m. or they will be shot on sight,
and I know not to call their house any time after nine p.m. because
they probably went to bed as soon as it got dark. Once we got the
night owl/morning person thing cleared up, everything else seemed
to fall into place. And I find I’m truly enjoying having them in
the same county with me.

At dinner, my mother and I can discuss the beauty and
wonder of Pennsylvania potholes, a phenomenon she and my father had
all but forgotten out west in Nevada. She will quickly relearn
that, in Pennsylvania, people exchange pothole stories the way some
men swap fishing or golf stories. (“Oh yeah? My PT Cruiser fell
into a pothole the size of Aunt Martha’s butt!”)

I predict it’ll all come back to them in a
post-traumatic-stress-disorder sort of way sometime in
mid-February. Then there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth. And
tires. Gnashing of tires too. That’s the really ugly part.

And, it’s fun to hear these Las Vegas folks say
things like, “Gee, it’s cold!” fifty times in one visit. In
June.

Then again, my dad is the same guy who, when he moved
to Vegas in 1994, kept saying things like, “Gee, it’s so
hot!
” And my mother kept saying, “Yes, John, you live in a
desert, remember?” How this slipped his mind is beyond me. They had
an eight-foot cactus in their front yard.

So, now, when she says it’s cold (while wearing
twelve layers of thermal clothing), I just shake my head and roll
my eyes.

Then again, I have a husband who spends most of the
winter going barefoot around our house, wearing shorts and
T-shirts, and turning the heat up to 74 degrees. The logic of this
escapes me. Apparently he never lived out west long enough to know
that you’re not supposed to turn up the heat back east—you’re
supposed to add another eleven layers of clothing, ear muffs, and
big, fuzzy slippers. And brew another pot of decaf.

He could take some lessons from my mother on how to
keep warm. She’s an expert. Just not in Pennsylvania.

One of the perks of living in western
Pennsylvania—besides the great baseball team and more annual
rainfall than Seattle—is a chain of family restaurants called Eat’n
Park. Charming, inexpensive, clean, and low-key enough to tolerate
families with toddlers, it quickly became a favorite place to eat
out when the children were very little.

So, when I found myself spending my first Valentine’s
Day post-divorce with a three-year-old and a one-year-old in tow,
the logical thing to do was to pick myself up, dust myself off, and
take the three of us out to our local Eat’n Park for dinner. After
all, the girls were too young to understand the poignant nature of
the occasion, and it felt good to take my mind off what had become
the lousiest holiday of the year (with the possible exception of
the annual National Eggs Benedict Day on April 16).

As we ate, my one-year-old daughter, Addie, merely
sucked on whatever bits of food I gave her from my own plate but
Grace, the three-year-old, chose her own dinner of chicken fingers
and fries, both of which she promptly slathered with ketchup.
(Heinz, of course—it’s required by law in western
Pennsylvania.)

The evening might have turned out better if I had
gone with my instincts and said no to her request for chocolate
milk to accompany her chicken and fries. (To be blunt, the evening
would have turned out better if I had stayed home, locked myself in
a closet with a rabid weasel, and fed us both cold sauerkraut
through a straw, but hindsight is 20/20.) And perhaps I still had a
chance of salvaging the experience if I had said no to her request
for a second glass of chocolate milk. Or said no to her insisting
that she gulp it down as if she were part of a pit crew gassing up
Jeff Gordon’s car. And oh, the things that might have been
different if I had factored in her congenital motion sickness and
easily upset stomach . . .

But no, I was feeling indulgent as only an eternally
guilt-ridden mother can feel, and I allowed Grace all these
personal excesses because the glee on her little toddler face
seemed worth it—at the time.

At the end of our meal, I stood and lifted baby Addie
out of the high chair, slinging her onto my hip. I motioned to
Grace to stand and get ready to leave. She hoisted back her glass
for that last chug of chocolate milk before standing on the bench
seat for all around us to see. She was so darned adorable standing
there smiling at the admiring groups of little old ladies who were
seated in neighboring booths, all of us celebrating this
Valentine’s Day bereft of male companionship but yet happy to be
with friends and family. She soaked up the murmured compliments and
smiles, and so did I as the proud mother.

Until Grace said, softly but urgently, “Uh oh.”

I had just enough time to look at her, standing on
that seat, now at eye level with me, before it hit me that a social
disaster of epic proportions was about to occur.

And yet, instead I asked, “What’s wrong, Grace?”

“I think I’m going to be—”

That last word, which was painfully unnecessary by
this time, was cut off by a thick brown volcanic eruption that
emanated from her tiny little mouth, arcing upward in a vaulted
stream and then down to the table below with the force of Old
Faithful and a curvature that fleetingly reminded me of the St.
Louis Arch. Bits of chicken breading took a road less traveled,
landing at other points in the booth and tempting me to yell out
“Fire in the hole!” for everyone’s safety.

Instead, I stood rooted silently to the floor,
watching as Grace’s projectile vomiting continued with no hope of
ever letting up. The look on Grace’s face had changed from the
previous moment’s sanguine smile to abject horror at the shock she
was imposing on everyone around us. In that instant, I again knew
what was coming next but was oddly paralyzed to stop it. The
slow-motion camera that activates whenever tragic phenomena occur
had just kicked in, and I watched in dismay as Grace—with the
knowledge of basic physics of a three-year-old—tried to obstruct
the forward progress of the vomit-volcano by placing her hands in
front of her still-spewing mouth.

Unfortunately, the hands of a three-year-old are tiny
and unable to block the unstoppable force that is projectile
vomiting. Much as a poorly built dam will eventually burst,
allowing the water to flow unimpeded in any direction it wishes, so
too was the reappearance of Grace’s dinner. As she desperately
continued to clamp both her hands over her mouth, the unrelenting
puke-stream merely found its easiest point of opening: between her
fingers.

All this did was redirect the chocolate gush straight
upward, covering her face, soaking even her eyelashes on its way
across the top of her head and into every corner of her otherwise
gorgeous, glossy black hair. I began to question my own
recollection of the laws of physics as I watched in repulsed
fascination the strange gravity-defying path of the chunk-laden
stream before me.

Perhaps only five seconds had passed since the first
eruption. Yet, of course, it seemed more like endless purgatorial
hours of torture, watching this continue and yet powerless to stop
it. Little Addie continued to cling to my left hip, oblivious to
the faux pas (and globs of ketchup) now coagulating all over the
booth table and seats. But, naturally, the incident hadn’t escaped
the notice of several Eat’n Park employees, and a handful of nearby
patrons, who were likely vowing next time to stick to the nursing
home dinner buffet, which never served chocolate milk for this very
reason. I slowly became aware of the service people around us,
several of whom had rushed up with large terrycloth towels, which
they flung onto the table in a frantic attempt to cover up the
offensive bits and pieces of, well, whatever this stuff had been
before this uncontrolled toddler had gotten a hold of it.

I heard myself apologizing in a stunned monotone that
smacked of clinical shock, sounding muffled and far away, part of
that same slow-motion effect that hadn’t left since the first
molecules of chocolate resurfaced nearly a minute earlier. No one
was listening to me, though. Total situational anarchy had broken
out, with mops and muffled screaming now added to the towels in the
ongoing vain effort to stanch the hemorrhage of reemergent dinner
items swimming in a chocolate geyser.

Then, as suddenly as it began, the surging swell of
supper ended. As the employees rushed around mopping and toweling,
while mumbling incoherent but likely imprecatory turns of phrase,
Addie yawned on my hip, and I held my breath waiting for Round Two.
Grace cautiously moved her useless toddler hands away from her
mouth, blinking chocolate drops off her long black eyelashes and
looking at me for guidance.

None was forthcoming. I was busy planning our escape
route. The townspeople were restless.

Because writing does not yet pay the bills for me, it
too often remains at the bottom of my to-do list each day. I’ve
heard all the suggestions about carving out time for writing, about
making it such a priority that you hang a sign on your home office
door that says, “Don’t bother me unless you’re bleeding or
something is on fire. I’m writing!”

As things are going currently, there are a few things
wrong with these suggestions at my house. First, my home office has
no door. The house used to be apartments, and my office used to be
the upstairs kitchen. There was a bifold door on it when my son
used it as a bedroom (the only bedroom with a sink and cabinets),
but that’s now buried somewhere up in the attic. Trust me: No one
wants to venture up there to look for a bifold door just so I can
hang a paper sign on it.

Another dilemma is that I was blessed at birth with
an innate sense of panic, anxiety and guilt. If someone in the
house is upset, it is automatically my fault and I must make things
right. If someone feels bored, I must entertain the masses. If
someone needs a load of laundry done, I must drop what I am doing
and take the laundry basket down to the basement. Despite being a
mediocre cook, and despite having a semi-empty nest, I am also
responsible for dinner, and in some cases lunch. I pack lunches for
family members who work outside the house. I also do grocery
shopping, clutter-control, and the modest amount of cleaning I can
bring myself to endure.

And, of course, I do freelance copy editing,
proofreading, and sometimes typesetting as projects come in. I
rarely turn down projects—part of that “Just Say Yes” syndrome that
we guilt-ridden folks are born with. We don’t wish to hurt anyone’s
feelings, even clients we’ve met only through e-mails, and so we
say yes to everything and then hope a calendar day magically
becomes forty hours long.

In my guilt-ridden mind, all of these things must
come before writing. I pick up on the unspoken opinion that the
writing should come in dead last, after I take out your trash or
paint your living room or run to the bank or take you to the movies
or a trip to the store for some Very Important Personal Shopping at
the last minute.

I don’t know why I buy into these opinions. I don’t
know why I cannot hang that proverbial sign on the rhetorical door
and force family members to fend for themselves for a few short
hours every day.