Head in the Sand ... and other unpopular positions (9 page)

And with those simple words, my foray into
womanhood ended and I was pushed back into childhood for a little
while longer. Mark Spitz was going to have to wait.

The song is sung

That Spring has sprung . . .

And yet I have my doubt.

I’ll hold my tongue

While Spring is young

While others sing and shout.

As bells are rung

And streamers hung

I sit alone and pout.

And I, high-strung,

My arms outflung,

Would rather not sit out.

Why fill a lung

With air that’s wrung

With pollen that’ll sprout?

The vines that clung

Their arms among

The sidewalk’s stony grout

Have long since brung

Their curls hamstrung

While reaching up and out.

And farmer’s dung

On pitchfork swung

Leaves odors all about.

And bees that stung!

And cows’ bluetongue!

Well . . . I’m just not that devout.

-----

And so I’ll spout

That Spring’s a lout

And leave your Spring unsung.

I was minding my own business, spending a glorious
weekend with girlfriends from high school at a lovely cottage in
Maryland, when an ominous thing happened. I felt a pinch at the
base of one of the fingers of my left hand—a sharp little pain any
time I bent a finger. One glance at my hand, one twist of my
wedding ring revealed a split in the gold—all the way through the
ring—and the angled edge of the metal caused by the rift was now
pinching my finger. The thing looked like someone had snipped it
with a pair of scissors.

My wedding ring was broken.

I was dumbfounded that the gold could just, well,
break. Especially without my catching it on anything or hooking it
on a knob or a handle or something. Did I just not know my own
strength?

Despite the fact that my husband and I had brought
six children from our previous marriages into our own marriage ten
years earlier, and had therefore been ridiculously frugal about the
money we spent getting married, it was time to start regretting the
pennypinching decision to purchase our matching simple wedding
bands at Walmart. Either that or God was punishing me for that
getaway weekend with three women I’d gone through puberty with
thirty-five years earlier. Nah, that couldn’t be it.

Upon returning home, I took the ring to a jeweler,
who soldered it for fifteen bucks—a figure I balked at only because
it was fifty percent of the original cost of the ring. But, once I
got the ring back, a week after our tenth anniversary, I was happy
to be able to wear it and bend my fingers without puncture wounds
or severe chafing and weeping and gnashing of teeth . . .

. . . until it happened again a month later. Either
the jeweler used substandard solder (honestly, though, how
substandard would it have to be to be worse than the Walmart ring
itself?), or I had some pretty strong joints on my left hand. Or,
God really was punishing me for something. I tried not to think
about that pack of Twinkies I’d had last night . . . or the
forty-two pairs of shoes in my closet. After all, what good would
finger-pointing do now?

I had a decision to make: One option was to take the
ring to a different jeweler to have it soldered again without
having to explain why I was back. But if this kept happening, I’d
quickly run out of jewelers. Plus, who knew if these people talked
amongst themselves about their customers—at some sort of solderers
convention or something? I couldn’t take the chance.

The only other option was to buy myself another
ring—one I could use as an “everyday” ring, saving the original for
special occasions—but none of the Walmarts in the area had that
ring in my size anymore. And besides, I had visions of this
happening to a new ring all over again in a few years. No, Walmart
was out, and so were K-Mart and Aldi’s and Dollar General. I was
going to have to spend some serious cash this time. My thirty-year
class reunion was coming up in a week, so for that one night I
purchased a cheapie metal-looking ring set (which came with a
gargantuan “engagement ring”) for nine bucks. Coupled with the fake
plastic wedding band, I wore my real diamond (which was more
sturdily built and was
not
purchased at a Walmart or a
thrift store or through the Pennysaver), and no one at the reunion
was the wiser.

After the reunion, I purchased a sturdy wedding
band—one that will stand the test of time, which is far more lovely
a symbol for our love and marriage than the idea of a ring that
splits up every time you get too close.

This new ring cost me twice what the original ring
cost, and I admit I got it on Amazon.com—but it’s doing the job
nicely so far. Not a nick or scratch on it, and certainly no gaping
holes. There’s a good reason for this durability, though: The thing
weighs a ton and is made of tungsten carbide, which, according to
the Amazon seller, is four times stronger than titanium.

I’ve learned some valuable lessons in this
situation:

• The ring’s heavy, sturdy weight on my finger means
I’ll never forget it’s there and accidentally catch it on whatever
broke the first one (like, a stiff wind or something). However, my
ring finger now has six-pack abs from the added weight it’s
carrying around.

• If Wayne and I have a serious, horrible, nasty,
vindictive fight, and I’m losing, I can threaten to bonk him on the
head with the ring. That’ll get his attention.

• New Valentine’s Day slogan: “Nothing says love like
tungsten carbide!”

• And last, what God—and the local jeweler—have
joined together, let no man put asunder . . .

Part of my job as a writer
is to notice stuff. Stuff you just don’t have the time or
inclination to notice yourself. I care about you so much, dear
reader, that I carry around a little black notebook so I can jot
things down as I see them—so I won’t forget them later. (And, at my
age, forgetting them later means in about five minutes, when I get
distracted by something major like the phone ringing or a piece of
lint in my pants pocket.)

I dug out the little black notebook today
and now realize that the list of random crap has gotten a little
unwieldy. That can only mean that it’s time to offload it from the
notebook into the real book. (For those of you in public school,
that means this book.) For your reading pleasure, of course. It’s
an important service I provide, and I’m only too happy to help you
out as you struggle to remember this stuff buried in your busy
days.

List #1: General Do’s and Don’ts

(Mostly Don’ts):

•
Don’t
say “I’ll
have what she’s having” unless you are absolutely sure you know
what she’s having.

•
Don’t
fall in love
with an ax murderer. And, as a helpful hint here: This starts by
ignoring any communications containing the words “prison” and
“penpal.” This is a good place to start. After that, you’re on your
own.

•
Don’t
let a
husband with no sense of time start a major remodeling project. You
know, one that involves items such as drywall or insulation. Or
even a hammer. And this “don’t” includes, in no uncertain terms, a
husband with no sense of humor. Or one with no sense of danger. Or
aesthetics. Or even one whose personal motto is, “It was on
clearance.” Trust me. I know what I’m talking
about.

•
Don’t
keep using
the hot sauce if your ears start sweating.

•
Don’t
irk a friend
when she’s majorly pregnant. She’s busy growing a whole ‘nother
human being, and it apparently takes up a lot of brain space.
She’ll get that brain space back in a few decades, so be
patient.

When I think back now on
my mom watching
Days of Our Lives
when I was a child, I wonder why she ever had the
show on. It’s not her style to be that frivolous with her viewing
time (although now she watches
Diners,
Drive-Ins and Dives
and
Meerkat Manor
and some
show where dog catchers break into people’s houses with big sticks
and find cockroaches everywhere
every
single time
—you know, shows for the
high-IQed among us). And she’s never been one for drama in real
life, let alone in her TV-viewing life. So, what was the appeal for
a reasonably sane woman such as my mother?

When I was in college, I noticed that
everyone watched soap operas—you know, when they should have been
in class or studying or both. (This is the most likely explanation
for my sudden dip from A’s in high school to C’s in my freshman
year at Carnegie-Mellon. Well, this, and the fact that I’m a night
owl and scheduled early morning lectures on the signifance of
ancient history on modern teenagers—lectures where attendance was
never taken. Lesson learned.)

Again, what was the
appeal? There aren’t many of these dinosaur series left
(
Days of Our Lives
remains one of the stalwart holdouts, with the occasional
visit by matriarch Alice Horton on the Christmas shows every year),
and yet the popularity of these shows was enormous at the time.
And
Days of Our Lives
has been around since 1965—a whopping forty-five years as of
this writing.

But again, why so long?
Why the popularity? I now put forth the premise that the popularity
of these outrageous shows (and their present-day counterparts) is
because they are precisely
so
far removed from the reality of our everyday
lives. Let’s face it: When a character on one of these shows is
facing a brain-lung-heart transplant and has double-amnesia and a
husband who’s sleeping with her evil twin, it’s bound to make your
own life look a little better by comparison. That flat tire on the
freeway just doesn’t hold the same kind of drama (unless you’re on
Facebook Mobile).

Let’s take a small peek into the days of
their lives, through the medium of ridiculously rhetorical
questions. Remember, there are no right or wrong answers. (That’s
why they’re rhetorical.)

•
Can anyone say or do
anything incriminating on these shows without the wrong person
conveniently standing in an adjacent doorway listening? And
misunderstanding?

•
Why does everyone hang
out at the local hospital as if it were a Starbucks? Isn’t that
just a little creepy?

•
Who would keep living in
a town where there are routine kidnappings and murders by long-lost
siblings or people with multiple personalities and/or adult- onset
amnesia?

•
Why do the middle-aged
people never age, but infants can go from diapers in one episode to
college in another episode a month later?

•
Why is a character being
pregnant a huge deal—fraught with DNA and paternity tests and all
manner of prenatal complications, getting major attention every
second of that character’s existence—but as soon as the baby is
born, the mother is never seen taking care of it or changing a
diaper or being stuck at home with a colicky baby, unable to get
enough sleep or to even shower regularly or eat hot food again? You
know, like the rest of us. . . .

•
And why does that same
baby conveniently disappear from view but yet it shows up again two
years later as a pregnant teen in search of her own real
father?
Who does the math on these
shows?

•
Why does nobody work at a
McDonald’s? Or eat at one? Everyone eats at the one restaurant in
town, which is owned by one of the characters, who never has to
actually work there.

•
Why do these people have
way too much time to sit in cafés (and hospitals) talking about
other people’s problems? And why do their schedules conveniently
dovetail with one another just in time to sit around discussing
these problems at the right moments? Doesn’t anybody have a job
with regular hours—except for doctors, who apparently live at the
hospital? Seriously, though, can you blame them? That’s where the
whole town is most of the time anyway.

•
Why do we never see
anyone cleaning the toilet or throwing out moldy food from the
fridge? Or taking out the trash? Or doing the laundry—unless it’s a
suspicious woman who conveniently finds something incriminating in
her husband’s pants pockets while checking them before doing the
laundry?

•
Why does everyone in town
go to the same church, which is incredibly nondenominational to the
point of absurdity and has about three pews? Why is it no bigger
than the hospital chapel, where a character can go to pray and
change the plot so that whatever he or she prays for actually
happens—usually within minutes of praying for it? Does anyone in
real life actually know where their hospital chapel is?

•
Why do none of the other
characters notice when a character leaves the show and comes back
later played by a different actor? Don’t any of them have the urge
to yell, “Good grief, Daphne, what happened to your face? And,
didn’t you used to be a redhead? And a man?”