Head in the Sand ... and other unpopular positions

by Linda M Au

  He saves bent nails, plastic bags, old sneakers (and I don’t mean just the previous pair he used to wear—I mean three and four generations earlier than the pair he wears currently), old underwear (can you say, “dust rag”?), old T-shirts with holes and pit stains (can you say, “big dust rag”?), old pairs of glasses (is he expecting his eyes to revert back to an earlier prescription?), old raffle ticket stubs (the contest is over, he didn’t win, but he’s taking the phrase “eternal optimist” to new heights), old physics textbooks from college (great bedtime reading, I guess), old AAA guide books filled with places that have long since closed or burned down, and anything else under the sun about which he can say, “You never know. I might need this later.”

  Which, as it turns out, is just about everything. It’s a battle cry for the ages.

  Does it bug me? Actually, I’m awfully glad he likes keeping all his old, useless, broken-down stuff … because that includes me.

  Rash Behavior

  I have an unexplained rash across my body. People talk in hushed tones around me. Dogs whimper and run for cover when I go outside.

  It isn’t poison ivy. I never get poison ivy, ever—even if I chew on the leaves and wash them down with a sumac chaser. This is an insidious, crawling thing, covering me like a creeping fungus.

  After I give up on home diagnosis, I go to my new, young doctor. He scratches his hairless chin, peeks under my paper gown a little, says things like “Huh!” and “Gee!”, and shakes his head.

  “Can I call in an associate? I have no clue what this is.”

  We call in an associate.

  Doctor #2 prods me a while. He looks twice the age of Doctor #1. He scratches his chin, peeks under my flimsy paper gown a little more, and says things like, “Wow!” and “You’re right!” He shakes his head and asks, “Can we call in another doctor?”

  Doctor #3 is added to our motley crew, and, judging from the dialogue, I’ve stepped right into a Marx Brothers movie.

  The only thing they agree on is that I should see a dermatologist. Like, yesterday. One dermatologist offers me an appointment for next Thanksgiving. Did I mention how much I love my new HMO?

  After my doctor’s receptionist badgers another dermatologist into an appointment the same week, I feel the resolution can’t be far behind. I return from that visit with the following information at my fingertips (which are the only parts of me left without the rash):

  • The good news is that the dermatologist had to ask me only two simple questions before she made a diagnosis.

  • The bad news is that I’ll have to pay $125 for that five minutes if my new insurance hasn’t kicked in yet.

  • The good news is that the disorder has a name: pityriasis rosea.

  • The bad news is that even that homeschooled Indian kid would have been stumped on this one in the National Spelling Bee.

  • The good news is that it’s not contagious.

  • The bad news is that people don’t believe you that it’s not contagious.

  • The good news is that it’s like chicken pox: You get it only once and then develop a lifelong immunity.

  • The bad news is that it’s like chicken pox: It itches like crazy, spreads everywhere, and looks absolutely disgusting.

  • The good news is that it will go away on its own.

  • The bad news is that it will go away on its own because no one knows how it gets there in the first place. “It will go away on its own” is a doctor’s catch-all phrase for ninety percent of the ailments I have ever had.

  • The good news is that there is a progression this rash follows, and it looks normal for the three-week mark.

  • The bad news is that it lasts eight to twelve weeks.

  • The good news is that the dermatologist prescribed two steroid creams for the itching.

  • The bad news is that one of them burns off three layers of skin, and the other one does about as much good as rubbing Crisco on my torso.

  • The good news is that my pharmacy has a drive-thru window so I won’t have to go inside with this ugly rash.

  • The bad news is our new health plan isn’t accepted at this pharmacy.

  • The good news is there is another pharmacy with a drive-thru window only a few blocks away, and they take my health plan.

  • The bad news is I have to walk in anyway because the plastic drive-thru vacuum tube I am supposed to put my prescription into slips out of my hands and rolls under my car, and I accidentally run over it.

  • The good news is I slip past the front counter without anyone seeing me carrying fifty pieces of crushed plastic.

  • The bad news is they are all staring at my rash instead, and the pharmacists in the back of the store probably wonder what other medications I am on to have demolished a big plastic tube at one mile per hour.

  • The good news is that oatmeal baths relieve the itching enough to go to bed at night.

  • The bad news is that my husband prefers Cream of Wheat.

  Tightening Your Belt

  It is bad. Really bad. We rip up the old living room carpet and realize we have to sand down the shredded chunks of petrified wood underneath. My husband, though, is giddy with anticipation. As I wrestle the furniture out of the room, he runs to the basement and drags out his belt sander, ripping the ratty old belt off and slipping a new belt on with ease.

  Then he reaches for the thingamajig that tightens the belt. It isn’t there. None of the handles on the contraption tighten anything—except his forehead, which is pinched so tight I fear an aneurysm.

  “Why don’t I look in that drawer where you keep the owner’s manuals for everything you’ve owned since sixth grade?” I offer.

  “Somebody gave this to me secondhand. I never had the manual.” If there’s anything Wayne loves more than a new tool, it’s a free tool.

  His first impulse is to do a Google search for “belt sander” to see if the manufacturer has a thousand-page schematic he can print out and stuff in a desk drawer until 2037. I remind him that we have just dismantled the computer and moved it out of the living room so we can rip up the carpet.

  He mumbles things I’ve only heard on cable TV and sits down in the middle of the bare wooden floor, pondering the sander from every angle. I watch him from across the room, fascinated, the same way Jane Goodall watches chimps. Before he can start grooming me for lice, I suggest that he call my dad, who owns every power tool known to mankind and sorts them in his garage by size and function. (He’s retired and has nothing better to do than fix things that aren’t broken yet.)

  Wayne ignores me and taps the sander with a ball peen hammer. Tap. Tap. Tap. I admire his manly way of taking charge. He grunts, then snorts. Then grunts again. I admire him some more.

  I cross the room to the phone and call my dad, asking him if he owns a similar belt sander. Naturally, he does. Wayne sits with his back to me, his derriere collecting jagged edges of floorboard with the same speed my daughter collects Barbie shoes. I say loudly and not-at-all subtly, “Dad, he’s right here,” and then hand Wayne the phone. It is a short conversation.

  “Uh-huh … . Ohhhhh.”

  Wayne grabs a screwdriver, winds up, and whacks the side of the sander, which makes a small clicking noise.

  “Huh. You’re right. It worked.”

  Another home repair problem solved. And no head lice. Jane Goodall would be so proud.

  Brave New World … Scared Old Mom

  Technology turned our mother-daughter relationship upside down. Without being asked, I had become the mommy of my mommy. I was the one in charge, teaching her so that she might one day toddle out on her own and forge her way in the Brave New World.

  The Brave New World, that is, of cyberspace.

  It started innocently enough back in the mid-nineties. While most older folks were moving to Florida, my parents retired at age fifty-five and moved two thousand miles away to Las Vegas. It was drier and warmer than Pennsylvania, they said. It was dirt cheap to live t
here, they said. It was their one big adventure in life, they said. This’ll never work, I said.

  My brother and I bit our lips and let them go with a kiss and a prayer—and a roll of nickels.

  It soon became obvious that the distance was going to be more daunting than anyone had anticipated. Despite the technology of the telephone, contact became more sporadic because it was costly—and because of the time difference. They now lived in a world of early rising, 110-degree “it’s-a-dry-heat,” and four p.m. cheap buffets on the Strip. By the time the phone rates dropped at the end of their day, they themselves had dropped hours earlier, snoozing during Murder, She Wrote.

  I’ve been online since 1988 and I know the value of quick, cheap communication such as e-mail. One day a few years ago I casually mentioned to a friend that it would be nice to get a cheap, secondhand computer for my parents so they could get online and keep in touch better. Soon I was offered a free low-end 286 computer and monitor. [Author’s Note: There’s no such thing as a free lunch—or a free computer.] With a little tweaking, my parents could use it to get started.

  Several hundred dollars later, I was belatedly rethinking my strategy.

  My mother seemed more eager than my dad to venture into this new technology. She had, after all, used customized computer programs in her job as a quality control technician for the Crayola crayon company for years. (My father’s expertise in high technology had been limited to hot-wiring and souping up the VCR—apparently so that it would flash “1:00” instead of “12:00.”)

  I timed the arrival of the upgraded computer at their house to coincide with my visit to them that spring. I arrived on Tuesday, and the second-day air packages arrived on Wednesday. I hooked everything up effortlessly and we were on our way. That week I gave my mom the perfunctory training she’d need to maneuver around Windows and AOL, and I left Las Vegas confident that we’d soon be e-mailing and sending instant messages to each other on a regular basis. After all, how hard was AOL to figure out?

  I swear on the grave of my Tandy 2000 that I had no sooner stepped in my door and dropped my duffel bag than the phone rang.

  “Hello?”

  “Linda? Hi! You’re home? How was your flight?”

  “Fine, Mom. I just got home. What’s up? Is everything all right?”

  “Everything’s fine. I just have one teeeeensy question, though.”

  Her emphasis on the word “teeeeensy” didn’t go unnoticed.

  “Go ahead, shoot.”

  “It’s about the computer.”

  I felt a slight tightening in my throat, but dismissed it as jetlag. Everything is fine…. Everything is fine.

  I sat down.

  “Yes?”

  “It won’t turn on.”

  The tightening became a lump. Never buy a used computer, I thought.

  “What do you mean, it won’t turn on?”

  “I push in the button like you showed me, and nothing happens.”

  The lump began to pulse rhythmically. Maybe my dad had hot-wired it. Abandon hope, all ye who enter here, I thought fleetingly.

  “What do you mean, nothing happens?”

  “I mean, nothing happens. Zilch. Nothing.”

  “What about the switch on the monitor?”

  “Nope. Nothing there either. Weird, huh?”

  “Mom … Did you turn on the power strip first?”

  “What’s a power strip?”

  One problem down. Thirty-seven thousand to go.

  I think I had time to unpack and eat a meal or two before the next phone call came in.

  “Hi, honey. I hate to bother you, but… . It’s the computer again.”

  “Doesn’t it turn on?”

  “Oh, it’s on. That’s not it.”

  I felt strangely relieved. She was teachable, at least.

  “Then what’s the problem?” I asked.

  “The thingy is blinking.”

  “The what is what?”

  “The thingy is blinking.”

  “Mom, you’ll have to speak up. It sounds like you’re saying, ‘The thingy is blinking.’”

  “It IS blinking!” she insisted. “And I keep hearing this crunching noise.”

  Twenty minutes and an entire lack of jargon later, I ascertained that the “thingy” in question was the hard disk activity light on the CPU. The crunching noise was, of course, the hard disk activity indicated by the blinking thingy.

  My mother began to get the hang of being online quickly after that. Soon she could forward joke e-mails to several hundred of her closest friends and type “LOL ;-) ” in an instant message window with the best of them. Suddenly I had more daily contact with my mother than I’d had in the womb. Despite the cyber-claustrophobia, it was nice to have her feel close again.

  Several months went by. Little questions trickled in now and then.

  1. “I swear I was just gone from the computer for ten minutes, and I came back and there were these swirling colored lines dancing all over the screen. Where did everything go?”

  2. “I saved this letter to your brother, and now I can’t find it. I think the computer hid it from me.”

  3. “I got the picture of the kids you sent me with your e-mail, but I don’t know how to open it again to show your father.”

  4. “Okay, I found the picture but when I opened it this time it took up the whole screen.”

  5. “I tried to install something, but it wouldn’t let me… . What? Honestly, I don’t know. It just kept telling me no.”

  6. “I know this was a used computer, honey, but I just found some old folder on here from the previous owner, called ‘Teen JPGs.’ Don’t tell your father. He’d die.”

  After a lot of trial and error, my mother learned to write down for me exactly what happened when an error occurred. She now wrote down the information in the little dialog box with the red “X” before clicking on “OK.” We began to solve her problems on the first try. And I began to wonder if I’d missed my calling as a tech support rep.

  Other than basic computer training, things went smoothly. And together, we got that computer tweaked and humming, and kept her and my dad in touch with the big, wide world. Then one day I got another call from my mother.

  “Hi, Lindy Lou… . How are ya, honey?”

  She’d called me Lindy Lou. She was priming me for something. Something big.

  “Hi, Mom. What’s up?”

  She sighed. “Ohhh… . It’s the computer. It broke.”

  “What do you mean, ‘it broke’?”

  “The guy at the shop said the hard drive died. He said this happens sometimes when hard drives get older, and it’s probably for the best.”

  She sounded as if an old maiden aunt had died. And was that sniffling I heard on the other end of the phone?

  “Mom, I’m sorry. I probably should have saved up more and gotten you a better computer.”

  “No, it’s okay. I feel bad since you spent all that time on it. The good news is that your father and I traded it in for a brand-new computer with everything on it!”

  I could tell how proud and excited she was. She always said “your father and I” for the big stuff.

  This newfangled contraption had Windows 98—and I was still lumping along with Windows 95. It had enough bells and whistles to rival all the slots on the Strip. She gushed on the phone that it did disk cleanup automatically at one o’clock in the morning, and that it defragmented her hard drive when she was shopping—things I’d only read about. I tried hard not to get my knickers in a twist.

  Every day I got a dozen e-mails from my mom: spam about Madalyn Murray O’Hara; forwarded jokes with more “>>>’s” in every line than actual text; URL links to online newspaper articles about diseases she was afraid I’d get; and recipes I’d never use because I don’t routinely keep goat cheese or spices from as-yet undiscovered countries in my kitchen.

  Despite all the warm, homey contact online, my life felt strangely hollow. It wasn’t until months later that I reali
zed what was missing: those unexpected phone calls from my technologically-challenged mother. She hadn’t had a problem with her computer in months. On her own, she e-mailed her senator every week, IMed with her grandchildren, played ten different variations of Solitaire, designed flyers for the neighborhood casino-zoning meetings at their house, and successfully installed videocam software.

  It was obvious, even to me, that she was ready. And, much to my relief, the Brave New World welcomed her with open arms.

  The Rule of Law in Florida: Little-known laws I discovered while visiting the Sunshine State in 2000

  Celebrating Christmas in southwestern Florida during a historic election year was certainly unique. Between ballot recounts while watching in horror everyone’s hanging chads, I had enough time on my hands to compile a list of rules for living there. It took my mind off the election brouhaha.

  RULE: At Christmas, you must over-decorate your house with icicle lights, even though you haven’t seen an icicle since you got that frost-free refrigerator in 1986.

  REASON: You must trick Santa into thinking it’s cold enough to show up in that stifling red suit.

  RULE: You must wear sweaters and hats if the temperature dips below 62 degrees.

  REASON: This alerts the tourists that you’re a local when a wind-chill factor of 58 sends shivers up your spine. This doesn’t stop you from going to the beach, of course. You just wear mittens.

  RULE: You must own a car the size of a 40-foot schooner.

  REASON: Most Floridians own cars that can be mistaken for small yachts in the parking lot of the Winn-Dixie. This is to protect them from the rare but elusive soccer mom wielding a dangerous SUV without using her left turn signal.

  RULE: You cannot have a basement.

  REASON: All building contractors in Florida are afraid of ancient burial grounds. But where do you put the broken bicycles, chest freezers, and power tools?

  RULE: You must own a two-car attached garage with as much square footage as your house, even if you own only one car.

  REASON: You’ll need room for your broken bicycles, chest freezers, and power tools. The rest of the garage is used to dock your car.