Head in the Sand ... and other unpopular positions

by Linda M Au

  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.

  There’s An Echo in Here

  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.

  People … People Who Watch People

  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.

  Stalking

  You’re focused on one person, often someone smarter and better-looking than you.

  People-watching

  You stay in one place, happy to watch people pass.

  Stalking

  You follow one person around, hiding in bushes.

  People-watching

  You take cute, humorous notes in a little black notebook so you don’t forget wacky things you see.

  Stalking

  You take copious notes in tiny, tight handwriting, collecting it in 27 scrapbooks you keep under a floorboard in your closet.

  People-watching

  You chuckle cheerily at the funny things people around you are doing.

  Stalking

  You drool over what you’re seeing in someone’s bedroom window with those night-vision goggles.

  People-watching

  You search through the trash bin in the park after you see a child accidentally drop in a favorite toy while throwing away her candy wrapper.

  Stalking

  You root through the garbage at someone’s house, looking for old gas station receipts, coffee grounds, and bits of rancid food the person might have touched so you can frame it and hang it on a secret wall in your basement.

  People-watching

  No one who’s watching you watching others will call the police on you.

  Stalking

  Two words:

  restraining order

  More Random Things I Notice

  List #2: Important Stuff to Remember:

  • Never try to jury-rig a WiFi connection with a wire coat hanger and chewing gum connected to your laptop with a twist-tie from an old bread bag, no matter what my husband tells you. It won’t work. He was just filching off the neighbor’s unsecure network and didn’t know it. (This is not to be confused with an “insecure network,” which is just a fancy, high-tech-sounding name for my group of women friends when we get together for dinner.)

  • Never pray for patience.

  • I opened a bag of corn chips today and noticed a small logo in the lower right corner of the bag: “Official Snack of Minor League Baseball.” Take note of that: Minor League. Somehow this bag of yummy snack food didn’t make it to the Show. What does this say about the chips?

  • Ever notice that clichés regarding work involve torture-chamber levels of pain? Putting your nose to the grindstone. Working your fingers to the bone. It’s a good thing we don’t realize as kids that this stuff is far closer to literal than any of us want to admit. We’d have thrown ourselves off bridges the first chance we got.

  • I don’t care how fast you want it: Never, ever pray for patience.

  • During one week, I see a news story about a study saying that coffee is good for you. The next week, a new study asserts that coffee is bad for you. So, just to be safe, I drink coffee every other week.

  • There’s something about Velveeta that creeps me out a little bit. My husband may have grown up with the stuff and may indeed have fond memories of eating it as a child, but anything called “processed cheese food product” that can also be branded with a half-life just shouldn’t be ingested.

  • I’m serious: Don’t pray for patience. It’s a trick.

  Stuff in My Car That Doesn’t Work

  It’s been another of those muggy weeks here in western Pennsylvania where I become a hermit in my house, enjoying the constant 74 degrees and low humidity of our central air. I turn into a wuss unable to leave the house to do anything unnecessary. Doesn’t help that the air conditioning in my car doesn’t really do much more than cool off my knees and my right elbow because the only cold air I feel seeps out of the vents and only the body parts in a three-inch radius from a vent get cooled off. And frankly, driving with my face hunched down in front of a side vent really wouldn’t do much for my driving record. Not really.

  Where was I? Oh yeah.

  We’re moving a big bookcase into the house from our storage facility, so I may get the rest of my books in here, and also the rest of my vinyl record albums. Yes, kids, you don’t remember such things, but we old fogeys played vinyl record albums instead of CDs.

  It’s a weird thought that none of my now-grown children know how to operate a turntable. I’m not saying I miss vinyl, despite the many things I’ve read about how compromised CD sound is compared to vinyl. I certainly don’t miss playing songs in a different order by lifting up the needle at the end of one song and physically placing it on the beginning of the song you want to hear next (which may have entailed flipping over the album first and holding in that little metal thingy at the top of the spindle so the album would fall all the way down and sit flat on the turntable). And I certainly don’t miss hearing that scraping sound of a needle scoring its way across the album, leaving a nice scratch in its wake that usually meant hearing a skip at that precise point in the song every time you played it from then on.

  And none of us would have been able to play vinyl albums in our cars like we can with CDs and now iPods. Can you picture trying to shove a big ol’ twelve-inch album into a huge slot in your dashboard, which would have taken up the entire width of the car? Instead, we’d all still be stuck playing cassettes in the car, hitting FF or REW in a vain attempt to skip songs on albums we hate without causing traffic accidents.

  Then again, in my case, even that would be a step up. Over a year ago my husband got me a CD player for my car. (I’m driving a ‘92 Corsica, made before technology was invented.) I was thrilled to replace my tape deck, and except for the fact that it apparently had no s
kip protection whatsoever, especially for burned CDs (“Don’t breathe, Jeremy, or it’ll skip over every three seconds of your favorite Good Charlotte song”), I was thrilled to have this technology available in my car.

  For approximately six months.

  Then the contraption woke up one morning and decided to forget what a CD looked like. And it hasn’t recognized a CD since. We’ve tried every type of CD in the book. We tried every type of cleaner known to mankind (except peanut butter, which every preschooler seems to think belongs in CD players). Nothing worked. Certainly not the CDs. So then I was reduced to using it as a very, very bad radio. Which was worse than the radio that had been in my tape deck.

  Then the thing started to physically slip out of the slot in the dashboard. When I drove up a hill, the whole CD player (or, should I say, “the very expensive yet cheap radio”?) would slide out the rectangular hole and whack the gear shift. I had to drive with one hand holding the thing in place to keep it from ramming the car into neutral, which got dangerous after a while.

  I asked my husband to disconnect the CD player entirely, and all I had left staring at me from the hole in the dash were about two dozen wires of different colors. Oh sure, they were pretty, but …

  Someday I hope to get him to put the tape deck back in. I’m actually looking forward to the day when I’ll be able to play a tape in my car again. My standards have gotten really low in the past six months.

  Till then I have no CD player, no tape deck, no radio, and no clock in my car. Nada. Zip. Zilch. Total silence when I drive. Well, except for when my kids are in the car. There’s never total silence then, of course.

  But, it’ll be months till I see another radio or tape deck in my car. Why? Because it would mean my husband would have to sit in my cramped, sweltering car jiggling wires around for hours on end. And, of course, it’s August.

  Oh well. Maybe for Christmas… . Oh wait, it’ll be snowing then. He won’t want to sit outside in my car then either.