Head in the Sand ... and other unpopular positions (4 page)

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.

RULE:
If you’re a tourist, you must always wear shorts, Birkenstock
knock-offs, and T-shirts everywhere you go.

REASON:
Even though it’s 40 degrees at night, friends
back home are being tortured by snowdrifts, so you’re determined to
get pictures of yourself near the ocean in shorts, Birkenstock
knock-offs, and a T-shirt.

RULE:
The only roadkill your tourist friends will ever see this far
south is a dead armadillo.

REASON:
The alligators eat all the other
wildlife.

RULE:
When taking walks, you’re permitted to experience a small
hill, but only if you’re on a golf course.

REASON:
Florida is really just Kansas with a lot more
water. And fewer tornadoes. But more hurricanes.

I just finished folding
bedsheets fresh from the dryer. There is a knack to folding
elasticized, fitted queen-sized sheets so they’ll lay flat in a
drawer and take up less space (and get less wrinkled till you use
them). My mother taught me how to do this when I was a young
girl—

patiently (or not so patiently, depending on
my perspective at age ten or age forty-nine) and with a precision
that I can still duplicate in just a minute or two to this very
day. I can do it properly even with my eyes closed. It scares me a
little.

It’s one of those housekeeping skills I
shied away from learning as a girl but can now appreciate as a
middle-aged adult. It’s beyond my own limited comprehension of
physics to understand why the same sheet takes up far more space in
the linen closet if I just give up and stuff it in there balled up
in frustration rather than carefully folding it and placing it flat
on the shelf alongside its peers. Isn’t it the same sheet with the
same square footage, the same amount of molecules? So why does it
take up more space if I don’t fold it first? I have always striven
against menial chores that take up more brain space than they
should, but in my house, the closet space is more limited than my
brain space (and that’s saying something). So, I grudgingly (but
efficiently) fold the sheets and put them away. And, they fit.

Let me be clear, though:
This is a skill that came from my mother. On my own, I would never
have thought to neatly fold square pieces of cloth with cinched
elastic that go onto a piece of furniture that’s used in a private
room of my house while I am essentially unconscious—pieces of cloth
that are always hidden under
other
pieces of cloth that I spread over the sheets
every morning precisely to cover them up. There is no logic to such
a folding exercise, and I’d never have thought it up on my own, the
physics of my small closets notwithstanding.

Of all the things I could have inherited
from my Type-A personality mother, God chose the ability to both
fold sheets properly and to wash dishes by hand within an inch of
their lives. (I get my hair and eye color from my dad’s side of the
family, in case you were wondering.) My mother also squeegees her
shower every time someone breathes on it, removes pieces of trash
from the bathroom trash can throughout the day so that it’s always
empty, and hates her kitchen floor because it has microscopic
grooves in the tiles where two or three atoms of dirt taunt her on
Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays when she scrubs the floor with
industrial-strength chemicals that require a gas mask and could eat
the skin off an elephant in five seconds flat.

This is the woman who raised me. Honestly, I
didn’t stand a chance.

This may be my
heritage—this may be the mother from whence I came—but it is not
the mother I have become. But I wouldn’t call it rebellion to say
that I can look at a dirty baseboard in fascination for months
before it begins to bother me—and even then it’s usually because my
mother is stopping by, and even
then
it’s not enough for me to
actually do anything about it. Not rebellion, really. More like
confusion with a dash of inertia thrown in.

If I hadn’t seen with my own eyes the birth
certificate with both our names on it and the hospital photos and
heard the stories of the million-hour labor, I’m not sure I’d
believe she and I share the same DNA. Can all the genes from one’s
mother be 100% recessive? Because that would explain a lot.

Then again, I’m looking at those folded
bedsheets right now, and they look damn good. There might be
something to this science stuff after all.

October 11, 2000

We’re here in sunny Las Vegas—my husband, Wayne,
nine-year-old Grace, and me—with blue skies overhead, the soft,
gentle
ping-pinging
of slot machines everywhere (even in the
Laundromats and Walmarts), and of course, the rough
rumble-rumble
of backhoes digging up my parents’ entire
street, down a foot and a half into the ground. In fact, the road
we came in on from our hotel this morning is now closed this
afternoon, and when we came back from our buffet lunch (see below),
my parents’ driveway was closed. No wonder my mom says the state
bird of Nevada is the “crane.”

The two flights in (for those of you who are still
snickering at my panicky fear of flying) were as uneventful as I
could have asked for. And trust me, I asked. The first leg
(Pittsburgh to Charlotte, North Carolina) was over before Gracie
could really get into it, although I personally could have done
without her gawking out the window and gasping, “Wow, you should
see how much the plane is
tilted
, Mom! I bet if
I had my Coke here now, it’d spill out of the cup! Cool!” (Yeah,
yeah, that’s nice, Gracie, now here’s a pillow. It’s fun to
sleep
on a plane too.)

The second leg, to Las Vegas, was 4.75 hours long (or
should I say, 4.75
long hours
?), but not bad (“not bad”
being a relative term). Reading several books and magazines helped,
as did my portable CD player with Santana cranked up loud.
(
Factoid of the Day:
Did you know that it is impossible to
turn up a personal CD player loud enough to drown out engine noise
without going clinically deaf?)

We were served dinner on this leg: a rather mediocre
roast beef-type substance with something akin to rice and corn, an
adorably teeny saladette, some dark brown, square thing that I
think was a brownie at one time, a slice of cheese, crackers, and a
dinner roll with Land O’Lakes butter. (Remind me to tell you
Wayne’s story of the legend of the Land O’Lakes girl. On second
thought, don’t.)

My enthusiasm for this meal was surpassed only by
Gracie’s, who eagerly commented on everything on her tray as if
she’d never had such a sumptuous feast in her life. (“Look, Mom, a
salad! Wow, crackers!” If only she were this easy to please at
home.) When we caught her eating her brownie with her spoon after
the meal, we asked why she hadn’t just used her fork instead. She
replied, “I just want to use
everything
!”

The only downer so far has been that Wayne spent the
morning we left Pittsburgh in the local hospital instead of at work
for half a day. Why? Seems he’s developed some sort of odd infected
bursitis in his right elbow, which had swollen up and been very
uncomfortable. So, he’s currently sitting in my dad’s recliner
across the room from me, doped up on several types of medication,
suffering from jet lag, and aching from having had to squeeze his
6’4” frame into a 2’x2’ plane seat for 4.75 long hours. (You do the
math. You’ll need a calculator. And yes, you can use scrap paper.)
Good thing he looks cute with his knees up around his chin.

Picture this:
We gave him the aisle seat,
thinking that he could then prop his sore elbow up on a pillow
hanging out into the aisle.

Rethink this:
Don’t try this if you are
sitting at the back of the plane right around the only two
restrooms on board. Before we lost count, his elbow had been
bumped, jammed, and poked forty-seven times per hour (all time
zones included) by folks sprinting down the aisle toward the
stalls.

Gracie is staying with my parents in their spare
room. Well, actually it’s their cat’s room. Yes, their cat (named
Joker—how appropriate for a cat in Las Vegas) has his own room. He
has a daybed (complete with trundle) for when he has guest kitties
over, a closet and drawers to keep all his stuff in, a clothes
hamper (unsure what this is for), a Health Rider exercise machine
(apparently he’s afraid of developing love handles), a phone jack
(for when he gets his own laptop and wants to get online), and a
litter box.

Anyway, Gracie said when she moved her hands in the
night, the cat jumped her and attacked her fingers. It seems he’s
tickled pink that Grandma and Pappy have given him his own personal
cat-toy to keep in his room.

Today we toured Caesar’s Palace, which has a huge FAO
Schwarz store complete with a three-story moving Trojan Horse
(everything has that Greco-Roman theme in Caesar’s Palace,
including the Warnerius Fraternius Storius, a.k.a. The Warner
Brothers Store). You can go inside the belly of the horse itself,
where you can be lured into buying all sorts of overpriced Trojan
Horse keychains and hats, plus a one-of-three-in-the-world Trojan
rocking horse for your child, as long as you have $12,500 you don’t
know what to do with. Yes, you read that right: Four times what I
paid for my used Corsica last year.

Caesar’s Palace has an hourly show at the fountains,
which involve animatronic robots reenacting the fall of Atlantis,
complete with actual fire storms, ice storms, and a gargoyle who
signals the fall of Atlantis at Zeus’ bidding. (Zeus is really just
a hologram video on the domed ceiling, but don’t tell the
animatronic statues. It’ll be our secret.)

We finished the day with a late-lunch buffet at
Boulder Station Casino. (No one over fifty eats dinner after three
p.m. here. It’s against the law.) None of us will be hungry again
until November.

The weather today has turned out to be about five
degrees cooler than it is in Pittsburgh. My mother insists we
brought the weather with us. I think anyone who owns an outdoor
Jacuzzi in a gazebo and can wear shorts and a tank top on Christmas
has no right to complain.

Since I have a husband tagging along on this trip for
the first time, and my parents have a small house, Wayne and I are
staying in a hotel a few miles away. We also have a rental car,
which means I’ve now driven the Las Vegas Strip myself and lived to
tell about it. It’s not for the faint of heart, because sixty
percent of the vehicles on the eight-lane road are taxicab minivans
sporting huge signs of scantily-clad showgirls (which is why I
don’t want to let Wayne drive, lest he inadvertently become
distracted and crash the car into the MGM Grand).

The rest of the day will be spent visiting my folks,
lounging around their house, taking over their computer, annoying
their cat, eating their food, and changing the channels on their TV
when they leave the room for a minute. Life is good.

Upcoming events for the week include: Hoover Dam
(otherwise known as “That Dam Tour”), the Treasure Island pirate
battle, the Mirage volcano, the Excalibur casino where we will get
a caricature done for Gracie (which I also had done for her
brothers when they accompanied me here), and—late in the evenings
when we leave Gracie here with my folks and head back to the hotel
in the rental car—more quiet, peaceful time alone than Wayne and I
have had in a long time.

Well, in a town like Las Vegas, in a hotel that
doubles as a casino 24/7, I suppose saying “quiet, peaceful time
alone” is really a relative term. But sometimes, being “alone” with
hundreds of strangers banging on slot machines and collecting
clanking quarters in metal containers can be quieter than time at
home with six kids.

But, that’s another adventure . . .

See you all later with more updates. And don’t forget
the big surprise for Wayne: Oct. 17, 2:30 Pacific Time . . . when
we renew our wedding vows with Elvis himself live on the Web!

Continued . . .

My husband is sitting here
in the living room in his own personal Electronic Geek Heaven: He’s
become one with the La-Z-Boy recliner, feet up, new laptop on his,
well,
lap
while
it whirrs and hot-syncs to his teeny tiny PDA, the television
remote control just inches away from his quivering right
hand.

His eyes are focused on
some generic show on the History Channel, or the Discovery Channel,
or possibly the Learning Channel. Frankly, I can’t tell them apart
anymore now that they’ve melded into pretty much the same channel.
They all air the same shows but with different titles.

On any given night, after
I say the four stupidest words in the history of womankind (“Watch
whatever you want”), I find myself knee-deep in either an hour-long
documentary on the history of concrete, or a biker-building series
where a bunch of men with greasy T-shirts and handlebar mustaches
reconstruct motorcycles out of old Budweiser cans and toilet seats
from outhouses they patronize somewhere on the outskirts of
town.

I can hear that nasal
twang emanating from the television even now . . . .

“
Well, golly, we’re behind
schedule on Joe-Bob’s commode-o-cycle, and we’ll have to take
shortcuts in order to get it done in time for the big contest in
three days. So, I’m a-weldin’ the seat lid to the carburetor and
hopin’ for the best. Meanwhile, Billy-John has gone and run a nail
gun up through his nose . . .
again
. . . and we’ll have to lose another two hours
taking him to the Urgi-Care in Buckland County to have his
sideburns sewed back on straight.”