Head in the Sand ... and other unpopular positions (15 page)

3. If you fish with a second person, don’t stand too
close to each other while casting your lines into the water. You
only have two eyes, remember? And lips don’t like to have holes in
them. At least mine don’t.

4. Some fish are stupid enough to meander around in
the water a foot from shore. Even ten-inch fish. Sometimes. So, be
ready to just walk to the edge and drop your line down into the
water and yank it back out with a fish attached. It can happen to
you.

5. If you bring a five-gallon plastic bucket to put
the fish in, don’t forget to bring a lid. One that stays on. Who
knew local fish were also
flying
fish? If you have no lid,
don’t put the bucket too close to the water. You’ve been
warned.

6. If you are using nightcrawlers in dirt, and if you
are handling your own fish to take them off the hook, bring wet
wipes. Trust me on this one. Especially if you also packed a lunch
and haven’t eaten it yet.

Despite the misadventures of the day, we’re really
psyched to go fishing at Laurel Hill Campground in less than two
weeks! Trout dinner over an open fire, here we come!

My everlasting beloved works at the local nuclear
power plant. (Think Homer Simpson minus the doughnuts. No, wait,
keep the doughnuts.) You probably have a local grocery store or a
local basketball team. And we have a local nuclear power plant.
Doesn’t everybody?

Tonight at dinner Wayne’s telling me a my-day-at-work
story and I’m listening while crunching my salad.

“So then Blaze says . . .”

“Wait, who?”

“Blaze.”

“The guy’s nickname is Blaze?”

“No, that’s his name.”

I have to think about this for a while. Crunch.
Crunch. Crunch.

“His first name?”

“Yup.”

Crunchety crunch crunch. I don’t ask what his last
name is.

Despite the fact that the story is not going this
way, my mind is wandering elsewhere. I am sitting here in awe of
parents brave enough to name their baby boy Blaze when they could
have named him Justin or Joshua or Sean or something equally
conformist. What an attitude this kid must have had during his
school years! What cheers he must have heard at graduation when his
name was called!

Then again, do you really want a guy named Blaze
working at your local nuke plant?

Three months later, though, I got the rest of the
story (no thanks to Paul Harvey). You know, the part I cared
about—that weird name.

Naturally, while having a conversation (especially
one with an engineer and not a fellow writer), no one’s spelling
out what they’re saying letter by letter (unless there are small
children around and you’re trying to talk about
s-e-x
).

Imagine my embarrassment to find out that our nuke
plant worker, Blaze, had parents who in actuality named him
Blasé.

So it is a normal name after all, if a bit on the
exotic side. But I bet he still got beat up on the playground.

List #4: Really Arbitrary Observations

•
Power outages at home are
fun—for about fifteen minutes. Then the teenagers figure out that
the Internet is down, the cable TV isn’t working, and it’s
difficult to read celebrity magazines by candlelight without
setting something on fire.

•
All haircuts are great
for the first few weeks, but one day the haircut goes nuts and
doesn’t remember where any of your hairs should go and cowlicks
show up unbidden.

•
Some days I have so
little intestinal fortitude that the only staring contest I can win
is with the goldfish, and even then it’s a close call because he
doesn’t have eyelids.

•
Parents gush with pride
over their children’s tiniest accomplishments because they remember
when the most difficult thing their kids did was refrain from
pooping in their pants, and they’re just grateful the kids have
moved beyond doing that sort of thing in public.

•
I have to feel
adventurous before I’ll clean the top of the refrigerator. Going up
there is akin to exploring the lunar surface. Last time I cleaned
up there, I found some moon rocks and a U.S. flag next to the
Cheerios box.

Have you ever awakened too early—accidentally? You
know, you wake up while it’s still half-dark outside, then realize
you’re way too awake to go back to sleep, so you get up anyway?

Yeah, me neither.

Well, actually, I did that this past week. Twice.
Once, I could forgive. But the second time was just downright rude.
I could have slept an extra hour or more but my body was saying it
needed to visit a bathroom, and then my brain said, “While we’re
up, why don’t we just check our e-mail real quick?”

Then my body said, “This couch is so comfortable. Why
don’t we just stay here and put on the news and see if anything big
happened overnight?”

Which, of course, nothing did.

By now it was eight o’clock, so I said to myself,
“Might as well just stay up now. I’ll never get back to sleep at
this point.”

I could have smacked myself for that last thought
(well, and the other ones before that too), but I never win when I
argue with myself so I let it slide this once and stayed up.

Then it happened again a few days later. Got up at
seven-thirty when I could have slept in for another hour and gotten
a full eight hours’ sleep. But no, I checked e-mail, fed the guinea
pigs, and generally putzed around before I had to shower and get
ready to take my daughter out for her standardized tests.

I just hope it doesn’t turn into a habit. If I
suddenly became a morning person, I think I’d have to kill myself.
But I wouldn’t do it till at least noon.

Did you ever eat lunch at a nuke plant?

Yeah, me neither—until this week. It wasn’t what I
expected—partly because I’m not allowed very far inside the
perimeter and stayed in the public areas near the outer edge of the
plant. But I did get to drive by all the cooling towers. Cooling
towers are those round concave buildings that just scream “China
Syndrome!” and “Silkwood!” and “Three Mile Island!” I drove through
the tiny town of Shippingport, which boasts these five cooling
towers as the main part of its skyline (a term I use loosely in
reference to Shippingport).

I’ve heard a rumor that the town’s residents, in
exchange for rearing their children in the shadow of a nuclear
power plant, get free cable TV. You know, something worthwhile and
comparable to their woes. Something the families with six kids (and
twelve heads) can really make use of.

But I digress. Nobody I saw while meeting my husband
for a quick lunch had a second head. Wayne did look suspiciously
like an overgrown Mickey Mouse, but that was because he was wearing
a white hardhat with gray sound-muffling earphones perched on the
sides of the hat. Before then, I’d never pictured Mickey Mouse as
six-foot-four, blond, mustachioed, and walking pigeon-toed in a
denim work shirt.

Or eating a foot-long pastrami sandwich from Subway.
But, amazingly, there he was. Not glowing, either, which was a
relief. Oh, and wearing forty thousand I.D. badges and cards and
keys and lanyards around his neck—all of which probably weighed as
much as a small Toyota. Bling for the engineering homeboys.

I kept expecting to hear a siren go off and then to
watch everyone hit the deck. You know, like in every movie with a
nuke plant in it. Or perhaps I’d see a security guard with a
semiautomatic weapon (yes, before you ask, they do, but don’t ask)
running up to me and asking to see my forty thousand I.D. badges
and lanyards, which of course I don’t have.

I got out of there unscathed, and the nuke plant
continues to make clean, efficient electricity for
everyone—including the two-headed residents of Shippingport.

True story:
My younger daughter and I were
eating pizza and watching the movie
That Thing You Do!
on
TV. We were watching my favorite scene—where Liv Tyler’s character,
Faye, is mailing a letter while wearing a radio earplug, and the
Wonders’ new song comes on the radio for the first time. She licks
a stamp and then dumps the letter in the mailbox and goes screaming
down the street in ecstasy.

Daughter, to me:
“Mom, in that scene she’s
licking the postage stamp before she puts it on the letter. Why is
she doing that? Wouldn’t you just stick it on the envelope?”

I just about fell over. Surely within my daughter’s
memory and lifetime there have been postage stamps you had to lick,
right? Surely she was kidding and she did remember you once had to
lick postage stamps? No, she hadn’t a clue that there was a time
when you couldn’t just peel a stamp off its backing and stick it to
the envelope.

Meanwhile, I rarely go through a batch of stamps
where I don’t fleetingly think, “I’m so glad I don’t have to lick
all these stamps like I used to have to do. They always tasted like
old cough medicine.”

In other words, something that still seems new to me
(peelable stamps) seems like it’s always been that way to my
daughter, who is already taller than I am and is learning to
drive.

Good grief, another foot in the grave. By my count,
that’s about six or seven feet so far, though, so, really, I should
be glad to be here at all.

I need to remind myself never to show her a rotary
phone. Or a percolator.

When I was a teen, my grandmother, Fannie Mae
Hockenberry Au, patiently taught me how to crochet. She had tried
to teach my mother this skill in years past, but apparently you
must carry an actual Hockenberry gene because my mother never quite
got the knack if it. As for my own training, after some figurative
and literal hand-holding by my eternally patient grandmother, I
picked up the basics of crocheting. For a long while the stitches
were uneven and ugly, and doing anything but straight lines back
and forth was an impossibility. And the term “straight lines” was a
compliment my work didn’t deserve.

But over the years since those early lessons I’ve
done several projects that were zigzag, or round, or had different
patterns. And I’ve found that crocheting fulfills a basic desire to
create something—something from (almost) nothing. There’s a sense
of satisfaction in completing a project. I’m at the stage now where
I hurry to complete one crocheting project just so I can move on to
another. There has to be a disorder named after that, doesn’t
there? Arts and Crafts A.D.D.?

However, now I have leftover skeins of yarn from each
project. (I always buy too much yarn for a project. There’s nothing
worse than getting toward the end of a project and only then
finding out your afghan is now going to be the size of a large dish
towel because of your poor planning.) I may feel brave enough
someday to make an afghan out of all those wacky mismatched
leftover skeins. It would still be warm and the stitches would
still be even. But where on God’s good earth could I put it? It’d
be an eyesore. A nice, comfy eyesore, but still, an eyesore.

So, if you know me personally and one day you get an
afghan of, well, unusual color schemes, for lack of a better term,
think of it as recycling. I’m just trying to be eco-friendly.

During my decades of crocheting—the thousands of
hours spent crippling my own fingers with an aluminum hook—I’ve
amassed a small amount of needlecraft wisdom I feel compelled to
pass along to the neophytes within my readership. So, jot this
stuff down; you might need it someday. (Wait, you don’t need to jot
it down—you bought this book and here it all is. And if you’re
borrowing a friend’s copy, shame on you! Stop reading now and go
buy your own copy, you skinflint.)

• My experience with mismatched skein ends has taught
me that this is how the granny square was invented. Which, come to
think of it, gives me an idea.

• If you are a slow crocheter, you should
double-check to be sure ponchos will still be in style before you
crochet twenty of them for your nieces (and nephews). The same goes
for berets. And neckties. And sweater vests. Take a walk through
your local thrift store if you don’t believe me.

• If you don’t have air conditioning, remember to
crochet tiny, lacy items in July and big, hefty afghans in
December. Nothing sucks worse than having a mammoth ripple afghan
draped across your lap when it’s hot enough to melt the linoleum in
your kitchen and humid enough to moisten Uncle Earl’s chapped
lips.

• Friends don’t let friends drink and crochet.

We’ve all heard the expression “Oil and water don’t
mix.” And yet, my husband, Wayne, and I are so different in so many
ways that I wonder if I ought to check his shirt label to see if
he’s a different genus or subspecies from me. Because honestly,
most of the time I don’t get how his brain works. To boil it down:
I’m a writer and he’s an electrical engineer. That’s fairly far
apart along the spectrum of vocational light.

The simplest way to express our rudimentary
difference is that I’m a word brain and he’s a math brain. I think
in logical
word
pictures (okay, not always
logical
),
and he thinks in logical
number
pictures, mechanical
pictures. I love books and papers, and he loves gadgets and objects
and things. I think; he does. I’ll theorize; he’ll simonize.

We’re both collectors—but not very official ones. So,
while I stack neverending book purchases on already sagging
bookcases and keep reams of 96-bright laserjet-compatible paper in
my office cabinets, Wayne stuffs rolls of ethernet cable, blue
plastic electrical outlet boxes, and roofing nails into large
plastic totes. I hoard red pens and paper clips; he hoards ratchet
sets and blank rewritable CDs.