Head in the Sand ... and other unpopular positions Read online

  Head in the Sand … and other unpopular positions

  Linda M. Au

  with a foreword by Patricia Lorenz

  Smashwords Edition

  Copyright © 2010 by Linda M. Au

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system (whatever that is) or transmitted in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the author, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review. A really positive, glowing review.

  ISBN: 9781301351244

  Visit Linda online:

  The Other Side of the Desk

  http://www.lindamaubooks.com

  Follow Linda on Twitter:

  http://twitter.com/LindaMAu

  “Like” Author Linda M Au on Facebook

  This book is also available in trade paperback.

  Cover design by Lynne H. Gordon

  Back cover photo by Hope A. Bowyer

  For Wayne …

  who allows me to cannibalize my life with him without even smiling

  and

  For the rest of my family and friends

  (who shall remain nameless, except that I wrote about them and didn’t change their names) …

  who tolerate my inappropriate people-watching and note-taking at family gatherings

  Ehh, forget about that “remain nameless” thing …

  This includes, but is not limited to:

  Mom & Dad

  Mike & Cindy

  Christopher & Courtney

  Jeremy

  Grace

  Addie

  Lynne

  Fara

  Mel

  Mary Beth

  Ginnie

  Wayne’s entire extended family

  The Deep Creek Four (Sarah, Jeannine, Chris & me)

  First Word and St. Davids

  CritClub, especially ChopOMatic & Myriam

  Easton Area High School (circa late-1970s)

  The entire RPCNA

  The Warpies writers

  The gang at Movie Forums

  The AlphaSmart group on Flickr

  Café Kolache, where many of these essays were written

  Contents

  And the Award Goes to …

  Foreword, by Patricia Lorenz

  Introduction

  Dear Santa …

  Even Jesus Doesn’t Save Everything

  Rash Behavior

  Tightening Your Belt

  Brave New World . . Scared Old Mom

  The Rule of Law in Florida

  Three Sheets to the Wind

  What Happened in Vegas, Part One

  Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Cement, But Were Afraid to Ask

  Buster’s Last Stand

  What Happened in Vegas, Part Two

  The Good, the Bad, and the Plugly

  What Happened in Vegas, Part Three

  Pennies in the Couch

  Say Ahhh!

  I’m Hoping You’ll See Less of Me

  Household Chores (a poem written in childhood)

  What Happened in Vegas, Part Four: Elvis Edition

  Is Nyquil a Legal Drug?

  Water, Water Everywhere

  The Bus Stops Here

  I’m Your Biggest Fan

  What Happened in Vegas, Part Five

  Close Encounters with Mark Spitz

  O Sing of Spring! (a poem written in adulthood)

  Dead Ringer

  Random Things I Notice

  Like Sands Through the Hourglass …

  Hell on Wheels

  Who You Callin’ Chicken?

  Medieval Instruments of Torture in My Hallway

  Open 23 Hours

  There’s An Echo in Here

  People … People Who Watch People

  More Random Things I Notice

  Stuff in My Car That Doesn’t Work

  Back Me Up

  Field Trip to the Drive-In

  The Winter of Their Discontent

  Eat’n Puke

  Cinderella Understood Writers

  Blood, Sweat and Tears

  Still More Random Things I Notice

  Gravity (an old poem now dedicated to Wayne)

  Beware of Geeks Bearing Gift

  Fishing for Compliments

  A Blaze of Glory

  Even More Random Things I Notice

  Sunny Side Down

  You’re Positively Glowing!

  Another Foot in the Grave

  Hook, Line and Sinker

  Word Brain Versus Math Brain

  “I Need You to Trust Me on This”

  Definition of a Bad Day

  Dead Lines (a poem written for no reason)

  And the Award Goes to …

  A tidy handful of the essays in this book have already ventured out into the world. Many have been criticized … I mean, critiqued … by my writers’ group, First Word, which meets monthly in Sewickley, Pennsylvania. They gave me the self-esteem I needed to start entering essays in contests around the country. I am grateful to them for helping me nitpick my work over the past few years and laughing at stuff in all the right places (and some of the wrong ones).

  Some essays have gone even further, winning awards in those contests, a few of which actually included money. No, seriously.

  And so, since these early accolades led me to believe I could actually write, here’s a list of awards garnered by some of the essays in this book:

  “Dear Santa …” won First Place in Humor at the St. Davids Christian Writers’ Conference, 2005.

  “Rash Behavior” won First Place in Humor at the St. Davids Christian Writers’ Conference, 2003.

  “Tightening Your Belt” won Second Place in Humor at the St. Davids Christian Writers’ Conference, 2004.

  “Brave New World … Scared Old Mom” won First Place (and a big fat check that didn’t bounce) in Humor & Technology at BrassRing’s launch contest, 2000.

  “Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Cement, But Were Afraid to Ask” won First Place in Humor at the St. Davids Christian Writers’ Conference, 2006.

  “Pennies in the Couch” won Second Place in Personal Experience Feature at the St. Davids Christian Writers’ Conference, 2005.

  “Say Ahhh!” won First Place in Life-Changing Moment at the Mercer One-Day Writers Conference, 2003.

  “Household Chores” won Third Place in Humorous Poetry at the St. Davids Christian Writers’ Conference, 2008.

  “O Sing of Spring!” won Second Place in Light Poetry at the Mercer One-Day Writers Conference, 2010.

  “Hell on Wheels” won Honorable Mention in Childhood Memory at the Mercer One-Day Writers Conference, 2007.

  Foreword

  Linda Au is the funniest woman I’ve ever met. In 2006 and 2007 I was asked to teach a few classes at the St. Davids Writers’ Conference in Pennsylvania and Linda was one of the conference participants. The one who left the biggest impression. We instructors awarded Linda a number of well-deserved prizes for her entries in the writers’ contests that week and of course I smiled and acted all proud of her, but inside I felt the green monster of envy building up. Mostly I envied her ability to write humor… . Okay, I became insanely jealous of her enormous talent. Then I decided if you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em, so I embarked on a quest to get her to either travel with me so her hilarious personality could rub off on me a little … or move to Florida where I live so I could pick her brain and spend my last forty to fifty years on earth being a better, funnier writer myself because of her.

  I dreamed of having Linda Au as my sidekick, sailing with me through life, getting into all so
rts of trouble, having adventures, exploring the world and yes, both of us writing funny, funny stuff which we could critique for each other in coffee shops drinking tea and howling uproariously. I suggested a writers-only cruise with some of our favorite writer friends. What I was thinking was, Hey, maybe if she spends a week with me on the open seas that’ll convince her to uproot her family and move to Florida where we could be writing buddies forever, BFFs with a writing clause.

  So far none of my grand schemes have worked. We haven’t gone on a cruise together, traveled together, nor has she moved to Florida. Having come close to being selected to be on Survivor one year, she did convince me to also apply to be a contestant. How did she know I’d been dreaming of being on that show since season one? See what I mean about how much Linda and I have in common? So I applied in my 64th year because she told me they were looking for older women. That too, never came to be. They probably looked at my video and decided I was better off watching the sunsets on the beach than digging for oysters with my bare hands and living on coconut juice.

  Meanwhile, I have gone on to write a few more books and Linda continues to tell me that she’s definitely planning to retire to Florida someday partly because her husband has close family in this section of paradise. I’ll believe it when I get the phone call: “Hey, meet me at the coffee shop and bring your laptop. I have some great ideas for a book we can do together.”

  All I can say about this woman author is this: She’s funnier than me. She’s younger than me. She’s a better writer than me. She’s smarter than me. Her best quirk is that she is a spelling-grammar-copy-editor-proofreader genius, having made her living for awhile as an editor and she’s going to pitch a holy fit when she reads the four sentences in front of this one because she’ll say it should be “She’s funnier than I.” But I think it sounds better with “me.” And since she asked me to write this foreword to her book, I get to say whatever I want and she can’t change it. At least I think that’s the way it works. I’m doubled over right now slapping my thighs. Which are bigger than hers, by the way.

  I love this book. This funny, funny book. (Note the incomplete sentence, Linda?) Every story is funny. The way Linda Au looks at life should be bottled and sold as a panacea for eternal youth. I bet she never gets ulcers because of her funny, irreverent outlook on every single event in her life, big or small. She makes things like her husband’s tool chest and his TV-watching habits funny as all get-out. You need a tissue when you read this book to mop up the laughing tears. She makes teaching her mom how to use a computer, the art of folding sheets, a letter to Santa, renewing her wedding vows in Vegas, a head cold, a water bed, a wedding ring, soap operas, roller-skating, people-watching, bathrobes, fishing trips, and even lunch at the nuclear power plant the funniest things since whoopee cushions were placed on all the nursing home chairs. You’re going to love this book and no doubt you’ll be as jealous of Linda Au as I am. After you finish reading it, please write to Linda and tell her it’s time she moved to Florida.

  Patricia Lorenz

  Author of a dozen books,

  including Life’s Too Short To Fold Your Underwear

  www.PatriciaLorenz.com

  Introduction

  Hi. Welcome to my book. Pull up a chair and stay a while. I like your hair like that. And I love those shoes. Okay, enough flattery. We’re moving on now.

  You don’t have to be a wife or mother, as I am, to identify with the stuff in this book. You just have to know a wife or a mother. That’s close enough.

  I’d love to say that everything in this book is completely true … or that everything in this book is completely made up. Either way I’m going to be in a boatload of trouble with somebody. So, to keep from being lynched in the restroom of the local craft store, let me assert with unabashed honesty that everything in this book is as true as it needs to be in order to be funny. When starting each of these essays, my goal was to exaggerate when necessary to keep the humor up around belly-button level (because belly-buttons are funny).

  Imagine my surprise to find out just how little I had to exaggerate once I really got rolling. These people I grew up with and hang out with and live with are just naturally funny. Well, from a slight distance, anyway. They just don’t know it yet.

  Still, I’ll leave the specifics of exactly which parts are true and which merely further the cause of humor up to you, dear reader. Because nobody I’ve mentioned in this book is going to admit to anything. Not without a lot of coaxing and a cashier’s check.

  So, now that the legal garbage is out of the way, just who do I think I am writing this stuff? A little background: I was raised in the sixties and seventies by a mother who drove a Fiero in the eighties and listened to Pink Floyd and a father who drove a pickup truck and listened to Johnny Cash. Somehow, all that genetic material added up to me.

  Me? I drive cars old enough to vote and listen to “Weird Al” Yankovic. I know, I know. It doesn’t make sense to me, either.

  But I take hope for the future of our family—because my kids drive nicer cars than I do … and listen to Pink Floyd and Johnny Cash.

  Dear Santa …

  Dear Santa,

  I’ve tried to be a good wife and mommy this year. I’ve hardly ever cursed under my breath upon finding the toilet seat up … in the middle of the night … in the dark. I only cut off idiot drivers on the parkway once or twice … a week. And I almost never find myself saying things my own mommy used to say to me, like, “Your face is going to freeze that way,” or “I’ll give you something to cry about,” or even, “If I hear that instant message sound one more time!” Okay, fair enough. My mommy never used to say that last one. But, she would have.

  With my otherwise stellar behavior in mind, Santa, I offer you the following wish list for the next holiday season:

  I want the secret of how to maintain a clean house without having to worry about things like wiping down the baseboards. Baseboards are a tool of the devil.

  I want a vacuum cleaner with a remote control. One strong enough to pick up signals from, say, Hawaii.

  I’m not impressed with a window cleaner that doesn’t streak. I want windows that don’t streak.

  I want mothers to come with built-in recording systems to match our already uncanny knack for remembering conversations verbatim. Because no matter how many times I can quote to my teenager his promise to finish cleaning his room, unless I got it on tape, I got nothing.

  I want to be the kind of person who doesn’t panic when she hears one of her “tidy” friends say she has to get home to take down all her mini-blinds and soak and scrub them—“because it’s spring.” What is that supposed to mean? She has to be O.C.D., right? I take mine down only when the three-year-old gets a glob of bright blue Colgate tartar-control gel smeared on them low enough for someone of average height to see. If he smears white toothpaste on white mini-blinds, I figure I’ve got another few months before it calcifies. And, if he flicks it so high that only a basketball player can see it, I know I’ve just bought myself a good year and a half without having to think about it … unless Wilt Chamberlain stops by. In fact, I can probably group that mishap with another event to be named later and then decide that the two events combined warrant taking the blinds down.

  I want a software program that will not only balance my checkbook but will deposit extra money into my account when I’m overdrawn.

  I want some sort of written guarantee that, when I lose weight (okay, if I lose weight), it won’t all come off my chest first and my gut last.

  I want a cat that knows the difference between my leg and a scratching post.

  I want a dog that knows the difference between my leg and … never mind.

  I don’t want a shampoo with the conditioner built right in. I want a shampoo with the hair stylist built right in. If I can’t have that, then just let me use the shampoo and conditioner separately. Time in the bathroom is the only time I get alone these days, and I want it to last as long as possible.
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  Oh, and yeah, I almost forgot: I want world peace. And let it begin with my kids.

  Thank you, Santa. I look forward to working with you again this year.

  Even Jesus Doesn’t Save Everything

  My husband, Wayne, saves everything. And I mean everything. He saves more than a Unitarian Jesus.

  In my husband’s pockets you’ll find crumpled up old receipts from trips to McDonald’s drive-thrus for a diet Coke. Just a diet Coke. No sandwich. No fries. No two-hot-apple-pies-for-a-dollar. Just the Coke. These receipts are so ancient and wrinkled that the purplish mimeo ink has faded or smeared so badly you can’t read it. Not that you’d need to.

  He saves envelopes from our bills. Well, you say, you need those envelopes to send the payments back. Well, I say, no we don’t, because we pay all our bills online. Besides, I wasn’t even talking about those envelopes. (And yes, before you ask, he saves those too.) I was talking about the envelopes the bills came to the house in. The ripped-open envelopes that now have absolutely no earthly use at all except to scribble down impromptu grocery lists. And no, he doesn’t use them to scribble down impromptu grocery lists. He just saves them.

  He saves catalogs. And not just to give himself something to read in the bathroom. I’m talking department store catalogs so old they’re having sales on leisure suits and Earth shoes. (“Hurry! Sale ends in 1972!”)

  He saves phone numbers and addresses. All of them. In his computer. In his cell phone. In his PDA. He syncs more often than a lead balloon. Well, you say, this is a good thing. You never know who you might need to call or send Christmas cards to. And, if that were all it was, I’d agree with you. But every Christmas I ask him for his half of the Christmas card list (the addresses and names of his friends and family), and I always get a handful of names on his printout with multiple possible addresses. Seems people move once in a while, or change phone numbers. And when they do, he doesn’t just replace their old information with their new information. Nope. He saves the old phone numbers and addresses. Like, what? Are they going to change their minds and move back to the old house?

  So, when we needed the phone number for a campground we visit, he dug three phone numbers out of his PDA—unsure which one (if any) was the right one. Naturally, the first one had long since been disconnected. The second one was an answering machine, but at least it was the right phone number. I’m still not sure what the third phone number was. Probably their future phone number.