Category: People Page 3 of 4

I was thinking about friendships, and I realize that I tend to like people who are like me. That’s because we have things in common. If I’m in a group of people, and they’re all talking about American Idol – they know all the contestants’ names and call in and vote a dozen times – but I don’t give a flying rip about the show (and I’m just using American Idol as an example, you can substitute any show, like Dancing with the Stars, Survivor, Jerry Springer – it’s all the same difference). If you don’t watch the show, it’s probably because you’ve tried to sit through one episode and you concluded that it was pretty dumb. And if they watch it, then it stands to reason that they’re dumb, too.

Humans have an immense capacity for thinking everyone else is stupid. Women demonstrate this repeatedly. A woman will say, “I can’t believe she did that!” Frequently the woman will lean over and put her hand to the side of her face so the public won’t be able to hear her catty comments. What she’s really saying is, “She’s so bizarre, I just want to take her and shake some sense into her.”

Women always want to shake some sense into somebody. We think we can fix people. We start with our husbands, which doesn’t get very far, so we have children and enjoy a small measure of success while they’re helpless, but around age two the battles start and escalate until they reach their teens and we concede the war.

So women go to work on their friends, but they have to be careful if they want to actually keep the friend. “I really liked your hair short,” is the kind of subtle comment they’ll make to try and get you to change. Or, “why don’t you try yoga, I hear that’s a really good way to get in shape – I’ll sign up with you.”

If you migrate toward people more like you, there’s less to fix and, consequently, less irritation. For instance, people choose the Republican Party because they want to hold onto their money and buy gas-guzzlers and McMansions to show they have succeeded in life. People choose the Democratic Party because they feel guilty about succeeding in life and want to share some of their wealth with those less fortunate. You’ll choose the group that makes you feel most comfortable, and set about criticizing the other group and try to convert them as much as possible.

Sometimes I wonder where I’m going with these tangents. But one thing I’m certain about, even within my own circle of friends who are a lot like me, I can still find things about them that I wish they’d do differently. And everyone I know is like that. I have one friend who thinks women should never be caught shoeless without a fresh pedicure. After she has people over in the summer, all she can talk about is how so and so’s feet looked so bad and how she can’t believe they go around in flip flops with those yellowish looking toenails. I have a relative who talks incessantly about how other people act so inappropriately, yet she has the social graces of a baboon.

And then there’s me, who wishes I could do a makeover on everyone. I’d have the negative people shut up, the mousey people stand up, the unhealthy people slim down, the mean people beat down, the prices at my favorite stores marked down, and my income jacked up. That’s how I’d make the world a better place. But in the meantime, I’m going to try and accept people just the way they are because, God love ‘em, they weren’t lucky enough to be born like me. And I’m pretty positive that everyone else thinks they’re just right, because it doesn’t seem like anyone I know has ever changed for the better, no matter how much good advice I give them.

I’ve always been the straight man, or straight person. I’ll see a joke coming and set it up. Like last night at that concert I was telling you about. My friend took a picture of me, and then a couple of minutes later we were looking at the pictures, and since it was dark in there, and the screen’s really tiny on those phone things, at first all I could see were just shades of color. I said, “Is that me?”

They laughed, so I realized it must not have been. The other thing is, I’ve got braces on my teeth due to some faulty dental work (I had very straight teeth and the last thing I wanted or needed before the faulty dental work was braces). I look hideous in pictures and I’m not exaggerating. They did a little blurb about me in The Oregonian and sent a photographer to my house, and he must have taken 500 pictures, but since every camera makes me look like some toothless doofus no matter how I pose or the skill of the photographer, I looked like an idiot. “It wasn’t the best picture of you,” my friend Joyce said, which I thought was very kind.

Anyway, I hate getting my picture taken, but not as much as I hate seeing the picture. Laurie was sitting in the middle, holding up the pictures for both of us to see, and as my eyes finally got focused on the camera, I saw that she was showing a picture of her pet frog, an ugly close-up shot from an angle that distorted him and made him out of focus so that he looked like a brown cow pie with a giant froggy eyeball. I piped up and said, “Is that me? I just don’t look like myself with these braces.”

Laurie and Olivia about wet their pants because they could obviously see the frog in the picture. Tears started rolling down their eyes, I’m not kidding. They were bent over like they were checking their shoes and laughing, only coming up to wipe away the tears, then bending back down again. Now, mind you, we all had a couple of pints of IPA, except Laurie had that black poison of a beer – a porter – because she must have thought she needed more hair on her chest, so maybe that made them a little more susceptible to my humor, but that’s what I’m talking about being the straight person.

I had a friend once named Steve Bingham who I snubbed all through high school but “met” in Fort Myers Beach, Florida when I was there with two girlfriends spending the summer after my sophomore year in college. Bingham (that’s what we all called him), by sheer coincidence, had come down there with a pack of his friends, and we ran into them and invited them to our apartment. A hurricane was raging outside – wind bending the palm trees almost 90º and sheets or horizontal rain pounding the windows. I discovered that Bingham was naturally very funny. We were listening to The Who, and I had on a pair of headphones so I could hear over the wind, even though the speakers were up plenty high. Did I mention I’m going deaf? Anyway, Bingham would ask me questions like, “You’re ugly, aren’t you?” and then start shaking his head up and down in an exaggerated way to get me to agree with him. Everyone in the room thought I couldn’t hear what he was saying, but I could, though I pretended I couldn’t and I’d start nodding yes along with him. Everyone cracked up. I could see them all giggling, but I kept a straight face. They acted like it was the funniest thing on earth. There was beer involved there, too. Then Bingham would say, “You like girls, don’t you?” and I’d nod and smile. “You eat Palmetto bugs, don’t you?” and so on. Seems like we did that for hours until we were overcome with hunger and walked downstairs to Vi’s Restaurant to get Key Lime Pie.

You know, I think some of this stuff gets lost in the telling, but I’m sitting here laughing like I’m at a comedy club thinking about it. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve laughed about that frog picture – it probably wouldn’t have been so funny if the frog hadn’t looked so bad. I woke myself up snickering about it in my sleep. See? When you laugh, you forget about the bad things, like how hideous you look in braces. For a couple of minutes, anyway.

I do some photography on the side, and I’ve noticed that older people lack color in their faces. I’m not talking about old women who spend their retirement years in the sun, turning their skin to leather and looking like a Shar Pei. I’m talking about the ones you see in church, or at bazaars, or in the line ahead of you at every checkout counter with a small change purse extracting correct change, one penny at a time.

Older women tend to have a heavy hand when it comes to coloring their cheeks. I used to think it was because they were blind and didn’t realize that they were putting on too much blush, but now I think it’s because they’re starting with such a washed out background that it’s the contrast in color that’s so noticeable, not the quantity of makeup.

Older men lack color too, but fortunately they don’t try to hide it. They’re too busy convincing the general public that they have hair. I’m sorry men go bald, I really am, but must they have those long strings of slick black hair running over the bald spots like someone drew a grid on a basketball? FYI Donald Trump, the general public is not fooled by these comb overs.

When women start losing their hair, they deal with it by cutting it all off. Then they pay a hair dresser once a week to kinky curl it up so that it looks like thin, coarse,  pinkish beige wool all over their heads that you can see through.

Which, I suppose, is more attractive than the blue-haired ladies I grew up with. I don’t know how it happened that so many of them had that magical shade of blue. Did they go to the store and find boxes of Clairol called, “midnight blue” (for blackish blue) “baby blue” (for bluish blond), and “blue all over” (for bluish-blue.

When I started getting grey hair, I fretted about it just like everyone else who was turning prematurely grey (everyone in my age group). After plucking a few hundred, I toyed with the idea of dying my hair. When I had my kids captive in the car, I’d ask them if I should dye my hair. “No, mom, it looks really pretty,” was their standard response. They had learned to say this to keep me from asking additional questions: “Does my grey hair make me look old? How old do I look? Do I look older than the other moms? How about Rebecca, do I look older than Rebecca? What about Cindy?”

One day I asked my son again, “Do you think I should dye my hair?” He said, “You don’t need to color your hair to look younger.” I sat up straighter, thinking what a fine young man I’d raised. Then he added, “It’s the wrinkles that make you look so old.”

I can’t remember exactly what happened next, but I think I used the ef word, and I think I reached over and opened the passenger door and used both of my feet to kick him out on the sidewalk, but it’s all a blur, I could have just patted his hand and said, “we need to see about getting you some glasses, sweetie.” It’s hard to remember the details when you get my age.

I used to like having my house clean when people came over. They’d compliment me on how wonderful everything looked, “even your bathroom faucets sparkle.”

That’s all in the past now. I can no longer devote my life to a clean house, especially for imaginary people who “might drop in.” When the kids were little, and there were stay home moms in the neighborhood, you never knew when the doorbell might ring. I was genuinely embarrassed when stuff covered the floor like fluff from a cottonwood tree. If I got wind someone was going to drop in, I ran around grabbing handfuls of toys, shoes, socks, underwear, can openers, wine bottles, bon bons, and tacky novels and slung them in a back closet.

I realized tonight how far I’ve come since those days because my daughter came home from swim team practice and nonchalantly said, “Maddie’s coming over.” I went in panic mode for a couple of seconds, protesting “At 9:45 on a school night?” “No school tomorrow, mom, it’s Veteran’s Day.” “Crapola!”

I said this into the phone to my favorite aunt in Tennessee, who was telling me a pretty good story about my uncle’s booze scandal. He buys all the books and manages the supplies warehouse for the county school system in my hometown. He’s always been a pillar of the community as well.

My uncle received a couple of bottles of booze as presents (people seem to give women candy and men booze – maybe we should turn that around). He left them in his office, locked up, unopened, in their original gift bags, and planned to donate them as a door prize for an organization he belongs to, thus re-gifting them like any red blooded East Tennessee school official who’s worth his salt would do.

Unfortunately, while he was on vacation, someone broke into the office and stole the booze and other odds and ends. They caught the guy and found the booze, as well as several other stolen items that were not taken from his office including, gasp, pornography. The local paper, in its infinite wisdom, decided to only mention the office robbery, and, interestingly enough, also decided to talk about only two of the stolen items, (guess which two), thus linking my uncle to the booze and porn. Who can blame them? This is such juicy stuff for a small town, and since there wasn’t a cat stuck in a tree or other breaking news story, my uncle’s robbery got front page billing.

It caused a scandal that spread to all corners of the countryside, about three miles from the epicenter of town. My poor uncle, who is literally the nicest guy in the world – in any contest pitting him against all the other nicest guys in the world, he would take the blue ribbon every time – was placed on unpaid leave for a week as punishment for having the booze on school property.

I just consulted the all-knowing Google and found the articles, which pretty much go from pointing a Bible-thumping finger at my uncle in the first one, to later admitting, without apologies, that there was no evidence that the porn came from his office. I read the readers’ comments and liked this one: “Warehouse managers are smarter than school administrators. The warehouse manager did not stand up and say, ‘Yeah, that’s my porn, I brought it in to watch during slow periods and I realize it was a lapse of judgment.’ That is what a school administrator would have said.” After reading that, I’m just thankful my uncle isn’t a school administrator, because those guys must be really stupid if they would admit to clandestine meetings with Palmela Handerson during work hours.

Needless to say, I didn’t get my house cleaned up, but I fed Maddie cheese quesadillas and black olives, so she’s cool with the mess. I’ll keep you posted if I talk to my aunt again. So much excitement in one night!

On Thursdays I go up to the high school and tutor writing for a couple hours. Sometimes no one wants to be tutored, so I get an old book off the dusty shelves and pretend to read until a decent amount of time has passed and I can leave.

This library is nothing like it was when I was in school. For one thing, computers attract the kids like something really attractive. Not that we ever opened a library book back then unless it was an encyclopedia or an anatomy book, but these kids wouldn’t even think of looking at a book.

One thing all these kids have in common is the perpetual use of the f-word:  loudly, and repeatedly, and in every sentence at least once but preferably multiple times used as a verb, noun, adjective, adverb, gerund, past perfect participle, and object of a preposition.

Another thing is their determination to reveal acres of skin. I saw one girl sitting at a table with a plumber’s crack as long as the San Andreas Fault.  Back in the day this would have aroused considerable attention, but no one was gawking but me.

The noise level in the library is akin to being at a rock concert, only louder. No one whispers. The school has a boiler-type heater that keeps temperatures just shy of inferno, so the windows are usually open. Whenever people walk by, which is more often than you’d think, kids get up from the computers to go over and make fun of them, yelling things like, “you’re such a dork,” as loud as they can. The librarians are too deaf to notice.

Whenever someone does come over to be tutored, they’ll hand me a paper that their teacher has slashed and scrawled so many notes and corrections that you have to excavate down to find the original work. It’s an incoherent mess beyond repair, and yet I smile and give them lovely suggestions about how to improve the first couple of sentences before they jump up and go spit out the window at a passing dog.

In their absence, I write a little tiny, “ef you” at the bottom right corner of their papers. Not really, but wouldn’t that be cool? They’d get home and think it was from the teacher, which they’d probably think was far out or whatever they say these days. It might create a bond that would last through the school year. On the other hand, they might bring a knife and slash the effeing ef to teach her to effing ef with them, son of an effing ef. It’s hard to know with kids these days.