Today’s traveling glitch raised its ugly head when I realized that the pilot was shutting down the engines of the aircraft we were riding on after he had taxied it to the far end of the airfield. That meant one of two things: The authorities had finally caught up with me and riot police would soon board the aircraft to drag me away in handcuffs, or the enormous traffic of the holiday weekend had forced the pilot to delay his takeoff. It turned out to be the holiday traffic. O’Hare airport was so choked with incoming aircraft that they told everybody everywhere not to even think about heading for Chicago for at least an hour. After the pilot explained all this to us, he said we could now use electronic devices such as electronic games and cel phones — and just about every single person on the plane whipped out a cel phone and called everybody in their phone books. “HI, IT’S CHARLIE! I’M ON THE TARMAC IN LOS ANGELES! I’LL BE HERE AN HOUR!” (Repeat a hundred times. Loudly.)
Everything else went smooth as silk. The pilot said we’d be delayed about an hour, and we took off almost exactly an hour after we were supposed to. We arrived in Chicago bang on time, we had to wait a while for our bags but they weren’t lost, I picked up our rental car with no hitches at all, and Barb met us in the baggage claim area just as we returned to find her. And you know what? I felt so good about the way everything was moving so smoothly that I wasn’t even waiting for the other shoe to drop.
Since the Air Force couldn’t manage to fly us all the way to the Dane County airport in Madison, we rented a BIG HONKING SUV and I drove the O-family to Wisconsin from Chicago. It’s a distance of about two hundred kilometers, or about a hundred twenty good ol’ American miles, which would take just about all day in Japan, where the speed limits on the winding two-lane roads max out at fifty clicks an hour (thirty miles per). Here in America, though, the interstate highway that we drove on up from Chicago was forty meters wide and we could scream along the pavement at a hundred twenty clicks. That’s about fifty yards and seventy miles per hour, if you only speak American. The trip took just a little longer than two hours because we stopped to eat. Even so, I was tired enough that I fell asleep for the last half-hour of the drive and dreamt my way along the white lines. Don’t tell Barb.
Random notes from our trip around the world:
The baggage carts in Norita airport are big as dump trucks, made to ride up escalators, and most important of all they’re free. That’s important because we needed at least two baggage carts everywhere we went on this trip. If you’ve never tried to haul eight to twelve gut-bustingly huge bags of luggage through crowded corridors and stairways, you don’t know how wrong it is for an airport to charge two dollars for a baggage cart.
It’s laughably easy to get around Los Angeles by bus and train, and cheap! Pay three dollars and you can ride all day, from one side of the city to the other and back with unlimited transfers. It’s also just about impossible to find a schedule that tells you where the bus or train goes and when. We figured it out by simply getting on the bus and riding it back and forth, and eventually at a connection with a rail line we found a map that showed every route of every bus and train through the city. You’d think they would print that up and offer it at every airport, motel and information booth in the city, but you can just forget that idea. Barb had the presence of mind to take a snapshot of it with her digital camera so we could consult it wherever we went after that.
I knew we were back in America when we turned on the television and saw that the meteorologist on the Fox morning news program in Los Angeles was a rail-thin blonde in her mid-30’s who wore tight jeans and a tie-die halter top and gave a lap dance to the news anchor after her weather report. You think I’m making that up, but I’m not.
More than anything else, Tim wanted to eat at Taco Bell as soon as he got back to the States, and today he finally got his wish. We were driving all over the city looking at one open house after another until they were finally all closed houses, then we looked for a place to eat and, as if on cue, a Taco Bell appeared along the side of the road. We couldn’t deny him any longer. We pulled in.
Either the standards of cleanliness have lapsed quite a bit at fast-food restaurants in the six years we’ve been away, or maybe it was just in this particular Taco Bell. The floor was like flypaper. It took some effort to peel one shoe up, then the other, in order to maintain locomotion. We all walked across the dining room from the door to the counter making a very unappetizing skritch skritch skritch noise. If the laws of gravity had been suddenly repealed, we wouldn’t have been in any danger of zooming off into what was left of the atmosphere.
Tim savored every bite of his tacos as if it were the tastiest meal prepared by the most respected chef in the land. Although it was our pleasure to make him so happy, Barb and I got spicy chicken burritos and they repeated on us for the rest of the day. It was like chowing down on a heavily spiced lump of lard wrapped in a greasy tortilla. I knew it probably wouldn’t kill me, but I was just a teensy bit worried about the indigestion and nightmares that sometimes follow a meal like that. With any luck, I can drown the congealed lump in my belly with enough beer and water to cancel its toxic effect.
It isn’t hard to find a house to buy in Madison. We could pick the neighborhood we wanted to live in, then cruise up and down the streets making note of the houses with “For Sale” signs on their lawns. I think — and this is just a shot from the hip — that the trick is getting the bank to okay a loan for the house we want. We saw two very nice houses that we liked a lot in neighborhoods that we’ve already decided we want to live in, but they’re perhaps just a tad more expensive than we’d planned on. Still, maybe we can find a banker who’s a little delirious or just plain off his nut. It could happen.
After house-hunting, we drove to the downtown pedestrian mall to walk around a bit, window shop, look through a book store, and check out the street life, partly just to get a feel for the place, but mostly just to make sure Tim was good and cheesed off. Make him walk anywhere for the sheer enjoyment of it and he’s on whatever the polar opposite of cloud nine is. We walked about four blocks before he was so torqued up that he was actually standing in our way, pushing us in the direction of our parked car. And this was a good day.
The car we got from the rental agency yesterday turned out to be total ass. If you own a Dodge Stratus, you have my sympathies. I don’t know what I like least, the uncomfortable seats, the lack of legroom, or the fact that it steers like a cow. Gas mileage sucks, too.
We spotted the Oscar Meyer Wienermobile right across the street from where we were shopping for a car. Sort of ironic, no? It’s maybe a bit larger than the kind of car we were looking for, though. Tim was the one who spotted it, in fact, and didn’t mention it to us until we were getting ready to drive away. “I thought you saw it already,” he said. “How could you not see a giant wiener on wheels?” We gave him the point. A car like that is hard to drive past without stopping to have a closer look and snap a photo or two, so here you go. The license plate, by the way, was OH I WISH. Nice touch.
I wonder how the heck they drive the wienermobile through Madison. It just doesn’t look like it can do eighty on the beltway, much less seventy up county road 151, and a car that can’t do at least seventy on the surface roads gets eaten alive in the traffic around here. I can do eighty, and I still get eaten alive because I won’t do ninety. I’ll probably always be intimidated by hundreds of SUVs, truck and tractor-trailers screaming along four lanes of traffic at high speed until the dealer sells armored cars in my color.
The traffic is not the only thing intimidating us. We went to see Batman Begins at the cinema tonight — how long has a trip to the movies cost thirty-seven dollars? I didn’t expect that it would be the bargain price that we got charged at the military movie theater, but we sat down in our seats with sticker shock like you wouldn’t believe. You couldn’t have left us more surprised if you’d jumped out of the shadows and hit us all in the face with a wet carp. I’m relieved to say at least that it was a good show we could all enjoy. We have paid as much for a trip to the movies at the cinema in Hachinohe, but things are supposed to cost too much in Japan. Looks like expensive movies, like expensive gasoline, have made their way to the heartland of America. Just wait until the expensive beer gets here, that’s all I’ve got to say.
Hi. Thanks for tuning in to drivel. The O-folk are still working on putting together a new life here in beautiful Madison, Wisconsin, one do-it-yourself project at a time. Today’s projects were simple, and there were only two: Set up a bank account at the credit union, and find a furnished apartment to live in. The details of each of these projects are so mundane that there would hardly be any way to describe them to you without lulling you into a deep, peaceful sleep. At the bank, we had to sign forms using one of those electronic writing pads that reduces your practiced signature to a shapeless dribble of curls and dots. Barb’s signature transmogrified into “Blarb Aomowomowosolo” and my name melted into “Duwe Oklowke.” The clerk helping us seemed to think this was nothing unusual. And later we rented an apartment. That was all there was to that.
We had our first visitors today when Mom & Tom drove down for the afternoon. We went to a restaurant and Mom treated us to a really tasty lunch. I ate a chocolate-chip cookie for dessert that was big around as my head. I now know that I probably shouldn’t have. It’ll take all night for me to properly digest it — no, I’ll never digest it properly, I’ll only be able to drown it in a gallon or two of water in the hope that it’ll stop grumbling around inside my tummy.
Mom left her car here in Madison for us to use for a little while, so Barb and I went back to the airport to drop off the car we rented. I was in the lead going up I-39 and she was supposed to be following close behind, but one trucker after another kept cutting her off so she couldn’t make any headway and eventually she fell almost a mile behind me. The only way I could’ve slowed down enough for her to catch up would’ve been to somehow fake a blow-out, set up warning cones and road flares, and wait by the side of the road, but I didn’t have any flares so I pressed on, figuring she’d be able to catch up to me after we made the turn off the interstate onto County Highway 30. No luck there. Apparently she couldn’t make it across all four lanes of the interstate without challenging somebody to a duel. Last I saw her I was sailing away up the off-ramp and she was still headed north.
She’s plenty smart enough to figure out how to make it to the airport by herself, so I went straight there and planned to wait by the rental agency desk for her to show up, but as I pulled up to the parking lot I realized I didn’t have any money at all in my pocket. If I parked in the lot and Barb didn’t show up for whatever reason, I wouldn’t be able to take my car out. I had to drive back out to the county highway to find a gas station with at ATM and jerk some money out of the slot. (I realized later that they had ATMs at the airport. duh.) Then I drove back to the airport, where I anticipated a long wait, but Barb was already at the rental desk signing the paperwork to get our money back. She must have flipped a U-turn across the interstate so fast that she made it back before I did.
Flashback from our visit to Los Angeles: We struck up a conversation with a woman on the bus, and when she found out we lived overseas and were returning to the States for the first time in six years, she wanted to hear all about it. I told her that I was retiring from the military and we were moving to Wisconsin. “Oh,” she said, “did the military give you property there?” I’ve heard a lot of people tell me some pretty odd misconceptions about military benefits, but that’s the first time I’ve ever heard that we were somehow entitled to free real estate.
A message to the drivers of Madison: WILL YOU PLEASE CHILL OUT JUST A LITTLE? WOULD IT KILL YOU TO GET WHERE YOU’RE GOING JUST A MINUTE OR TWO LATER? AND HOW ABOUT PUTTING MORE THAN A FOOT BETWEEN YOUR CAR AND MINE BEFORE YOU MERGE? THANK YOU! This outburst brought to you by a guy who’s not used to morning commutes like the ones they have here. We now take you back to our regularly scheduled drivel.
This morning’s commute took me to my second job interview. I think it went pretty well. It was sort of like a nice chat with new friends, except that I was unbelievably overdressed in a suit and tie, while they were in more casual chinos and open-neck shirts. I felt just a little bit out of place at first, but I wasn’t scared enough to barf until after I left the campus, when I turned into the wrong lane of traffic for the first time since I came back from Japan. They drive on the left side of the road there, y’know. I made a tight left turn after waiting at the traffic light and was suddenly facing a long line of parked cars, all pointed at me. “Oh hell!” I shouted out loud to whoever might be able to hear me in the back seat. “I’m on a one-way street!” Then I looked over to my right and saw the cars that had been behind me going past and up the correct traffic lane. Luckily for me, there was no oncoming traffic — I could just jerk the steering wheel to the right to get back into the lane I was supposed to be using. Just kidding about the barfing. Didn’t barf at all, only wished I could.
Get this: Barb and I tried to get our driver’s licenses this morning, but when we got to the DMV office there was a notice on the door saying that the computers in the DMV offices were down, and they didn’t mean just the DMV offices in Madison — they meant every computer in all the DMV offices in the state of Wisconsin. We couldn’t drive to Milwaukee, or Green Bay, or maybe even Superior to get our licenses there, assuming we were bored or desperate enough to try that. We tried again in the afternoon but the computers were determined to stay down all day long, so we focused our efforts on bigger and better things, as they say in the biz. (“What biz would that be?” I hear you asking. Why, the biz of moving to Madison. You must have heard of it.)
After we talked it over, Barb and I decided to eat up about two and a half hours of a Toyota car salesman’s time by taking a Corolla and a Camry for a test drive. The salesman wanted to talk for quite a while and we wanted to drive each car for quite a distance, and apparently none of us had anything better to do this afternoon so we didn’t finish up and get out of there until about one-thirty. It was actually kind of fun to take a brand-new car and race it down country roads to “test the pick-up.” I watched the salesman’s face in the rear-view, but if he was annoyed or scared or anything but bored with riding along on another test drive, he didn’t give it away.
We thought Tim was going to be really uptight when we brought lunch back to the hotel two hours late, but he said he wasn’t hungry. Turned out he ate all the doughnut holes Barb bought at Cub foods the day before, the pig. So we ate without him.
Between lunch time and dinner, we made a visit to the West Gate mall. I have to agree with Tim on this one: West Gate mall is ass, but they had the only cinema in town showing Howl’s Moving Castle, which is worth traveling across town to see, or at least we thought so.
The high point of the day had to be our trip to Ella’s Deli on the northeast side of Madison. We were expecting nothing more than a deli where we could get a sandwich for dinner, but it ended up being so much more than that. For a start, each of the glass-topped tables in the dining room was a window to a game or a collection of toys or, in our case, a miniature train that ran around its oval of track when we pushed a button. The whole place was full of toys, and most of them appeared to be home-made, like the papier-mâché Mighty Mouse that flew back and forth above our table, although I recognized one or two of them from my childhood, such as the band stand with six-inch bandsmen on top of the juke box. It was like having a meal in the middle of a really big toy box. We loved it, even Tim, who tried to act very cool but completely failed to convince, especially when I pointed the camera at him for today’s photo.
Tim’s got a great big thing for my hat. He can’t seem to keep his hands off it, especially when it’s on my head. “Why do you have to keep messing with my hat?” I screamed at him as he ran down the street with it for the umpteenth time today. “Because it annoys the hell out of you,” he answered somewhat sensibly. At least he’s focused on a goal. Too bad it gets him thrashed every time big daddy catches him.
Today we had just one goal: To get to the Department of Motor Vehicles as early as we possibly could so that we could get to the front of the line and get our driver’s licenses before the department’s computer crashed and burned for the third day in a row. Even though we had only one bathroom between us to complete our morning ablutions, Barb and I still managed to get to the DMV just five minutes before it opened, but it wasn’t early enough to beat the crowds. When we were still a block away, we could see a line of fifty or sixty people waiting to get in the door. Because we drove all the way from the other side of town, we got in the line anyway to see if we could get lucky, and what the hell — we did. The computers kept working, more or less, and we punched out of there in about an hour. Just an hour. I don’t think I’ve ever gotten in and out of any DMV office in under an hour. We would’ve gotten out even sooner but a tiny glitch in the computer made them issue me a learner’s permit instead of a diver’s license. It took them just five minutes to straighten that out, though.
In one hour we achieved the one goal we thought would take all day, and proved once again that time is an illusion (“— lunch time doubly so.” Douglas Adams). To fill the rest of the day, we cruised up and down the streets of Monona looking for “For Sale” signs on the lawns. There were quite a few, even one or two in front of houses that we liked a lot. But all we did today was look for them; we still haven’t overcome our fear of mortgage payments enough to call a realtor, or at least I haven’t.
Tomorrow we move from this hotel into a two-bedroom furnished apartment. With any luck, there’ll be no more bumping into each other in the hallway or doing the pee-pee dance while banging on the locked door of the only bathroom.
For the fourth time in seventeen days, we moved. It took two trips to get all our bags and every member of the O-family across town from the hotel to an apartment near the arboretum using Mom’s borrowed Saturn four-door sedan, but we did it in less than two hours. Thanks, Mom.
Not only have we moved once again, but we’ll have to move at least once more in the next week because we moved into the “Jacuzzi suite” in order to get in this week. It’s too expensive to stay in, though, so we’ll move into a regular two-bedroom apartment next Friday. *sigh* This is becoming just a little tiring, to say nothing of dizzying. When I wake up in the middle of the night to go potty, I don’t know whether to go right, left, or straight on anymore. At least the apartment we moved to today has more than one room, and one of them is a kitchen. I liked eating out at all the restaurants, but it was beginning to add up to a hefty expense. Tonight’s dinner was brats we bought at the farmer’s market the other day.
Barb and I went shopping for groceries at a store called Woodman’s Warehouse Foods, where they had more food than China and the store was almost as big. Barb could hardly cope. Every time we came to an intersection, she would turn in circles with no idea which way to go next. Every time we found one of the items we were looking for — oatmeal, for instance — we were confronted with at least a dozen brands in dozens of flavors and too many sizes to count. When you’re talking breakfast cereal, that’s a lot to deal with. Barb’s a comparison shopper. She has to look at the sizes and prices of everything. A couple times I was sure she was going to explode. All I could do was get between her and the product when she got that glassy look in her eyes, throw anything at all in the shopping cart, and push her along down the aisle.
Just before she was about to go to bed, Barb looked out the window and squealed, “Oh! Fireflies!” and she ran out the patio door to sit and watch the fireflies for about an hour. The only time I’ve seen her so excited about bugs was when ants got into the house and she did everything but mobilized the National Guard to get rid of them. Fireflies are apparently a special memory for her. She even showed Tim how easy it was to catch them, and put a few of them in a glass to watch them light up.
The Elephant Man lives in the upstairs apartment, and at about two o’clock in the morning he decided to run back and forth across his bedroom at least a hundred times. His bedroom is right above ours, naturally. After he’d stomped back and forth for almost a half hour, he turned on his television set and cranked up the volume, then made at least a hundred more trips across his bedroom. To be fair, even the slightest sound carries through the thin walls of these apartments, so it would be hard to move without making a lot of noise. Still, I can’t wait until about midnight tonight when I fake a Meg Ryan moment and bang the bed frame against the wall.
Barb and I drove into town this morning to take the civil service examination. I don’t want to say that it was easy, but it was mostly checking how well you could spell, proofread, and there was even a test of whether or not you could recognize Microsoft Word icons. The last fifty questions were all personal: what job would you take, where would you work, does your chewing gum lose its flavor on the bedpost overnight? We were in and out in less than 90 minutes.
Today was not a good day for me to be driving. The nerve cell that connects my memory of all the rules of the road to the part of my brain that’s smart seems to have shorted out. First, I drove up a one-way street. We were on the way home, Barb said turn right to get to Washington, and without even looking I swung right into oncoming traffic. Dumb. If there's a bright side, at least I was in the right-hand lane and nobody else was. Next, I was working my way through the stop signs on every corner of a side street while talking with my navigator once again about the route home. Stop, look both ways, drive on to the next corner, stop, look both ways, drive on to the next corner, stop, look both ways, drive on ... uh-oh, was that a red traffic light? Finally I found the route back to the apartment, I turned into the right-turn-only lane and we just about merged with an oncoming car that I honestly didn’t see, but my wife and son did, and said so very loudly, thank goodness, or else we could’ve been a story on the evening news. The driver of the other car was not very happy at all, but he didn’t stop to punch me out after I pulled over to let him by, for which I’ll light a candle.
But today was not a bad day for anything else. It was a beautifully clear day to drive into town to see the art fair in the capital square. Tim’s going to want me to mention that it was freaking hot, and it was, but I’m also going to mention that Barb and I each dressed in shorts and a cotton shirt, while Tim wore his usual layered look and a pair of heavy, baggy blue jeans. He was sweating buckets. I was just a bit worried he was going to collapse of heat prostration, but we got him into the shade and filled him with plenty of water and he made it home without melting. Meanwhile, Barb and I enjoyed looking at all the artsy-fartsy things on sale. The photo shows just one example, a mirror surrounded by shards of collectable platters from all over the United States and the title, “I WANT TO SEE IT ALL” across the top. If I had $500.00 in my petty cash drawer, I would have happily given it up for this.
We have library cards! We’re real people again!
Cel phones: one more thing to make us feel like we just beamed down from another planet. I think of them as phones, not as communication nodes that can schedule your day, communicate with your computer, let you talk to your car, and a zillion other things. “You can get a basic phone,” the sales woman told me, “or you can add features, like Bluetooth wireless technology.”
I frowned at her. “But the phone is already wireless.”
She blinked at me. She hadn’t heard that one before. “Bluetooth lets the phone tie in with a computer interface or a wireless headset,” she said, as if explaining it to an infant.
Barb and I went to a local store to buy a cel phone because we move every damned week and we’re getting tired of telling people we don’t have a permanent phone number. We thought a cel phone would solve that problem, and it probably would, but every place in town expects us to sign a two-year contract for service. “Most people don’t make that kind of commitment to a spouse!” Barb sputtered. So our failure to get a cel phone today stemmed from a fear of commitment, you might say. Cold feet.
Our failure to buy a house depended on simple economics. We found a beautiful house today, so we went to visit the loan officer at our credit union who sat down with us to make out an application for a mortgage, but when it came out that neither Barb nor I are employed the process came to a screeching halt. Kind of as I figured. Everyone I spoke to this past week acted as though making an offer on an house would be dead simple and I felt like a total spaz for thinking that we should have an income before we even thought of looking at houses, so I kept my mouth shut. It turns out that I was on the beam after all: The bank expects us to show we have some sort of assets to pay off the loan; particularly, assets like jobs.
We’ve made a loan officer somewhere out there happy, because today we signed up to buy a Toyota Camry, and we didn’t have to play that game with the salesman who runs out of his office to “talk with his manager” a half-dozen times as we made offers and counter-offers. We took the car for a drive, went back to his office and told him what we could pay for it, he and his manager talked it over and probably looked up our impeccable credit history, and he came back and gave us what we wanted. That has never happened to us in a car sales office before. I could’ve kissed him. In the past, buying a car was such a god-awful hassle that I would much rather have gnawed off my own leg than gone through it again, but this guy changed my mind.
For the first time in more than twenty years, I took a typing test. Did pretty well, too: 77 words per minute. Yee-haw! Well, 63 words per minute after they took off for mistakes, but still. I was cookin’!
We moved once again, this time to an apartment we won’t have to move from for at least a month, knock wood. For the first time in weeks, we can take all our clothes out of our suitcases and the cosmetics out of ziplock bags. We can buy a week’s worth of groceries and not have to worry about throwing out an unfinished package of food. We can fill out the “address” block on a job application without having to explain that we won’t be there very long. Wow, this is livin’!
It’s worth mentioning that moving took all of fifteen minutes, even though a lot of our clothes were on hangers and we had bags of food and other sundries. We only had to go from an apartment on the lower floor to one on the top floor, so we didn’t have to schlep it far. We’re moving so often these days that we don’t have the strength to go very far now. Next month, we’ll be moving from the bedroom to the living room, about thirty feet. After that, we’ll creep toward the balcony in baby steps.
Aside from moving, we spent just about all the rest of the day searching for another, much more permanent place to live, in the nearby town of Monona. That’s where we concentrated our search for a house — in fact, that’s where we found the house that we completely failed to buy because we unfortunately had to mention the pesky fact to our loan officer that we’re looking for further employment. There may be a way to get that loan after all, but all the planets have to line up just right, so we’re also looking for a place to rent. Call it “Plan B.”
We also combed the newspapers and the internet for jobs. I got three applications in this afternoon, a new record. If I can keep that up, I should work my way through all the employers in town inside of a month, if I don’t bother applying for the greeter jobs at Wal-Mart and jobs like “Second-shift fry cook — Growth Opportunity at Hardee’s!” I’m going to keep those as “Emergency Back-Up Plan Z.”
I’ll mention by way of closing that the weather has been really freaking hot. It’s so hot that when ladies take their poodles out for a walk, the little furbags go “POOF!” the minute they cross hot asphalt. No kidding, I saw that on a newsreel. Really. It’s going to be even hotter tomorrow and Sunday, yet I’ve somehow let Barb talk me into going to the farmer’s market in the capitol square in the morning. This time, though, we’ve got buckets of sunscreen to keep us from getting toasted the way we were last weekend.
Saturday. Weren’t any new advertisements for jobs, couldn’t call anybody to ask for money to buy a house. Good day for a trip to the Farmer’s Market. Farmers filled the booths around capitol square, selling lots and lots and lots of vegetables and flowers, some beef and bison and ostrich (!) and there were many, many bakeries selling more pastries, bread and other gooey treats than you can dream in a month of Sunday nights. Barb and I strolled through it for about an hour, trying to choose from the dizzyingly many choices. We settled on ostrich burgers, fresh sweet corn and a couple pastries. The ostrich was delicious. Who’da thunk it?
While Barb was waiting at a bakery store’s counter to buy some scones, a little old lady hustled up behind her pushing one of those walkers-on-wheels. “I wanna get in there,” she barked at Barb, and gave her a little spanking as an incentive to more quickly step aside. There’s going to be a day when I’m so old that I have to walk with a cane. I can’t say I’m looking forward to it, but if it means I get to whack people and snap, “Move aside, young whippersnapper!” then it seems to me that old age must have some benefits after all. I can’t count the number of times I’ve wanted to give somebody a great big old poke in the ribs so I could finally belly up to a busy, crowded counter. If I did that now I’d rightly get a good talking-to, maybe even belted in the mouth, but who’s going to argue with an old codger? Barb certainly didn’t. She stepped aside without a word and let the little old lady push her way to the front. Didn’t even mention it to me until we were in the car some time later.
We also went shopping for groceries at a local health-nut store to buy some organic salad dressing. Barb and I could so easily become long-haired hippie weirdo bunny-huggers, although we’d be the kind who live in a downtown condo with air conditioning and high-speed cable internet connectivity, not the kind who move to a one-room shed in the forest and live off the grid.
And beer. We also bought some beer. Here’s a funny thing about our outlook on the family budget: Money’s a little tight and we’re trying to economize every way we can. One of the things we considered cutting back on — Barb considered it at length, I considered it for about nine-tenths of a second — was our intake of spirituous liquors. Then a little devil appeared on our opposite shoulders in a flash of fire and cloud of brimstone and said, “Come on! You want to stop drinking beer? What did you move to Wisconsin for, the glamorous living and the mild winters? Pick up that six-pack and hustle your butt to the check-out counter! MOVE!” I don’t like to imply that I always do what the little devil tells me, but I frankly felt he had the winning argument in this case. Why even bother to serve a tasty ostrich burger with all the trimmings for dinner if you can’t wash it down with a cold glass of locally-brewed suds? It just wouldn’t make sense. So tonight we had the “Headless Man Ale” and it was good.
It’s really freaking hot. Looks like we arrived at the start of a heat wave. The governor has declared a drought emergency and temperatures this week have been right around ninety degrees most days. I guess it’s lucky for us this move took us to America, where almost every house, store and car has an air conditioner, and when I say “air conditioner” I’m talking about refrigeration equipment powerful enough to create a Canadian-sized cold front, even in cars. Hotels get so chilly that sweaty windows are the easiest way to tell which rooms are occupied.
The raw arctic force of all this air conditioning is just a little intimidating at first because everybody keeps their air conditioner cranked up as high (or is it low?) as it can go. If air conditioners came with a “snow” setting, Americans would use that all day and all night long — they’d just throw a few quilts on the bed and keep a whisk broom on the night table to brush the snow off in the morning.
To get around in the day time, though, is a little tricky. Most of the time you can’t dress for the weather, because you’ll be exposed to it only when you walk from your house to your car, and again when you walk from your car to the store, or work, or wherever you drove. If you’re going to be outside for a while, though, and you dress in shorts and a t-shirt, when you go back inside all the sweat on your body is going to frost you all over and you’ll look like a giant Eskimo pie, except for the stick. (If you have bean-pole legs like mine, you’ve even got the stick.)
In a hot spell like the one we’re having I’m grateful for the relief of air-conditioned stores. The only drawback that I can see is that the temptation to stay inside all day is almost irresistible, and most people wouldn’t consider that a drawback but I went for a soak in the pool late yesterday afternoon, just to try it out. It was wonderful, like a lukewarm bath. I put on my straw hat to keep the sun off my head, hooked my arms over the edge and hung in the corner up to my chin for a half-hour, just what I needed to beat the heat. If the apartment hadn’t been air conditioned, I probably would’ve been in the pool all day long. Then to dry off all I had to do was sit at the poolside for about three minutes.
Our apartment is supposed to come with a fully-outfitted kitchen, but I suspect the previous occupants may have walked away with a few things, because there weren’t any carving knives, paring knives, steak knives — there weren’t any sharp knives at all. There was no kettle, either, which left us with no way to make drip coffee in the morning. Now, how would anybody expect us to start the day without a cuppa java?
This is a job for: Saint Vincent de Paul’s, the store where you can buy everything you need for the kitchen of any house or apartment, including utensils, pans, bowls and plates, saucers and cups, salt cellars and sugar bowls, wash tubs and drying racks, cups and tumblers and wine glasses, even those fruit bowls that look like great big watermelons — and all for about five dollars.
Well, to tell the truth, the prices have gone up over the years. St. Vincent’s used to be the Midwestern version of Goodwill; you could buy a stack of used blue jeans for a nickel back when blue jeans were work clothes instead of a fashion statement. Same thing goes for kitchenware these days: you can still buy everything you need for a couple bucks if you keep it plain. Anything that looks the least bit ornamental, though — that is to say “collectable” — has been marked up. It’s only a guess, but maybe the people who drove up in Cadillacs and Buicks have been combing thrift stores for the folksy-looking stuff; it brings a pretty penny at the local flea markets.
We got our kitchen knives and a pitcher for the morning OJ besides, but we didn’t find a kettle until we stopped at a flea market — oh, the irony.
I got my first haircut in the States. Maybe that’s not as big a deal to you as it was to me. For four years I’ve been looking forward to being able to tell a barber exactly what I want. I couldn’t find a barber today, but I was desperate so I had to visit one of those chain store stylists instead.
“I need a trim,” I said to the stylist. “Just take a little off the top and sides, and square up the back, please.”
“How much do you want off the back?” she asked.
“Clean it up a little, but not too much.”
“Did they use a clippers on you last time?” she asked, taking the electric shears out of a drawer.
“Ah, yeh, they did, but I don’t want it cut very close.”
“They cut it too short last time?”
“You could say that,” I said, smiling. “I just got out of the military after twenty-one years. This is more hair than I’ve had in over two decades.”
She liked that one. She put a really long comb on the shears to trim my neck, then clipped about a half-inch off the top and sides and lowered my ears a bit. Just what I wanted.
Barb and I spent all morning and the early part of the afternoon at the library downtown preparing applications for a pair of jobs she found vacant at the city office. I mean to say they were advertised in the paper; she didn’t walk into the offices and find a couple of empty desks. Anyway, we reserved a computer at the library to draw up the papers and print them out so they’d look all spic and span, but each application was about forty-seven pages long and Barb ran out of time. We had to reserve another computer and come back in half an hour. That gave us just enough time to split an apple fritter between us over coffee at a small shop on State Street called Michelangelo’s. Nice shop. We each had the small coffee. The picture shows Barb drinking what they called “small.” Next time we’ll order the “large” and get a picture of both of us soaking in it up to our necks, like a spa.
We were supposed to pick up our new car today, but it didn’t arrive at the dealer’s until late and the finance guy was up to his coccyx in paperwork, so we put it off until tomorrow at one. Photos of The Phantom are pending arrival.
“Dude! You got a beard!”
Tim yelled this at me from the back seat of the car as we were driving up the highway through the east side of town today. I haven’t shaved for about a week and I’ve grown some scratchy whiskers. He’s seen me every day this week, and it’s not like the whiskers popped out overnight, but I think it’s possible he popped out of a wormhole in time this morning because he asked Barb and I which day this was, and when we told him Tuesday he thought we were pulling his leg.
“Tuesday?” he said, as though that was impossible. “No way. It’s Sunday.”
“Hello,” Barb said to him. “We went to Jim and Sue’s for dinner on Sunday. This is Tuesday.”
“No way,” he said. “We went to Jim and Sue’s on Saturday.”
“We ate brats and cob corn for dinner here on Saturday,” I pointed out.
“How could it be Tuesday already?” It was a problem that he couldn’t noodle out and never would. He’s been staying up until three in the morning ever since he became addicted to channel surfing with cable television, and as a result he sleeps in until eleven in the morning or sometimes even twelve o’clock the next day. You could think of it as self-induced jet lag; he messed up his internal clock so badly that he has no idea what time or what day it is.
I’m not sure I can explain how it took him several days to notice my beard, except for the time travel idea.
We were on our way across town to pick up our car, which arrived at the dealership yesterday and was patiently waiting for us to come take it home. It’s a new car. I once swore we would never buy a new car again, but we’ve bought plenty of used cars over the years and by now we know that we always spend at least a couple thousand bucks the first year repairing all the problems we inherit with an old car. Here’s what would happen: One or both of us would have a hot lead on a job across town, or just to make us even crazier, we’d have a job interview scheduled a couple days down the road. Then we’d be on the way to get a suit jacket pressed and the clutch pedal would go all mushy in that special way that meant we would have to give about a thousand bucks to a mechanic and go without a car for two or three days while they dropped the new clutch in.
A new car comes with no inherited problems, a warranty and a phone number to call when things go all pear-shaped. A new car looks mighty spiffy. A new car has that smell. After we signed a pile of financial paperwork and shook hands with the dealer, Barb and I went for a drive in the country. I can’t remember the last time I went for a relaxing drive in the country. Well, I tried to relax. The only disadvantage to a new car is that I drive on eggshells for the first week or so, but then I get over it and drive it like it’s mine.
Barb ran in to a local grocery store to get a few things while I waited in the parking lot with the air conditioning running because it was hot enough to split the atom out there. I don’t know if it really has to be hot to spilt an atom, but it sounds like really hot work, doesn’t it? Anyway, it was the kind of hot that makes an eternity in hell seem like a dream vacation, so I had the air conditioning cranked all the way up and I was trying not to feel too guilty about basking in the cold blast of air from the vents while one of the grocery store workers was running past my car collecting the store trolleys that were left scattered all over the place. She was probably low on the employee food chain, maybe a stocker or a bagger making minimum wage, and it was her turn in the barrel that afternoon. Sweat was running off her in rivers. As hot as it was out there she would’ve been sweating like that even if she had been standing still. Of course she wasn’t standing still, she was working herself ragged running back and forth across that hot tarmac, grabbing trolleys and assembling them into great long trains that she hustled back to the store, then came back and collected even more.
In the next row directly across from me a guy emptied the groceries from his trolley into his car. He saw this woman hustling up the road past him wrestling with a string of about a dozen trolleys. He finished what he was doing, buttoned up his car, then he pushed his now-empty trolley into the road in front of her. He didn’t even watch to see if she got it, just shoved it out there. When she saw his trolley and realized what he did, she grabbed the trolley, ran across the road with it and crashed into the side of his car, repeatedly. She left huge dents and scratches in the fenders and doors. Just dinged it all to hell.
No, I’m kidding, that’s what I wanted her to do. She was a good trooper; she just picked it up and took it inside, and Mister Too Good To Clean Up After Himself drove away, well-served like the lord he apparently thought he was.
It rained like a sonuvagun this morning. The heavens opened up and down came enough rain to fill all the water towers in the United States of gosh-darned America. “We needed the rain,” everybody’s going to say, because it’s been so freaking hot that even the weeds can’t take it and droop over, wilted and gone. Everybody was looking for rain, except maybe the merchants who were trying to stay dry under their awnings at the farmer’s market on MLK Boulevard this morning. The crowds were somewhat reluctant to stand around browsing the selection on the trestle tables crowding the street in front of City Hall, where Barb and I stopped. She had to drop off some paperwork for a couple of job applications she made there, so I drove her into town and, just as we were trying to figure out how she could jump out of the car and I could circle the block and meet up with her again, a truck pulled out of a metered parking space right in front of us. I cranked the wheel and glided right in. Looked very cool doing it, too.
Barb drove the car!
We were on our way back from Monona when she said, very casually, “Why don’t you pull over somewhere and I’ll drive it the rest of the way home.” She was careful to wait until I had already crossed The Beltway, Madison’s notorious LINE OF DEATH, a road of such violence and speed that only the most courageous may journey along its four lanes while the meek are crushed under the tires of speeding long-haul trucks. She didn’t want anything to do with that. Can’t say that I blame her. I’d get somebody to drive me across it if I could afford it.
We exchanged seats in the parking lot of a convenience store. That way I could make a short detour to bring some beer back to the car, in case anything overly exciting should happen on the way and I needed a sedative. I didn’t think anything would, of course, but you never know when fate’s going to throw you a curveball and, through no fault of your own, something totally unexpected and beyond your control will change your life. I meant to me of course, not to Barb. She was very calm as she glided along the back streets, oooo-ing and ahhh-ing over the silky smooth ride and the easy way it handled. She may have been a tad nervous, but she didn’t show it until we were in the parking lot and she mistook the accelerator pedal for the brake. Plowed the car into a dumpster. Totalled the front end and deployed the air bags.
Kidding! Nothing unusual at all happened to Barb while she was driving. It was me the fates were trying to mess with today. The dump truck that I almost hit was a good example. He was waiting at a stop sign, I was cruising along a busy road, and just as I was about to drive by he decided to pull out, come to a stop, back up toward me and finish his three-point turn into the road he came out of. I had to stamp on the brakes to avoid hitting him, then throw the car into reverse to back out of his way. I could’ve used that sedative then.
Boo was the first to wake me up this morning, instead of Bonkers, whose technique is to simply sit beside the bed and cry until one of us, usually me, gets up. Boo is not a crier. Her temperament is a bit more subtle, if you can call it that. This morning she walked across my pillow above my head, then sat at the foot of the bed and looked at me. Then she got up on top of the dresser and knocked my wrist watch and keys and a few other things on the floor, watching me all the time for a reaction. When she didn’t get one, she climbed up on my night stand, knocked the lamp over, then sat down and stared at me. She had to climb up on the desk to knock nearly everything on the floor, too, but eventually I got out of bed. Didn’t feed her or Bonkers right away, though; I had my breakfast first, read the paper, made a pot of coffee, drank a cup. Can’t have them thinking that I get up just to feed them, although that’s what they seem to believe, anyway.
Here’s one more sign that we’re “officially” on home turf in Wisconsin once again: Barb spotted this sign while we were in the airport terminal at Truax field, just north of Madison. I’ve seen this sign posted over drinking fountains in every country I’ve visited all over the world, asking people not to clog the drain of the drinking fountain by pouring their coffee grounds in it. What makes this sign worthy of a photo, however, is that this sign doesn’t use the words “drinking fountain” — whoever made this sign called them “bubblers.” Bubblers! I’ve gone for so long without using that word that I’m surprised it hasn’t been deleted from my memory cells. There’s only one other place in the whole world I know of where you’ll hear people call them “bubblers,” but I’ve never been to Boston, I’ve only met a few people from there, so this was like a “Welcome to Wisconsin” sign.
We took a ride up to Manawa to see Mom & Tom and to return Mom’s car; she lent it to us while we were getting on our feet in Madison. I drove our car and Barb followed me up in Mom’s. Tim rode with me and we were supposed to be navigating, and we got so busy bullshitting about all kinds of things that we missed the turnoff from Steven’s Point to Waupaca, but it was easy to take the next exit and thread our way to Waupaca along Highway 10. Then we missed the turnoff to Waupaca. There was a second exit, but it was so obviously not the right one that we had no hope of playing it off as if it was what we meant to do. Finally in Manawa, we had a nice lunch with the folks, then spent a few hours chatting before we left for Madison at about six in the evening. Too bad Barb didn’t hear the cell phone ringing as we left town, because we forgot to give Mom the keys to her car. I suppose that officially makes us about the dumbest people in Wisconsin, at least this week.
Damn. Now that the impossible has become achievable, we’ll have to make up another word for things that can’t be done. I love the flexibility of the English language, but something’s got to be done to silence the dopes who “give one-hundred and ten percent,” who are looking for something that’s “more unique,” who “save up to thirty percent — and more!” Death’s too good for them, so that’s out. I’d like to sentence them to actually trying to do the impossible things that casually trip from their tongues. I dunno, that’s just the way I feel about it.
I sure hope I can find a job soon because looking for a job is exhausting! I need to settle into a job so I can get some rest.
Barb and I have established a routine by this time: Get up at about seven, or about an hour after the cats wake us up — more or less the same time, really. Then we make a reservation for a computer at the local library so it’s waiting for us when we get there. That usually leaves us about an hour to eat breakfast and clean up, but it seems like less time because it’s, well, you know, pretty early. The drive to the library takes five or ten minutes, depending on how many nutjobs are on the road. After we log on to our reserved computers, it’s a mad race to find the job application on-line and type like crazed beasts before our time runs out. Those applications seem pretty simple and straightforward when you take your first look at them, but most of them take me at least an hour and a half, and I make a lot more mistakes than Barb does. (She doesn’t make any.) With the forms filled out and our computer time all gone, we make copies of everything before we stop at the bakery next door for a cuppa joe and maybe some cookies. Somehow it’s always after noon by the time we get home.
Between lunch and supper there’s a lot more of the same, unless one or both of us isn’t applying for a job. Then we’re looking at houses to rent or shopping for groceries instead. The two take up a whole lot of time for exactly opposite reasons. There’s almost no other place I’ve been that has the variety of foods we can find in Madison. We’re literally swamped for choices, so we’re always running to one side of town or another to check out a farmer’s market or a whole foods grocery store. Renting a house takes up a whole lot of time because there are almost no two-bedroom houses available to rent in Monona, so we have to comb through the newspapers and on-line ads and call an awful lot of people. Looking for a home is almost as much work as looking for a job.
Tim, on the other hand, rolls out of bed at about noon, wolfs down a couple bowls of cereal, hangs out on the couch reading a book until we get home and then tries to get his chores done while we’re chasing after him waving sharp knives over his head. I’d trade places with him in a second.
Every so often you get the chance to see how other people live and the experience is so profound it makes a changed person out of you. We’re looking for a house to rent and saw one today that was so god-awful filthy it was like walking into a third-world shack. Looked all right from the outside — in fact, it must have been a cute house long ago, but the current tenants had done everything in their power to turn it into a very large dumpster. There were piles of what must have at one time been furniture but were now heaps of ragged, infested upholstery and broken sticks. The carpet was so grubby it might as well have been dirt. If any one of us had fallen down in there, our bones would have been stripped by millions of ravenous microbes working in piranha-like schools so quickly that there wouldn’t have been time to cry out for help.
The guy who was showing us the house tried to remain upbeat about the possibilities. “After we tear out the carpet and slap some paint on this, it’ll look a whole lot better.”
“How about this?” I asked, pointing out that several tiles and most of the grout were missing from the shower stall and water had eaten into the drywall underneath.
He poked at it with his finger. “We’ll probably have to replace those tiles.” He kept talking like that. He said they were going to bring in a cleaning crew after the tenants moved out on Friday spend the whole weekend cleaning the house. It’s only my guess, but I believe a platoon of war-hardened men armed with either a tank truck filled with chlorine bleach or flamethrowers would need at least a week to really clean that house.
The upper floor had sustained surprisingly little damage; I suppose we could have all lived up there and gone down to the lower floor only to escape, but there was no toilet upstairs, and the kitchen was downstairs as well. I tried pretty hard to imagine how I would bring myself to pay more than fifty dollars a month to live there, but the only scenarios that came to me involved hiding from an invading army of Martians, fleeing a wild hyena attack — that sort of thing. And now that I think about it, I’d rather take my chances with the hyenas.
The longer we look for a house, the further we seem to be getting from downtown, which is where I wanted to live in the first place — and after all, it’s all about me, isn’t it? If I could have my way, I’d live in an apartment or condo right in the middle of town, but if that ever happens it’s looking like that’s not going to before I’m fifty. We’ve spent four weeks looking at houses in Monona, to buy and to rent. When buying turned out to be impossible, at least for this year, we looked at renting, and by the time we found out what kind of houses were available to us for rent, the market was drying up and all that was left were fleabags where even a roach wouldn’t want to lay his head.
But while we were talking with Jim & Sue a night or two ago we learned that high school students in Cottage Grove go to school in Monona, so we looked in the paper to see what was available and not only found five or six right off the bat, but they were at a price that wouldn’t be so tight on the budget. We called on one and drove out there today to see it, a little split-level duplex that everybody liked. All that remains is getting our application approved, and moving — again.
We’ll also have to buy at least a small collection of matchstick furniture, or live in very large, empty rooms, sitting and sleeping on the floors. We don’t have anything now, naturally. We could take delivery of our first shipment of goods, called the “unaccompanied baggage,” but that’s mostly kitchen utensils, some clothes, a set of lawn chairs and our computer. No furniture, unless you count the lawn chairs. If we accepted our household goods shipment, we’d have to rent a storage locker to stow most of it, not to mention the fact that we’d have to move it when the time came. Makes me shiver just typing those words.
Goodwill and St. Vincent’s might be able to help us out a little bit with maybe a lamp or an end table, but we’re going to need a couple cheap beds for at least a year. How do you get hold of those? Is there any such thing? We were thinking maybe we stood some chance of success at a garage sale or an estate auction, but we have just about no experience at that. Garage sales are ruled by people at least as aggressive as cheetahs and twice as fast. You gotta get up pretty early in the morning to find what you’re looking for at garage sales. After eight o’clock — about the time I get out of bed on Saturdays — all that’s left is velvet paintings and beanbag chairs.
Our tiny three-member family goes through at least one roll of toilet paper every day. How is that possible? I could understand how we went through that much TP if about a half-dozen incontinent girls lived in our house and everybody else ate nothing but bran and prunes at every meal. Is anything you do in the bathroom so messy that you need that much paper to clean up after yourself? Wait, stop, don’t answer that.
It’s been suggested that we could address this problem by simply buying cheaper, one-ply paper, which sounds like a good idea but falls apart on so many levels:
First of all, I don’t have sole buying authority over the toilet paper purchases. In fact, the queen of the house usually buys the stuff, although I have on occasion made a solo trip to the store and brought home the wrong brand of TP, whereupon she who must be obeyed sent be right back to get the correct, two-ply quilted brand.
Second of all, she who must be obeyed is not the only person in the house who prefers the quilted stuff. I don’t know if I’m getting old, or soft, or both, but these days I can’t stand to use the one-ply sandpaper they sell as toilet paper. Just won’t do. The only thing worse, in my view, is the waxy stuff they try to pass off as toilet paper in some public bathrooms.
Lastly, on the few occasions that we have tried to use the single-ply abomination, everybody ends up using at least twice as much to avoid a risky single-ply application that might result in the kind of accident you don’t want to know about. Two-ply is the way to go. The volume of use will have to remain a quandary.
Today is the last day of July. That means two things: We’ve been in the States an entire month now, and only thirty-one days remain before my retirement from the military is official and I become Mr. Dave Okonski. Or even just Dave. I don’t care if it’s mister. I can do without.