My Planet: Finding Humor in the Oddest Places

by Mary Roach

  “I think,” he said gently, “That it’s a seasonal thing.”

  For three solid weeks, it rained leaves. We raked until we had blisters, and dibblies, and blisters on our dibblies. I was fast approaching the third stage of gardening: the calling-in of the professional.

  Here’s what pushed me over my limit. It was a Saturday afternoon. I was down in the basement failing to understand the sprinkler control console, when I came across a small cabinet crammed with bags and boxes. Organic Bulb Fertilizer, said one label. Azalea and Rhododendron Food, said the next. I looked over at Ed. “What—they eat too?” Where would it stop? Would we have to clothe them and drive them to track practice?

  So I gave up. As Omar Sharif said in Lawrence of Arabia, “Let the English have their gardens. We will make do with barren ground and brittle, unsightly ground cover.” Perhaps he didn’t say exactly that. But he was thinking it. And I am too.

  On the Road Again

  A family is a collection of people who share the same genes but cannot agree on a place to pull over for lunch. Ed and I, plus his parents and sister Doris and eight-year-old niece Alisha, are on a road trip to Yosemite. Poppy wants Subway, Ed wants In-N-Out Burger, Mary wants Sonic. In the end, we compromise on McDonalds, where Alisha will get an “Incredibles” action figure that will come in handy later for breaking the heater vent.

  We’ve rented a minivan that seats eight, yet somehow, there are not enough cupholders. How can this be? This is America: To every passenger, a cupholder, and to every cupholder, a watered-down soda big enough to baptize a harbor seal.

  “Alisha!” says Doris. “Take Mr. Incredible out of Poppy’s cupholder.”

  It’s a three-hour drive to Yosemite, but we’re taking a little longer, as we’re working in a tour of Highway 80’s public restrooms. As the saying goes, Not one bladder empties, but another fills. I am reminded of that track and field event wherein one person runs for a while, and then hands off the restroom key to the next person, who runs until she’s done, and then another person runs.

  Unhappily, many of these restrooms belong to gas stations. Gas-station customers, perhaps inspired by the nozzles on the pumps outside, are prone to dribble and slosh. Though I almost prefer this to the high-tech humiliation of air travel, where the restrooms have faucets programmed to respond to precisely executed hand signals no one has taught you, and the toilets flush mere seconds after you sit down. It’s like having your plate cleared before you’ve even salted your potatoes.

  We get back on the road. Poppy’s driving now. We’ve entered the road-trip doldrums, the point when all the cheesy tabloids have been read and the travel Etch A Sketch has grown boring, and anyone under age 12 is required to say “Are we there yet?” at ever-shortening intervals. Ed and his sister, two middle-aged adults, are playing with the highway bingo set. Alisha is making Mr. Incredible fight with Poppy’s earlobes.

  Doris covers the bingo square that says motel. “BINGO!”

  “No way,” says Ed. “A motel is only one story high and has a swimming pool full of algae. That was a hotel.”

  “Same diff,” says Doris.

  “MA! Doris is cheating!”

  Alisha kicks the back of Poppy’s seat. “Are we there yet?” If by “there” she means the end of our rope, then, yes, we’re pulling in right now.

  Just outside Manteca, we stop for coffee. Coffee is an important feature of the relay-restroom training regimen. Without it, the chain could be broken, the gold medal lost. At a Starbucks checkout, Ed buys a CD of Joni Mitchell’s favorite musical picks. The hope is it will have a calming effect.

  The first cut is by Duke Ellington. Alisha makes a face. “Is Uncle Ed trying to annoy us?”

  “It’s not my favorite Ellington number,” agrees Nana. The CD returns to its case, pending the day Joni Mitchell joins us on our annual vacation.

  Pulling back onto the highway, it starts to pour, which at least quells the debate over whether to have the windows open. Depending on whom you ask, the temperature inside the minivan is either “freezing” or “so hot I’m going to suffocate.”

  Then something amazing happens. As we climb the Sierras, the rain turns to snow. The pines are flocked with white. We’re struck dumb by the scene outside. For a solid 15 minutes, everyone forgets about their bladder, their blood sugar, the temperature in the van. Alisha has never seen snow, so we pull over to make snow angels and catch falling flakes on our tongues. Then Ed realizes we need tire chains, and we have to turn back and drive 30 miles to Oakhurst.

  “Good,” says Poppy. “There was a very nice restroom there.”

  It’s Your Fault

  We recently moved to a house that lies a quarter-mile from an earthquake fault. For some reason, we did not give this a lot of thought when we bought the place. At the time, the distance from Quick & Juicy Burger or a decent espresso place seemed of greater import. The fault is named Hayward, which may have contributed to our nonchalance, for it makes it sound kindly and avuncular. Prone to tweedy outerwear. Not the sort of name that sends one running for the gas valve.

  So we’ve been reading some of the government’s “emergency preparedness” websites to see what we could do to be better prepared.

  “Are you ready?” asks the FEMA web page cheerfully, as though a natural disaster were a sort of amusement park ride, and all you need do to survive is be over four feet tall and lower your safety bar. The earthquake page suggests that you “stay in bed” and put a pillow over your head. It doesn’t say to put Lucinda Williams on the stereo and have a good cry, but I think that pretty much goes without saying.

  Much space is devoted to the assembly of a home survival kit. This must contain not only the predictable items—water, canned foods—but mysterious items like a pencil and a medicine dropper. Ed mused that the medicine dropper was for nursing baby birds. “They fall from their nests and are unable to locate their parents because all the cell-phone circuits are busy.”

  “Good,” I said. “At least someone will be drinking the canned milk.” From here we digressed into a discussion of PET Evaporated Milk. My mother always fed our cats PET milk, and I’d assumed it was a special inexpensive kind of milk for pets. “Why, sure,” said Ed. “It’s shelved right there next to the IDIOT Milk.”

  I consulted the website of PET, known to themselves as “the dairy goodness people.” Alas, it said that the origins of the name were “lost in history.”

  The survival kit lists go on for pages. Batteries, sturdy shoes, blankets. I understand the importance of having all these items on hand in your home, but why do you need to drag them from their appointed storage places and put them in a “kit”?

  “Because . . . you don’t know where anything in your house is even when the electricity is on and the walls aren’t falling down?” guessed Ed.

  I insisted that I knew where every one of these items was.

  “Okay,” said Ed. “D batteries?”

  I had to admit that the batteries were “lost in history.”

  “Besides,” said Ed. “It’s important to have a kit.” Ed has a special weakness for kits. We have a first-aid kit in the car and one at home. While packing to move a few months back, I decided to actually look in the home kit. There were three rolls of tape but no bandages. I asked Ed if he planned to tape our wounds shut. He did not answer. I sensed he had other taping-shut plans in his head.

  The Department of Homeland Security survival-kit list includes the item “unique family needs.” “Chocolate-covered raisins?” said Ed. “Lip gloss,” volunteered Phoebe, my stepdaughter.

  All the sites stress the importance of having a plan: knowing where to go and what to do. “Stand in a doorway,” said Ed. “Get under a desk,” said Phoebe. We looked at the FEMA earthquake page. Item 4 said: “Use an interior doorway for shelter only if you know it is a strongly supported, load-bearing
doorway.” They had forgotten Item 3A: Get an engineering degree.

  Ed frowned. “Do I stand in a doorway or not?” I say go for it. Lean against it provocatively while wearing leather slippers and a burgundy dressing gown and say, “Anyone for a nightcap?”

  Ed took the Unique Family Needs list and wrote: Scotch.

  Taking Its Toll

  The highway toll station as a method of tax collection dates to medieval times, long before the existence of postal trucks and other handy means of delivering tax bills to citizens without wasting an hour of their lives every day. Our local bridge district, perhaps staffed by medievalists or those nostalgic for simpler, more irritating times, continues to use a toll plaza.

  “Good morrow, sir!” Ed salutes the tax collector as we pass through the gate each morning. His greeting is drowned out by a radio in the booth, or possibly a hurdy-gurdy player in doublet and pantaloons.

  To convince commuters they are progress-minded fellows, our bridge district recently installed FasTrak, a system that deducts the toll automatically from your account as you pass. To use it, you send away for a “transponder,” which has a promising “Star Trek” ring to it, as if you have only to flip the thing open, press some buttons, and you and your car will vanish, then reappear on the far side of the traffic, wearing form-fitting V-neck uniforms.

  In fact, it’s just a small, flat beeping plastic box that you put on your dashboard. Some people choose to Velcro the device to their windshield, as a convenience to thieves who can now break your car window, confident that their transgression will, at the very least, produce 20 bucks in bridge tolls.

  While FasTrak apparently lives up to its name elsewhere in the nation, our version is not quite there. On our maiden run, traffic was backed up a mile from the toll plaza, the cars all honking and the knights overheating on their caparisoned chargers. Alas, the FasTrak-only lanes begin about 500 yards back from the tollgate, meaning that you can cut, oh, about 35 seconds off your commute. Ed tuned the radio to the 24-hour traffic station. As it was too late to take an alternative route, there was no point in doing this. I didn’t say anything, because the day before, Ed had refrained from saying anything when I tried to run my library card through an ATM slot. We do this for each other.

  Ed leaned in to the radio speaker, concentrating. “Yup,” he said. “Traffic’s backed up all along here.”

  At long last, we neared the FasTrak-only lane. I rummaged in the glove box for the transponder. Ed gave me a queer look, for I had grabbed our Travel Etch A Sketch and set it on the dash. The transponder was in the other car. As it turned out, it didn’t much matter. With just two FasTrak-only lanes, both were so clogged that it was actually faster to use a cash lane. To pass the time, I called directory assistance and tracked down the local administrator of the FasTrak program. She had ruined my morning, and now I was going to ruin hers.

  I asked why there are only two FasTrak-only lanes. And why so short? She said they weren’t sure they had the “political stomach for the outcry” from the cash payers that would ensue if more, or longer, FasTrak-only lanes opened up. I gave her some outcry to practice on. Fie upon the cash payers! The goal should be to make these people’s commute so miserable that they are forced to get with the program.

  “Well,” she said. “It’s certainly a tough decision. We try to strike a balance and move forward.”

  “Me too,” I said. “I try to move forward too. Oops! Look at that. I can’t. Traffic’s at a standstill.” I hung up the phone.

  “Why the hatred?” said Ed. “It’s just life.” If only I could be like Ed. I decided that from here on out, I would go forward—or maybe just sideways—with acceptance and calm and forgiveness.

  As we got to the tollbooth, I smiled and handed the collector an extra dollar. A little something for the hurdy-gurdy man.

  A Kiss Is Just . . . a Pain

  America is a culture that cannot agree on how to end an evening. Some people are huggers. Some peck, some shake. Ed and I were at a dinner party last week that was particularly treacherous, in that it combined old friends and total strangers, each requiring a different skill set. Ed is better at this, and I turned to him for guidance.

  The first to leave was our friend Laurie. “Kisser-hugger,” whispered Ed. “No problem there.” Her friend Jim was trickier. We’d met him only once, and though I had a dim memory of him as a hugger, I couldn’t say for sure what kind. There’s full-body frontal, lip/cheek, cheek/cheek, and there’s combo. I stepped closer to Jim, imagining a panel of judges off to the side and a team of commentators speaking in hushed tones. “It looks like they’re getting ready for a single-side, lateral cheek press with shoulder clasp. That’s got a difficulty factor of 5. Let’s see how Roach does. In the past she’s had trouble with her finish.” I pictured them wincing quietly. “That’s going to be tough to recover from.”

  Other cultures have managed to agree upon a national protocol for greetings and farewells, and they simply get on with it. The French kiss each other twice, perhaps because no one else will. The Dutch at some point trumped the French with a triple cheek buss. The English, my people, will step closer and raise their arms to your shoulders while simultaneously leaning away, imparting a vague impression of affection while at the time suggesting it’s quite possible they find your kind repellent.

  Cross-cultural good-byes are especially trying. I once met a French-Canadian author in an airport and spent a pleasant hour chatting with him. When his flight was called, we stood up to say good-bye. I went for a peck, but because he had turned his head in preparation for a double-cheek press, my mouth collided with the side of his nose. We rushed to make corrections, but it was like trying to steady a plummeting jetliner. The embrace spiraled out of control and crashed to the floor. Black smoke billowing from the departures hall for days.

  Cross-generational hugs are also tricky, as I learned with Laurie’s mother the other night. A kiss or hug might seem inappropriate, but a handshake might be taken as standoffish.

  “Let her make the first move,” whispered Ed.

  I worried that she might be plotting the same thing. Ed acknowledged that that was a problem, in that we’d both be awkwardly standing there. “High noon in a Clint Eastwood movie” was how he put it.

  So I made the first move. I flipped my poncho over one shoulder and removed the cigar. I was going for a cheek/cheek. Though people refer to this as a kiss, it is technically an embrace. It is physically impossible to kiss someone else’s cheek while he or she is kissing yours, unless you have highly elastic, protuberant lips. Orangutans can manage the simultaneous cheek kiss, but have the good sense not to bother.

  The rest of the table had stood up and begun gathering their coats. We were toward the back of the pack. A man with whom I hadn’t exchanged a word was drawing near.

  “Hug,” Ed whispered urgently. “If you’re at the end of the line, and everyone in front of you has been doing the hug, you have no choice. You have to go to the hug.”

  So I hugged the man, perhaps a bit too exuberantly. He extracted himself as quickly as he could without actually pushing me away. The judges shook their heads sadly.

  I can’t tell you how happy I was to get home, where the people I love come and go without any of this fuss, unless one of us is heading off for, say, a year in Tripoli. “See ya!” “Bye!” It’s so wonderfully simple.

  Caught on the Web

  Last week I was forced to look myself up on the Internet. I was doing a search on Mary Roach websites, to see if the domain names were taken.

  I am not one of those folks who delight in Googling themselves. The last time I succumbed to the urge, the mighty search engine turned up an African wire service story stating that author Mary Roach has “gone off her trolley.” I wasn’t certain what this meant, or even if it was a bad thing. I mean, who knows, maybe it was my stop? Curious, I then Googled the phr
ase “off her trolley.” I did not find a definition, but I learned that Sharon Osbourne, Ann Coulter and Kate Bush are also off their trolleys. An unpromising sign.

  A website, as you know, is a resource designed to provide quick and easy access to outdated or useless information. I give you, for instance, the website Maryroach.net. The Mary Roach in this case is an old American Idol contestant whose audition Simon Cowell called one of the worst he’d ever heard. I don’t watch American Idol very often, but I heard about this Mary Roach, because for two weeks afterward, people in my household were walking around gleefully quoting Cowell’s line, “At least we don’t have to listen to that horrible MARY ROACH anymore.”

  Most folks logging onto websites are looking for nothing more than a phone number. But company websites rarely give you one. Why? Because they long ago laid off their phone-answerers in order to hire designers of useless, outdated websites.

  In keeping with the general goal of irritating as broadly and efficiently as possible, many websites require passwords. In order to get a password, you must undergo a half hour of tedious, unpaid data entry known as registering. If you’ve already registered, you can proceed directly to not being able to remember your password, followed by remembering passwords for seven other websites, followed by, as they say in the Good Book, a wailing and gnashing of teeth.

  Moving on to www.maryroach.org, I was surprised to find myself redirected to the website of a business called Nature’s Drugstore. Here you can buy Eczema Kits, All-Purpose Ointment, and seven different Libido Enhancers, including the eyebrow-elevating “Men’s Package.” I e-mailed Nature’s Drugstore to ask what Mary Roach has to do with all this, but got no reply. There was—Lo!—no phone number, just an address in Greeley, Colorado. Greeley has a website, but there was nothing on it about Nature’s Drugstore. There was, however, a mention of Greeley as the home of “the oldest symphony west of the Mississippi,” which may explain all the libido enhancing that’s going on there.