by Mary Roach
Ed was quiet for a moment. “What do we share?”
I thought about this. We share a home e-mail account that neither of us checks or uses or even remembers how to log on to. We share a Netflix account, though it is Ed who manages the film queue. Not long ago, a Jack Black movie featuring the portly actor in a full-body leotard dropped through our mail slot. I ran out the door in my sock-feet, convinced that the mailman had given us a neighbor’s envelope. We don’t share the same shampoo or breakfast cereal or even toothpaste. I couldn’t come up with an answer.
For an experiment in togetherness, I suggested that we share iTunes, the software that allows you to bleed your bank account dry in 99-cent increments—oops, I mean, download songs to create an online music library. Ed already had an iPod, and I had just bought one. (When I was nine or ten, I used my allowance to buy a jack-in-the-box. The toy store clerk, an older woman with dry, permed hair and a grim set to her mouth, not that I harbor any resentment, said, “Aren’t you too old for that?” I got to relive that moment right there in the Apple store.)
Our shared music library lasted less than an hour. It was too embarrassing to have Ed know that I’d downloaded a song by, say, Al Stewart. I actually paid the 99 cents, and then, seeing it there on the list between Frank Sinatra and acclaimed avant-garde accordion and glockenspiel trio Tin Hat, I deleted it. And while Ed could skip over my music on the playlist, I had the kind of iPod that chooses songs at random. I’d be bopping along the sidewalk, and “Sweet Home Alabama” would suddenly segue into a neo-klezmer band.
“How could someone not like the Klezmatics?” said Ed. There was an implied “and like Al Stewart” at the end of the question.
“I do like them,” I said. “I just would always rather, you know, listen to something else.”
Ed made me a separate library file for my music, which he labeled “Out-of-Date Pap,” or anyway wanted to. Then he showed me how I could easily copy any of the hundreds of songs in his music library to my own. So I did that. Now there were six songs in my library.
He looked at the list. “Those are the only ones you want?”
I nodded.
“Huh,” said Ed. “We’re very different, you and I.”
We shared that sentiment, and then we went upstairs to spit toothpaste on each other’s hands in the sink that, for the moment at least, we share.
Gratuitous Gratuities
Not long ago, a mysterious Christmas card dropped through our mail slot. The envelope was addressed to a man named Raoul, who, I was relatively certain, did not live with us. The envelope wasn’t sealed, so I opened it. The inside of the card was blank. My husband explained that the card was both from and to the newspaper deliveryman. His name was apparently Raoul, and Raoul wanted a holiday tip. We were meant to put a check inside the card and then drop the envelope in the mail. When your services are rendered at 4 a.m., you can’t simply hang around, clearing your throat like a bellhop. You have to be direct.
So I wrote a nice holiday greeting to this man whom I had never seen or met, this man who, in my imagination, fires the New York Times from a howitzer aimed at our front door, causing more noise with mere newsprint than most people manage with sophisticated black market fireworks.
With a start, I realized that perhaps the reason for the 4 a.m. wake-up thonks was not ordinary rudeness but carefully executed spite: I had not tipped Raoul in Christmases past. I honestly hadn’t realized I was supposed to. This was the first time he’d used the card tactic. So I got out my checkbook. Somewhere along the line, holiday tipping went from an optional thank-you for a year of services well rendered to a Mafia-style protection racket.
Several days later, I was bringing our garbage bins back from the curb when I noticed an envelope taped to one of the lids. The outside of the envelope said MICKEY. Unless a small person named Mickey had taken up residence in our garbage can and this missive was intended for him, it had to be another tip solicitation, this time from our garbage collector. Unlike Raoul, Mickey hadn’t enclosed his own Christmas card from me. In a way, I appreciated the directness. “I know you don’t care how merry my Christmas is, and that’s fine,” the gesture said. “I want $30, or I’ll ‘forget’ to empty your compost bin some hot summer day.”
I put a check in the envelope and taped it back to the bin. The next morning, Ed reported that on his way to the gym, he’d noticed that the envelope was gone, though the trash hadn’t yet been picked up: “Someone stole Mickey’s tip!” Ed concocted a scenario whereby an enterprising colleague of Mickey’s had done a late-night sweep of his route, stealing all the tips. He made me call the bank and cancel the check.
But Ed had been wrong. Two weeks later, Mickey left a letter from the bank on our steps. The letter informed Mickey that the check, which he had tried to cash, had been canceled. The following Tuesday morning, Ed ran out with his wallet. “Are you Mickey?”
The man looked at him with scorn. “Mickey is the garbageman. I am the recycling.” Not only had Ed insulted this man by insinuating that he was a garbageman, but he had obviously neglected to tip him. Ed ran back inside for more funds. Then he noticed that the driver of the truck had been watching the whole transaction. He peeled off another twenty and looked around, waving bills in the air. “Anyone else?”
Had we consulted the website of the Emily Post Institute, this embarrassing breach of etiquette could have been avoided. Under “trash/recycling collectors” in the institute’s Holiday Tipping Guidelines, it says: “$10 to $30 each.” You may or may not wish to know that your pet groomer, personal trainer, handyman, hairdresser, mailman and UPS guy all expect a holiday tip.
The Mary Roach Institute has something to say: Enough! People hate tipping. It forces them to make an unpleasant choice between feeling cheap and feeling taken. Americans are nickeled-and-dimed from every direction. Just factor it into your rates and be done with it, I say!
Ed got that look he gets when my true nature breaks through the sweetness-and-light exterior that I prop in place about 20 percent of the time. “Who are you?” he said.
I hung my head. “My name is Scrooge. I live in your trash bin.”
Color Me Flummoxed
I am a fan of the Sherwin-Williams Company, if only for the crazy audacity of their logo: a giant paint can spilling its contents over Earth. What I want to know is, how did they decide on the color? Painting the earth is a big job. You don’t want to do it twice. And red is a bold choice for even the smallest home décor project.
As is yellow. Last year, Ed and I spent 45 minutes flipping through yellow paint chips when we redid our TV room. Seeking something subtle, we went with Peace Yellow. Ed covered two walls. “Whoa!” he said, squinting. It was like living inside Easter. We had failed to observe the Universal Law of Paint Chips: Whatever you choose will be two times brighter, darker and more garish than it looked on the chip.
This time, repainting the guest room, we decided to go with Benjamin Moore. They sell trial paint containers the size of baby-food jars, and, as with baby food, the idea is to smear patches of the stuff all over the walls. This enables you to try the colors out before committing to a full gallon. Off we went to the paint store.
“This is nice,” said Ed, holding up a chip of Wyndham Cream. The name was pretty but largely devoid of useful color associations. This bugs me. I like a paint namer who calls it like it is―for instance, the person who came up with Benjamin Moore’s American Cheese. Although who in their right mind―not that anybody in the midst of a home décor project is in their right mind―would cover their walls with something suggestive of Velveeta? “Some dogs I know,” Ed said. “My nephew. Your friend Clark.”
Because Wyndham Cream sounded so lovely, we bought the little jar of it, as well as a jar of Asbury Sand, Crowne Hill Yellow, Hathaway Peach and a couple of others. Only when we got them on the wall did we recognize the colors for what they
actually were: Caulk, Jaundice, Band-Aid and Cheap Drugstore Foundation.
Ed had made a huge grid of paint squares on the wall. The guest room looked like The Hollywood Squares. We stared at the grid for a long time. “Paul Lynde isn’t that bad,” I said.
“I could live with Charo,” said Ed.
After a half hour of this, we had to accept the fact that we didn’t care for any of them. We had just spent more money on sample-sized jars of paint than we’d spent on the wasted gallon of Peace Yellow. We’d been taken by the names, by peaches that turned out to be first aid supplies. This is the surprising thing about people who name paint colors: Many are color-blind. What else can explain why Bonfire is dark red or Greenfield Pumpkin is brown? Ed pointed out that I have never visited Greenfield, nor looked upon its winter squashes. “You don’t know, really,” he said. “Could be something in the water there.”
If only to get away from the depressing home décor scenario playing itself out in the guest room, I went downstairs and Googled pumpkin and Greenfield. I couldn’t find an image of a Greenfield pumpkin, but I did find a news item headlined “Pumpkin Launcher Accident in Greenfield, New Hampshire.” The operator of a catapult built for pumpkin-chuckin’ contests was knocked out when the device hit him on the chin.
“What color is the pumpkin launcher?” Ed asked. Lo and behold, it was brown. Ed surmised that Greenfield Pumpkin was a Benjamin Moore typo and that the person who named it had actually called it Greenfield Pumpkin Launcher.
“You know,” said Ed, looking at the chip, “it’s kind of nice.”
“Uh-huh,” I said. “Matches the rug.”
And so we went with Greenfield Pumpkin Launcher.
Change Is Not Good
A man’s front pants pocket is a one-way portal to his dresser top. Coins go in, but they are never pulled back out and spent. I have seen my husband, Ed, receive 97 cents in change, dump it all in his pocket and then pull a dollar bill out for the tip jar. This appears to be a near-universal male trait. We have all seen the news stories of elderly men buried under the rubble when the bedroom floor finally collapses under the weight of 55 years of pocket change.
The Bank of Ed resides in empty sauerkraut jars and assorted broken crockery that has found a second career in finance. “Coins are heavy, but at least they’re dry,” the mug with no handle will say to the chipped cereal bowl.
One year, for his birthday, I got Ed a noisy, battery-powered machine to roll his coins. Unfortunately, this particular machine used special rolls that you had to send away for. By the time your special rolls arrived in the mail, your wife and children would have long ago jammed the machine by feeding it buttons and subway tokens just to see what happened.
Most men’s coins are rolled by a noisy, irritation-powered machine called a wife. I spent the better part of a Thursday evening rolling two years’ worth of Ed’s coins the old-fashioned way. On Saturday we loaded up two canvas tote bags full of money and pushed our way through the bank’s front doors, like robbers in reverse. We began piling the rolls on the narrow shelf in front of the teller’s window, where the missing and nonfunctional ballpoint pens live. The teller stopped us. “You’ll need to write your name and full 16-digit bank account number on each of those rolls,” she said. I obviously looked like the kind of person who pads her coin rolls with buttons and subway tokens. Just to see what happens.
A sympathetic woman who had been in line behind us said that the Lucky supermarket nearby had an automatic change-counting machine. While we drove there, I gently probed Ed about his change-hoarding habits. Why couldn’t he spend the coins as he got them? He explained that he set them aside on purpose, so that at the end of the year, he’d have a couple hundred dollars to do something fun with.
“Like driving coins down to Lucky?”
“Something like that.”
On the pavement outside Lucky, a workman was unloading pallets of canned chicken broth. There were hundreds upon hundreds of cans, stacked as high as the workman’s head. It was what the top of Ed’s dresser would have looked like if stores gave you chicken broth instead of coins for change.
On the front of the Coinstar machine was a sticker informing us that an 8.9 percent “counting fee” would be subtracted from our total unless we chose to receive gift cards—for Amazon.com, Starbucks, iTunes, Eddie Bauer—instead of cash. I was surprised to see iTunes on there because I think of coin rolling and change exchanging as a pastime of the middle-aged and elderly. I picture young people just throwing their change away.
In case there was any question as to whether you’d count us among the young or the middle-aged and elderly, Ed chose Eddie Bauer.
We began pouring handfuls of coins into the basket. “Can we trust it?” I said. “How do we know it’s not skimming?”
Not that I would know anything about skimming. The five or six dollars a week that I take from Ed’s coin stash for bus fare and parking meters is not skimmed. It’s a “rolling fee.”
The machine tallied up 5,288 coins. We now own a slip of paper entitling us to $403 in Eddie Bauer store credit, which will spend its days atop Ed’s dresser, alongside the broken mugs and cereal bowls and pallets of chicken broth.
One Good Tern . . .
Late one fall afternoon, a flock of cedar waxwings descended on our backyard. I get excited by a bird with a crest. They’re the royalty, the showstoppers. I barreled into the den to get my binoculars. Ed was watching the game. “Cedar waxwings!” I yelled.
“St. Louis Cardinals!” Ed yelled back.
I paused in the doorway. “Have you ever even seen a cedar waxwing?”
“It’s a bird,” said Ed. “I’ve seen birds. They fly, they sing a little ditty.”
I was raised by bird-watchers. My mother filled bird feeders and cadged hunks of suet from the A&P butchers to hang on trees for the woodpeckers. At a young age, I learned the simple satisfaction of identifying a new bird all by myself and then making the decisive check mark on the life list in the back of the bird guide. No one notices birds in my husband’s family. They view bird-watching as a sort of quaint, perplexing mental illness. I have heard Ed refer to birders as people who pull their pants up a little too high.
When I first went to Florida with Ed and his daughters to visit his parents, I tried to drag everyone out to the Wakodahatchee Wetlands to see the storks and ibises. Wakodahatchee is a native word meaning “swamp that serves as a major mosquito breeding ground for the greater South Florida region.”
“Do we have to go?” Lily would say.
“It stinks there,” Phoebe would chime in.
I once dragged them out to the Everglades in search of the roseate spoonbill, a large storklike item with a bald green head and a long spatulate beak.
“Imagine trying to eat with no hands,” I said to Lily and Phoebe, hoping to spark their interest. “Imagine trying to pick up a fish with a set of mixing spoons that have been stuck to your face.”
Phoebe swatted a mosquito. “Imagine getting the hell out of here.”
Lily yawned. “Imagine going back to Nana’s and lying out by the pool.”
The late-afternoon sun had deepened the waxwings’ colors. The last quarter inch of a waxwing’s tail feathers is bright yellow, as though it had been dipped in paint. I don’t know why this should thrill me so, but it does. “Are you sure you don’t want to come see them?” I said to Ed. He was sure. I told him birding would be good for him. He could use another active hobby, something that gets him out into nature.
“That’s true,” said Ed’s friend Brian, who was watching the game with him. “Like me. I’m taking up golf.”
Ed frowned. “I’m taking up space.”
I recently bought a software program called Handheld Birds—a bird guide with birdcall audio files and checklists built in—which can be loaded onto a PalmPilot. While it was ni
ce to have the birdcalls with me in the field, the appeal of a handheld device, for me, was more basic: Fewer people would peg me as a birder and think derisive thoughts about me. Instead, they’d think, There’s a successful businesswoman checking her many pressing engagements while standing in the woods at 6 a.m. on a Saturday.
I soon went back to my bird guide. If I’m trying to identify, say, a new tern species, I need to see all the terns at once, laid out for comparison on a page or two. The handheld limits you to viewing one species at a time, though it does provide a lot more information on each of those species. You can zoom in on a blowup of the bird with its distinctive features pointed out—the blue bill of the ruddy duck, the white underpants of the pigeon guillemot. It’s possible I misread this and that what it says is “white underparts.” But I prefer to picture the guillemot standing out on the rocks in a pair of white underpants, no doubt pulled up just a little too high.
Talking the Walk
It began, as most backpacking trips do, in a ranger station. The ranger was explaining to Ed and me that we would need a bear bag. This is a special food bag that you hang over the end of a tree branch so the bears don’t come into your tent and don’t get into your food. “Bears are too heavy,” the ranger said, “to go out on a limb.”
“Lot of bears up there this time of year?” asked Ed.
His tone was calm, conversational even, but I, unlike the bears, will go out on a limb and say that Ed was uncomfortable with the bear concept. As was I.
“No bears.” The ranger narrowed his gaze. “Marmots.”
It was as close as a park ranger gets to cursing. The marmot, according to one of the handouts he gave us, “will eat virtually anything” and will “chew through your pack to get food.”
I can never get a good fix on the forest ranger personality: calm and carefree—or quietly desperate? Most likely it’s something of a mix. In exchange for being able to live in places where the rest of us go for vacation, they are forced to wear bulky uniforms and have tedious conversations about permit fees and wilderness etiquette.
