Moonbeam McQueen

I’m spending a great deal of time in my car these days. It’s almost an hour ride to work, and an hour back to the house where I’m staying. On Fridays, I drive an hour-and-a-half back to my “real” home, and on Monday mornings, I commute back to Columbus. This gives me an abundance of time for thinking, which is dangerous, I know, but no more dangerous than what I’ve seen other drivers doing, such as simultaneously eating a McBreakfast sandwich while talking on a cell phone and touching up the old hair and makeup.

I can’t manage any of this while driving. During rush hour, I spend the majority of my time gripping my steering wheel in terror and hoping that I make it to my destination alive. When I can relax a little, my mind starts to wander. I hum happy little tunes, sip a bit of coffee, and my thoughts drift like whispy little clouds on a breezy day. Here are some of the things I’ve been contemplating:

I’m convinced of the fact that the world would be a better place if there were more Merry Mobiles on the road. Do you remember these, or were they just a Memphis phenomenon? Merry Mobiles were cylindrical ice cream trucks which were painted red, white and blue, and they zipped around the streets of our fair city at about three miles an hour. I seriously doubt that anyone could muster too much road rage while driving one of these babies. Imagine how thrilled you’d be if your date picked you up in one. Pre-recorded circus music would be tinkling through the speakers as your ice-cream man proudly drove up, and you’d be the envy of every kid on the block as you climbed in. I bet you’d get free Bomb Pops too.

I’ve been worrying about the fact that Ollie hasn’t been by to visit us since the incident with the police, which is what I was afraid would happen. It makes me quite sad. When I’m through with this job thing, I might go visit his mommy and daddy, and try to explain that I’m neither an undercover narcotics agent nor a crackhead. Maybe they’ll let him come over again. I hope so.

Rush hour makes me imagine bumper stickers like this one:

I might have to market these.

I imagine the future. We will soon have this little chunk of severance money, and I want to use it to relocate. I’ve been spending a lot of commuting time dreaming of how and where to make our getaway. If you have any suggestions, please let me know. Here are some of the criteria:

A temperate climate, with four fairly equal-in-length seasons. Not too hot, not too cold. I long for a little cottage (with reasonable rent) near a river with lots of trees, in a small to medium-sized town that’s not too far from a hustly bustly big city and bike trails. The cost of living and the unemployment rate must be fairly low, and there should be little bunnies hopping around while butterflies dance about their heads. Garden fairies would be nice too. Seriously, I want to find a wonderful place to live out my days and begin my writing life in earnest. If you have any suggestions, I’d love to hear them.

I think a lot about Lila and Ray, a couple who’ve been in this neighborhood since gangs consisted of only the Sharks and the Jets, and problems were worked out by performing intricately choreographed dance numbers.
Ray is an eighty-something year old former alcoholic, his wife Lila is in her late seventies. Ray shuffles slowly down the sidewalk like Tim Conway did when he played that little old man on The Carol Burnett Show. He even stops ocassionally to take little naps mid-step, or at least it appears that way.

Lila, on the other hand, still has a spring in her step, which is partially fueled by anger at Ray and his increasingly erratic behavior. She has long hair that she pulls back in a pony tail, and you can still see a little red mixed in with the gray.

Last spring, Lila would stop to talk to me about gardening and to gossip about former neighbors who moved away decades ago. She has all the scoop from twenty years back.

Lila told me how much she used to love going to church, and that no matter what happens to her during this life, she can endure, because she’ll soon be on her way to heaven.

“I really hope I see you there, Moonbeam,” she said sweetly. I wanted to tell her that I’d be okay either way, because although I don’t believe in heaven or hell, if I somehow end up on the fiery side of the hereafter, I’ll have plenty of friends waiting there for me, ready to hand me a weenie on a coat hanger when I arrive.

“Thanks Lila,” I said instead, “I hope I see you too.”

I asked her why she no longer attended church, and she confided that Ray is and always has been insanely jealous. He’s convinced that every time she walks out the door, she’s off to have a torrid affair, be it with men in the neighborhood or guys sitting in church pews communing with the Lord.

Although it made me sort of sad to hear this, there was a part of me that thought, “Good on you, girl!” To be approaching eighty and still have your man think that you’ve got it in you to do some slutting around is a great compliment of sorts. But really, it’s more of a testament to the fact that Ray’s got a hole in a pocket of his brain, and one by one, he’s losing his marbles.

I didn’t see them during the winter, but a few weekends ago, I was sitting on the front step drinking my coffee when Lila rushed by, looking down at the sidewalk and frantically talking to herself. I imagine that she was discussing Ray, who seems to have degenerated quite bit since this time last year. He’s thinner and slower, and Tom saw him peeing in their back yard a few weeks back. I didn’t want to interrupt Lila while she was working things out, but I hope I get a chance to visit with her soon. You know, when she has time between her liasons with the men in the hood.

As I’m driving, I ponder truckers, and why so many of them honk at anything in a skirt. Seriously, I could be wearing a tutu and full clown makeup, and this would happen. It doesn’t matter if it’s a short skirt or a long one, or whether I’m having what my mother refers to as a “cute day” or I look like Mrs. Potato Head. I’m pretty sure that this is some kind of boredom game that truckers play, and I’m wondering exactly how bored you have to be to honk at a forty-seven year old woman with an increasingly bad case of Writer’s Ass.

You may remember the really sweet Pakistani convenience store owner who gave me my flopping fish salt and pepper shakers. I drove by his store on Friday, and it crossed my mind that I should really stop in there more often. That night, Tom saw a news report that said the store had been robbed and that the clerk had been beaten up and robbed of $500. I hope that it wasn’t the sweet guy that I met. Actually, I hope that the story was wrong, and that no one was hurt at all.

See? We really have to move.

Sitting in traffic one afternoon, I was thinking about words, specifically the words “penis and vagina,” and how almost everyone who mentions them says how stupid they sound– so clinical and weird. This made me think that really, all we need to do is change the pronounciation to “Pennis (rhymes with ‘Dennis’)” and “Vageena (as in ‘Geena Davis’).” Doesn’t that sound better? I think it could catch on. Think of it– when a couple discusses a Pennis and Vageena, it’ll sound like two really fun friends are coming by for a visit, instead of conjuring up an image of some ancient doctor, ready to probe them with a cold steely instrument.

I’ve been thinking a lot about this conversation that Tom and I had recently. We were standing out in the yard, admiring the green stuff that’s pushing its way up through the dirt. The birdies were singing, and this got Tom reminiscing about birdhouses he’s constructed in the past. “Hey, I should build you a birdhouse!” he declared, and for some reason he added this sentence (I’m definitely paraphrasing here): “I gotta keep my girl happy, so I can keep getting that good lovin’.”

Let’s stop here for a moment. I don’t like discussing my love life on my blog, but I’ll be mysterious here and simply say that it’s quite nice. So I told Tom that it wasn’t necessary to build me things, because really, I don’t need much incentive when it comes to amoré. But at some point, I lay down to take a nap, and by the time I woke up, he’d actually constructed a birdhouse for me.

A nice gesture, huh? Well, I’ve been sort of obsessing about it. Please don’t think that I’m ungrateful, but ever since Tom uttered that sentence about the lovin’, let me tell you what I’ve been considering while doing all of this on-the-road thinking:

• Elliott Spitzer’s call girl was paid $4,300 a pop for nookie.

• When Kobe Bryant was in the doghouse with his wife after being unfaithful, he bought her a $4 million eight-carat diamond ring.

• Even on the low rent end of things, The Girl from the Ghetto reported that the husband of her state senator was busted for paying $150 for oral sex.

Here’s what I got:

The photo’s not so great, so let me describe it. This is a birdhouse, probably built within a half an hour or so. It’s made of a masonite board and fastened together with duct tape. Tom screwed it onto the fence, within easy reach of cats and possums. Suprisingly, it no longer exists, and no bird ever went near it.

“Well, what do you think?” he asked, fully aware of how little it takes to please me.

“Um…I think you did a slapdash job in order to gain sexual favors.” I answered. “The workmanship is really shoddy, and it would be so easy for a cat to reach his paw in there that all I can think of is Sylvester grabbing Tweety around the neck and choking the life out of him.”

Remember, I’d just woken up, and my politeness valve was a little clogged.

There was a long silence, then we burst out laughing. But ever since, all I can think of is where I rate on the sex-for-pay scale– somewhere below a Snickers bar, but a little above the wrapper.

More Commuterama to come…