June 2010

Monday Morning Gift

/ wvfurandroot / 3 Comments

The elegant black of fresh paving.

It’s like Christmas!

Actually, this good news is going to make Christmas less stressful.

I’m so excited I could tap dance if I knew how.

The post office has repaved the parking lot.

Yes, indeedy, yee-haw and Snoopy dancing.

Getting into and out of the post office parking lot is a feat of derring-do that is responsible for my forehead crease becoming permanently deep. My derring-do isn’t daring enough as the adrenalin rush of surviving that parking lot is not the adrenalin rush of victory but that of a near-death experience.

I collect the mail for my place of employment. Five days a week I brave the demolition derby of the Veteran’s Boulevard Post Office. Contrary to stereotype, the folks that work there are downright nice and helpful, but before I can get to them, I have to brave the onslaught of the confused trying to negotiate what seems to me pretty straightforward travel lanes and parking lines.

There’s one old woman who I forgive most of her transgressions while simultaneously appalled that her driver’s license hasn’t been revoked. She’s not particularly short, but she’s so stooped she can’t sit up straight. Consequently, she appears to be one of those little old ladies who can’t see over the steering wheel. Come to think of it, she probably can’t see as she wears coke-bottle thick glasses and strains to read the printing on her mail.

She and I arrive about the same time of the morning. The days I’m behind her when she negotiates the right-hand turn into the parking lot closely followed by another right-hand turn into the handicapped accessible parking space are the days I want to bang my head on the dashboard. I want to do so not because I have no patience with her, but because sure as iceberg lettuce at a ladies luncheon, the person behind me will develop road rage.

Road Rager will, as soon as even an inch or so space opens up, drive around me only to slam on the brakes when learning, suddenly, that Daisy-in-need-of-a-Driver must back up and pull forward a half dozen times before she concludes she has the car properly parked.

While Daisy is negotiating the well-faded lines demarking the parking space, the demolition derby continues unabated in the remainder of the lot. Let me just a draw a picture so y’all can understand the problem.

OK, so I can't draw. Get over it.

If you study the photograph closely, you’ll see that lines, faded though they may be, demarcate a flippin’ nightmare of a traffic pattern. Under the best of circumstances, the parking lot is fraught with potential mayhem. Factor in lines that have faded to almost nothing, the impatience of the average American, and Miss Daisy trying to navigate around the jerks who are so special they needn’t park in an actual spot. (I always wonder if Miss Daisy glares at the jerks while the Road Rager is glaring at her.)

Further, after last winter, the lot had a fair number of potholes and crumbling macadam which provoke swerving and, otherwise, driving where it was not intended for folks to drive.

The drop boxes also provoke confusion. Folks don’t see, don’t read, or don’t care about the One-Way and Do-Not-Enter signs helpfully, but fruitlessly, provided at the entrance and exit to the Parking Lot from Hell. Daily, someone will pull in the out, pull up to the drop box, do all sorts of contortions to drop the mail into the box from the wrong side of the car, and then attempt to go out the in. If Miss Daisy is still trying to get her car into her parking space it can get ugly.

During the peak mailing days of the Christmas Season, all my Fa La La begins to channel The Grinch. April 15th is really a headache, because folk are well irritated before they even get to the post office. And for some reason, the back-to-school period of late August and early September is a busy time.

I always park as far away as I can thus protecting the car, but endangering my body as I try to traverse the distance without acquiring a need for traction.

My car has been hit 6 times in this parking lot – 5 of them while I was correctly parked and in the post office fraternizing with the hired help. I have been nearly run over more times than I can count as I tried to negotiate the derby while walking across the lot.

When I drove in this morning (two cars in front of Miss Daisy), the beauty of fresh black paving lit my soul from within and I fairly skipped to our post office box where I found Daisy working assiduously to get her key into her box. ‘Mornin’,” I said. She didn’t hear me, but I swear her back was a bit straighter and I’m convinced it was due to her happiness about the paving.

I went and talked to the clerks. I need to point out here that lines have not yet been painted on the new paving. I told them I wanted flashing red, LED lit lines, speed bumps, and concrete barriers. They told me that probably wasn’t going to happen. Still, I’m tickled at the mere possibility that a new traffic pattern could be in the works. Contrary to popular belief, it takes so little to make me happy.

Thanette

/ wvfurandroot / 10 Comments
Chef Boy ‘R Mine’s Thanette was better,
but this will have to do until I clean that damn closet.

The internet has been very good to me.

I’ve been hanging out on the ‘net since before sound and pictures – before there was a web. As for social networking, I dived into the Usenet groups somewhere around 1990.

There I met a significant number of people who became friends, sometimes good friends. The Ex referred to them as my Invisible Friends which seemed apt and so I adopted the description..

The arrival of the digital revolution was so new that home computers were a rarity; and trying to explain to folks how it could be that I was making friends was daunting. It can be a tough thing to explain. Nonetheless, I blathered on and on about my cyber-life to anyone who would listen. Over family dinner, I would talk about the funny things people said on the ‘net.

One bright Saturday the phone ring and my son, who was practicing his telephone etiquette, answered. I heard him say, “May I tell her who’s calling.” He ran to get me, proclaiming all the way that Thanette was on the phone. I searched my memory banks and could not summon any memory of anyone named Thanette or Annette or anything similar. Curious, I took the phone and said hello.

The caller was Jane who lived near Perth, Australia. She and I bonded in the rec.food.cooking group on Usenet. Chef Boy ‘R Mine, bless his heart, had listened to me babble on and on about the ‘net thinking it a person, one person, named Thanette. I asked Jane what she had told him in response to the who’s-calling-thing. She had announced herself as Jane, Jane from the ‘net. It’s curious that my son didn’t think of Thanette as a place. Of course, with her accent, it’s a wonder he understood anything at all.

I asked him to draw me a picture of what he thought Thanette looked like. The end result was a portrait of a woman with brown curly hair, glasses and a big smile. [Damn it all, I saved that artistic work and it’s probably in The Closet I’m Afraid Of. Resurrecting that drawing could be an impetus to start that project. I don’t want to start it, but I do want to find that drawing and frame it.]

My Invisible Friends were far flung. Most of them were in the states, but a good number were scattered about the globe. These were people I had never seen, but who I counted good friends – the kind you tell secrets to.

They lived in Mexico and Scotland and England and Denmark and New Zealand and Sweden and Australia and Canada and, I’m pretty sure, most of the states. Eventually, I started meeting up with people – to meet in 3D – learning what they looked and sounded like.

In the early days, my Visible Friends were shocked that I would travel, one time all the way to London, to meet people I found on the internet. They were sure my brutal death at the hands of a serial killer was an inevitable destiny given my loss of common sense.

Last night, I met and had dinner with the infamous Buzzard Billy. She represents the first Invisible Friend from West Virginia that I’ve jumped in the car to go meet. I’m sure it’s a badge of honor that she’ll wear close to her heart – Hillbilly Thanette.