The Perfect Song Blog

Note: This is first post in a series that two weeks ago I could not even imagine writing.  It’s all about adventure, change and what it means to be really alive.  Oh, and there’s a bit about marketing, too).

After two years of living with us on the East Coast, my wife’s mother decided she’d like to go back home to Coronado, CA  My wife wanted  to drive.  We had done that before with me driving her step-father who nearly died on the road in New Mexico, and Linda driving her mother.  (for details see this series of blogs).  We found that America on the road is not handicap accessible.  People are friendly and helpful but buildings and services  aren’t.
I decided  on this trip to study marketing where ever I could.  It began with Jet Blue. 
We drove our new Nissan Sentra 120 miles to the  Rochester airport where we would leave for JFK airport and then take a direct flight to San Diego.  Linda had instructed Jet Blue that we were traveling with an elderly, handicapped woman.  We also had two large luggage bags, two small ones and our computers.  When I puled up to the curb, a distinguished looking African American man met us..  “I represent a private firm,sir  and can help you with all of this.”  I didn’t argue. Within moments he had our bags  on a cart and a wheelchair for my mother-in-law.
I parked the car and ran back to  the check-in.  The man asked to see my ticket.  “Your wife said you are  not sitting together.  Let me take care of it.”  In a few minutes he was back with new seating and our luggage checked.
Big tip.
Jet Blue personnel had us and other with handicapped persons  and children board first.  During th whole flight I found Jet Blue staff to be courteous, helpful  and most of all, efficient.  When, on the second flight from JFK, thee was a mixup on seating, they fixed it quickly and quietly to, I think, everyone’s satisfaction, certainly ours.
Their slogan, “Happy Jetting,” was placed  in all passenger areas, but not ostentatiously. 
There were no  delays.  In fact we arrived in San  Diego early.  Pilots and staff thanked  each passenger for flying Jet Blue.
Most of these things happen on most airlines but with Jet Blue I got the feeling of a customer-oriented company that operates with confidence from the top down.
Next post: The underground society surrounding us.  

Kids should not be allowed in grocery stores. I have good reasons for saying this.

I’ve taken over the grocery shopping to give Leigh more time with her business. I don’t mind extra duty but I do shop like a male.

I have a list. I want to find an item as quickly as possible, cross it off and move on.

I don’t mind other shoppers who pull off to the side of the aisle and park as they study ingredients on a package or compare prices. I don’t mind the elderly who move at a slower pace. I can pass them, just as someday, a new generation will pass me.

What I absolutely can’t stand are shopping carts that have little kids attached to them – to the front, the sides, the back and to mom’s pants. One, two, sometimes three hyperactive, nose-picking rug rats all vying for attention while Mom is trying to find the best prices and make sure she remembers her husband’s favorite beer.

I don’t even like the ones who are trying to be good, standing still—in the middle of the aisle. The last thing I as a male am going to do is ask the child to get out of the way and trigger the terrifying ire of a mother whose child is being threatened by a male.

No, I am going to stand there politely, gritting my teeth and trying to maintain an expression of empathetic patience until the mom sees the traffic blockage and says: “Come over here, Megan. Stay out of the way.”

She then gives me a look that says: “Thanks for your patience. And polite as you are, please get lost and don’t interrupt us again.”

Grocery shopping is the one recurring life experience in which a woman has to question the practicality of motherhood. She’s looking for low sodium pickles while trying to watch the whirling, kicking kids and hoping they don’t pick up a jar and drop it. . .or throw it at a sibling.

If they’re not trying to get mom’s attention by asking questions, the kids are doing it by crying or pleading for some sugar-laden treat that’s making them hyper and fat. They’re wild cards, not staying on their side of the lane, darting in and out, bouncing , grabbing stuff off shelves, begging mom to buy something or (I’ve seen it), sneaking it into the cart.

Kids are shifty little buggers and we don’t give them enough credit.

They also do not belong here. Grocery stores should be for adults only.

Really.

And those damnable “grocery cars” are the worst thing to ever occupy into a grocery store. In the next post I’ll tell you why.

It’s a story you won’t believe, but it is, I swear, true.

Saturday, April 26, 2008

After breakfast I gather up the garbage and the recyclable stuff. The three dogs jump in the Jeep. I toss in the garbage and my flat garden tractor tire. The first stop is the bank to cash a check. I don’t use cash much anymore but it’s good to have.

It’s a breezy sunny day in the 70s – not April weather. I pull into the transfer station. There’s a line of cars down the road though there are none up by the bins. Finally I see that there is one car at the top of the drive with two really slow middle aged people pulling out their recyclable stuff. They’ve parked right in the middle of the drive so no one can get around them.

No one honks. They’re too polite. . . When the car finally moves, we all pull up to the unloading area. Frank, the man in the trailer who sells the garbage bags, smiles, “How ya doin’?” I say fine, great weather. He nods. “My apple blossoms are out already. I hope we don’t get a frost.” I say we could. “Oh, yeah, about every two years that happens. “

I backtrack to Christianson Tire and leave my tire and inner tube. The nice young man at the desk says he’ll do it himself. Outside, I find myself thinking about the coming week. On Monday I attend to the burial of my younger brother, Rick. He was too young to die but did and left an empty space in a lot of hearts.

Someday, when I can, I’ll write more about him, his life.

I ‘m in Christianson’s parking lot looking across Rt. 86 at the complex composed of department stores, Circuit City, a pet store and a Wal-Mart super center. The land used to hold the world’s largest A&P plant but it went bust in the early ’80 and sat vacant for a quarter of a century.

I’m surveying the retail complex and realize I’m looking at exactly what’s wrong in the country. Places where we produced things then exported them are now gone and replaced with stores that sell things they’ve imported.

Wednesday I’m scheduled to have a broken molar capped. It will involve numbing and drilling with my head bent back for an hour. My dentist is involved in reviving a small, family amusement park and he’ll talk about the Coast Guard test he has to pass to navigate a dragon boat in the park pond.

I head over to Lowe’s where I pick up seed beds, garden gloves for Leigh, and poison to kill the tent caterpillars that ravage our weeping cherries each year.

I run into Audrey who used to work for me in the 1980s when we had word processing staff. She retired a long time ago but I was still surprised when she said she’d be 81 next week. “The thing that bothers me the most is being treated differently because I’m old,” she said. “Hey, I have a computer. I have a cell phone. I text message. . . .”

I go back to Christianson’s. The nice young man has my tire. “The other one was bad,” he said. “I put the new one in. I don’t know if it was defective or I punctured it so I put one of ours In and I ain’t gonna charge you for it.”

“Thanks. So you sell inner tubes here?”

“Yeah.”

I felt a little foolish for bringing in a tube from a farm supply store down the road.

So in the last post I was in Wal-Mart trying to buy my seed starter kids, seeds, storage crates and T-Gel shampoo. I was after the crates when this huge couple appeared in front of me. Aside from crying, spoiled kids with a helpless mother, nothing makes me more uptight than large people who take more than a fair allotment of space in the world.

This couple was composed of a 6-foot, 250-pound human in jeans so tight they had to have been put on by a construction crew.

Her boyfriend was even bigger, lumbering along in a daze that he had been born with.

I was directly behind them so I can tell you with authority that side-by-side they were wide enough for a truck license.

They held hands, meaty hands. While this was nice and loving in a big, meaty innocent way, all they were doing was staying in my way. They were slow. Of course they were slow. Part of me understood that.

When you’re forcing this much mass to move, your velocity never shifts out of first gear. I found an opening by a garden hose display and veered left.

An aisle later, closing in on my T- Gel , I ran into an old, bent lady plodding with a walker.

Don’t get me wrong. I love old, bent ladies with walkers. They are the white-haired salt-of-the-earth, still determined to be a part of society, which is to say, they’re damn well going to shop at Wal-Mart. The one downside of old ladies with walkers is they’re scary. I have this neurotic feeling that at any given moment their determination can turn into rage and the walker will become a weapon of destruction.

I can just see this lady – repressed and misunderstood all her life, finally rising in a burst of animal strength nurtured by decades of seething, silent anger, bringing the aluminum walker crashing down on my unsuspecting male head and smiling with a wild triumphant look in her pale eyes: “I’ve always wanted to do that. You didn’t think I had it in me, did you? You male chauvinist T-gel using pig. Pick up your seeds and get out of my way!”

I cautiously avoided the little old lady, grabbed my shampoo and rushed to the check-out where a cashier associate punched the numbers with skill created by practice, swung my bag around on the turnstile and said “Thank you for shopping at Wal-Mart.

“Have a nice day.”

I have mentioned in several posts that I hate “Have a nice day.” The vast majority of “nice day” users don’t mean it and if they thought about it at all would probably realize they want their day to be as rotten as theirs.

I took my bag and headed out as the wizened 75-year-old dude in his baggy blue vest at the exit door looked at my receipt , nodded and said, “Have a Good Day” in a way that said “My legs are killing me.”

I stepped out in the parking lot. Mission accomplished.

It’s a really big parking lot .

I know my car’s out there somewhere. . . .

Get up, grab coffee, go outside to throw the balls for the three dogs.  Back inside, make breakfast–fried eggs, sausage, toast from home made bread and juice.

I run to Miniers Plaza two miles away to get my haircut at Shear Knowledge where Karen has been cutting my hair for a decade. She knows my hair better than I do. We both love to read and watch movies so she usually tells me about her favorite authors and I give her a couple movie reviews.

We just watched V for Vendetta last night which I loved.

Back home. Gather the garbage, throw it in the Jeep and head to the bank before it closes at noon. The teller who looks like Jennifer Aniston cashes my check. I love looking at her but I limit myself to glances. My daughter once told me while having breakfast in a hometown restaurant in Utah that I stare at people too much.

“I’m a writer. I study people.”

“You stare too long.”

“Is it that noticeable?”

“Yes.”

“What am I supposed to do?”

“Don’t stare so long.”

Off to the transfer station where I talk with the pleasant horse faced man who’s retired, chews gum and smokes cigarettes. We talk about tomatoes because we both grow them, him successfully, half successfully. “Yeah, I give a lot of them away, now that my wife is gone,” he says for the 20^th time. He stares somewhere far off and deep inside for a moment.

He looks over at the airport right beside the transfer station. “You go back by the airport, you take a look at them planes.” I look over at a fleet of corporate jets. There are races going on at Watkins Glenn. “They here for the races?” I ask.

He nods once. “If you and I had the money that just one of them planes cost, we’d never need to work again.” He thinks a minute. “Course, that kind of life is pretty grueling, too. I did it the last three years I worked.”

This surprised me. I had taken for granted that he had been some kind of blue collar worker. “What did you do?” I asked.

“I was with 3M. The last three years they flew me all over the world to help them set up. I was all over the Middle East. The worst place was Morocco. Man, you leave Casa Blanca and go out in the rural areas and they’re 75 years behind everybody else.

“The employees, the first week, worked a 40-hour week. Then they started coming in later. Then they had to have hour breaks. Pretty soon they were working maybe an hour a day. They knew the king or bought their way to the royalty and got away with it.

“One day I needed a five-gallon can of gas and the place you got it was maybe from here to there.” He pointed to the Olive Garden maybe a 10^th of a mile from us. “I had to ask for it through my interpreter, of course. The worker said he’d get it. I never saw him again the rest of the day. The next day I asked for it again. The worker said he would, then left at 11 and I didn’t see him again. The next day I said to the interpreter, ‘you tell him to bring me that gas or I’ll track him down and knock his head off!’ I got my gas okay, and pretty quick, too!”