Road Trippin’ Down Under: Planes, Brains, and Automobiles

The flight from Abu Dhabi to Perth went pretty much the same as the flight from Chicago to Abu Dhabi, only instead of spending twelve hours facing the front of the plane, I spent them facing the back. Oh, and about four hours into the flight I had to give up both reading and playing Scrabble in favor of watching movies because I was so tired that I could no longer comprehend the written word—much less devise one out of a set of seven letters.

By the time the third movie started—ten hours after we had boarded—I could no longer comprehend the SPOKEN word either, but that was partly because the actors were speaking Japanese and I didn’t have the wherewithal to read the subtitles. And so, by the time the captain announced that we were starting our descent into Perth, I was more than ready to deplane and eager for a change of scenery.

And a change of scenery is what we got….

For starters, there was the immigration and customs area of the airport, which basically looked the customs and immigration area of any other country I’ve visited except that it was practically deserted. I don’t know what happened to all the other passengers that were on the plane with us when we landed, but they most definitely were nowhere near us at that point. I’ll admit we hadn’t exactly sprinted there from the baggage claim, but it isn’t as if we had dawdled either. And even if jet lag and sleep deprivation had kept us from dashing through the airport like O.J. Simpson in a Hertz commercial, certainly SOME of the folks on our flight were just as worn out, so it’s unlikely that ALL of them were capable of walking faster than we were.

It felt kind of eerie to be the only people in the area. I kept wondering if we’d gone to the wrong place, or if the others had all gone to the wrong place. Or if instead of getting off the plane and walking through immigration and customs, I had fallen asleep and was only dreaming that I was walking through immigration and customs. Or if instead of dreaming that I was walking through immigration and customers, I was walking through a virtual immigration and customs deep within the Matrix.

“I doubt it,” the Jarhead reassured me, although I suspected he would not have minded if my brain had gone offline. “We probably just got here after the solitary, young, and childless people, and before the slow, older people, and the people traveling in groups and with children. Most of them will have brought a few more bags than we did, so it will take them longer to get their luggage off the carousel and wheel it over here.”

That sounded reasonable, I’ll admit. But if that was the case, it would have been the first time in our entire lives together that I had walked that far and that much faster than that many people without the promise of chocolate or pizza, or the threat of bodily harm as a motivator.

At any rate, we made it through the maze and soon were standing in front of a friendly red-haired agent at the rental car area. Her name was Gail—a fact which I remember only because it is also my dad’s name—and after discussing the details of the rental with the Jarhead, she took one look at me and asked if I had brought any sunblock. She then went on to tell us how easy it is to get a sunburn in Australia, especially for those of us from the northern tier of the United States.

Gail then cheerily asked the Jarhead if he’d ever driven in Australia or anywhere else where they drive on the opposite side of the road. When he admitted that he had not, she said “I see,” with a deliberate smile and more than a trace of gravity. “I’m sure you’d do just fine,” she added. “Just make sure to keep her in the gutter.”

Having assumed that the “her” in question was the car, I wondered why she thought driving it through the gutter was a good idea. Then I wondered if perhaps the word gutter meant something different in Australia than it did in every other English speaking country in the world. Then I realized that the “her” was me, and that by advising the Jarhead to keep ME in the gutter, she was trying to help him avoid drifting out of the left lane and into oncoming traffic.

It was good advice. Disturbingly delivered. But good just the same.

I pondered that advice all the way through the terminal and across the parking lots to our rental car. I was able to forget my concern long enough to take note of the pleasant breeze and snap a quick pic of the Jarhead behind the wheel, but it came flooding back again as we were fastening our seatbelts.

“You’re going to need to drive around the parking lot a while,” I informed my chauffeur. “You’re not ready to be on the road yet.”

“Sure, I am,” he replied.

“Okay, then I’M not ready for you to be on the road yet. All I can think about is you forgetting to stay on the left side of the road and driving head on into a semi.”

“Do they even have semis here?” he asked as he simultaneous ignored my request and missed my point. “Or do they call them something else?”

I couldn’t tell if his was a genuine inquiry designed to ignite a lively debate or just some sneaky attempt to distract me from my fears, but I wasn’t about to fall for it. I needed a shower more than I wanted to argue or assert my verbal superiority, after all, and our room at the Esplanade Resort in Fremantle was still about 45 minutes away. So, in the interest of time, and lacking another viable option, I slapped on my “sunnies” (“sunnies” as in protective summer eyewear—not the ubiquitous Midwestern lake fish) then closed my eyes and braced for impact.

Every few minutes I would tell myself I was being an idiot and scold myself for not opening my eyes and taking in the sights. You didn’t come all this way to see nothing but the inside of your eyelids, after all. So now and then I would open one of my eyes or cover them both with my hands and peek out through the gaps between my fingers—as if seeing only a sliver of the underside of a semi or witnessing a bloody murder with only one eye would make the whole experience less traumatizing—but that failed to quell my anxiety. If anything, these tactics made the situation worse because it seemed like every time I would venture a peek at the wonders to beyond my knuckles, the Jarhead was changing lanes and coming within a fraction of an inch of hitting a nearby bumper.

Same thing happens whenever I watch a scary movie, by the way. Just as I get brave enough to look out through the gaps between my fingers, I immediately find myself face to face with a slimy alien, a slobbering zombie, or an ax wielding lunatic. It’s uncanny how it’s never a basket of puppies, a litter of kittens, a bunch of baby goats or a bouquet of shiny balloons. And if it ever IS a collection of puppies, kittens or goats, you can bet they’ll be zombie puppies, kittens or goats, and the balloons will be shiny because they’re covered in blood.

At any rate, by the time I was comfortable enough with the Jarhead’s driving to keep my eyes open and uncovered long enough to get a good look at our surroundings, we had arrived at our destination. Not knowing our way around well enough to find a parking garage, and not wanting to run out to the street every two hours for the next 24 to drop more coins in the meter, we pulled up the valet, handed him the keys, removed our belongings from the vehicle, and trudged into the hotel.

Road Trippin’ Down Under: To Board and Not Be Too Bored

If you were hoping that this post will be the one where you finally get to read about Australia, I have bad news for you. We’re not even halfway there yet.

But don’t despair. As a wise if somewhat aimless individual once put it: Life is supposed to be a journey, not a detonation.

If you are chuckling to yourself, I thank you. I am deeply grateful to you for embracing the whimsy. If you’re irked rather than amused by the reference to explosive devices, please accept my condolences on your flagging sense of humor. If you have no idea what this section of the post is about, you should probably take a nap and read it again when you’ve had some rest.

Interestingly enough, I wasn’t the least bit worried about detonations before, during, or after this trip. Despite the 96% chance that Homeland Security had failed to detect a bomb or gun on the person of one of our fellow travelers (as discussed in Travelers’ Advisory on March 4 of 2016) I was less concerned about someone hijacking and/or blowing up the plane than literally any other travel hazard you could name. Same goes for mechanical failure and operator error. None of that even entered my mind either before or after we’d made it through security.

No. Boredom was going to be my real enemy that day, I knew. Followed closely by discomfort. Which is why I arrived armed to the teeth with reading material—six magazines, one paperback and a Kindle loaded with multiple novels and an electronic Scrabble game—and pain reliever, eye drops, facial wipes and chewing gum. If I was going to survive this trip, I was going to need plenty to do, and I would need to do it without a throbbing head, dry eyes, oily skin, and furry teeth.

The Jarhead had suggested that I lie lay down and try to sleep. According to him, I would handle the heat, the crowds, and the lack of a shower during our 11-hour layover in Abu Dhabi better if I were well rested. Of course, we both knew that what he meant was that I would be a much better travel companion if I was well rested. But we both also knew that sleep for me was not an option. I find it hard enough to sleep at my usual time in my own bed and in an empty room, so there was zero chance I was going to fall asleep in a cabin room full of strangers at five o’clock in the evening.

And so, I kept to my own game plan and spent just over 12 hours reading, eating, drinking, playing Scrabble, and trying not to watch the clock. Aside from trying not to obsess about the time part, it reminded me a lot of my babysitting days when I would stay up all night doing whatever I wanted—only better, because it involved champagne, French Cheese and fine chocolates instead of soda, Cheez Whiz, and frosting, and because these things they were delivered to me personally by well-dressed people with great hair and exotic accents. I felt like an extra on the set of a Bond movie, or a passenger on the Orient Express. It was fabulous.

And the fun continued for several hours AFTER we landed in Abu Dhabi. For those who are unfamiliar with the city—as I was until I looked it up on Wikipedia—it is one of seven emirates that comprise the United Arab Emirates. It is the largest of the seven emirates, and sits on an island in the Persian Gulf.  According to Lonely Planet (https://www.lonelyplanet.com/united-arab-emirates/abu-dhabi) it boasts “The world’s largest hand-loomed carpet, the fastest roller coaster, the highest high tea, the tower with the greatest lean, the largest cluster of cultural buildings of the 21st century” and “isn’t afraid to challenge world records.”

Now I don’t know about any of that, since we never left the terminal. Although it might have been cool to take a tour of the city, we would have had to find a driver to take us around since, as I understand it, the traffic there is about as bad as it is in Naples. On top of that, we would have had worry about getting back to the terminal and through security in time to make our connection to Australia. So it just made sense to enjoy it from within the confines of the business class lounge.

I know. Poor us.

Seriously, though. Walking into that place was like stepping into the most elegant hotel room on the universe’s most elegant space station, or wandering into the most elegant secret lair of the world’s most elegant evil overlord. Decked out from top to bottom in ultramodern architecture, furnishings and artwork it felt more like we had landed on another planet instead of another country, or walked onto the set of some futuristic film instead of an airport, and I kept expecting the cast of Gattaca or Oblivion to come walking in and sit down to at one of the extravagantly appointed dining areas.

But no luck. In fact, besides the impressively neat and efficient staff (who kept whisking away our used dishes, napkins and tableware almost the second we set them down) the only other folks we saw, were other tourists (although, for all I knew, they were famous tourists but just not famous in America.) Which was probably a good thing since I was wearing rumpled traveling clothes, no makeup, and nearly two-day old hair by that point. Not exactly how one imagines oneself when running into famous actors—from any country.

So instead of chatting with celebs and becoming the next Hollywood It couple, the Jarhead and I lounged around and sampled the food and drink on offer at each of the three—yes, three—international dinner buffets. Avid fans of ethnic cuisine of all descriptions, we happily devoured all the familiar Greek, Indian, Middle Eastern, European and Asian food we could find, and eagerly—if gingerly—sampled several of the unfamiliar ones—and found not one bad bite in the bunch.

The only down side to enjoying a lavish meal in a lavish setting with lavish seating, is that it puts the Jarhead in a state of lavish sleepiness. Consequently, it wasn’t long before he was struggling to hold his eyes open and I was struggling to hold his attention and maintain my sanity.

And so, with a headful of flat hair and nothing else to do but use the ladies’ room (which turned out NOT to be the relaxing experience one would expect to have in such an gloriously outfitted facility, owing to the presence of an irritatingly fastidious attendant, who kept walking up and down the room and furiously sweeping, wiping, and scrubbing the stalls almost the second they were vacated, making it very difficult for some folks—not saying whom—to do their business) I approached the salon and spa, to see what fun there might be to have there.

The options included manicures, pedicures, facials, massages, and hair care. Since I needed my hair washed more than I needed my nails painted, my skin resurfaced, or my body manipulated by someone who hadn’t at least bought me dinner, I decided to go for a wash and blow out.

I almost didn’t go through with it, to tell the truth. Even though it was only going to cost me about $35, the thought of waltzing into a salon and paying someone to shampoo and style my hair sounded downright decadent to me. So, hoping he would talk me out of it, I walked back over to the semi-conscious Jarhead (semi-conscious only because the news was on and he was half-listening for the weather before allowing himself to drift off to sleep) and laid out my plan. To my dismay, he said that sounded like a good idea if it would make me more comfortable.

Damn him, I remember thinking. I had hoped he would have forgotten how much I hate the feeling of flat hair. Now I had no reason not to take the plunge. Oh well, I said with a shrug as I headed back to the salon. At least I would look lovely and refreshed when we landed in Perth.

I’m not sure what went wrong during the conversation between me and the gorgeous Syrian man who stood behind me at the stylist’s station, but SOMETHING sure did because I definitely did NOT look lovely and refreshed when he finished doing my hair. In fact, although I hadn’t thought it was possible, my hair looked even flatter than it had when I first entered the salon. I literally looked like Janice from the Muppet Show: all face, no hair.

I kid you not. All I would have needed were a pair of false eyelashes, some lipstick, and a couple of wires to attach to my wrists, and people would have been clamoring for my puppet autograph. It was that bad. So bad, in fact, that I almost went to the bathroom to wash my hair. And I probably would have it I hadn’t been worried that the stylist would walk through the lounge later and have his feelings hurt upon seeing my freshly washed and wavy hair.

So, instead I walked back over to where the Jarhead was dozing and waited for him to open his eyes and start laughing.

If I didn’t die of boredom waiting for him to wake up, that is. Which was a distinct possibility. But his reaction will be totally worth it, I told myself as the minutes ticked by. Just hang in there.

An hour later I couldn’t stand it anymore, so I bumped his foot with my purse and pretended it was an accident. He opened his eyes and I said I’m sorry. And when his fog cleared, he opened his eyes even wider. “Have you already had your hair done?” he asked, looking at his watch and then back at me.

Although I didn’t get the shock and horror I was hoping for, at least he was awake.

“Yep,” I admitted with laugh. “It’s awful, isn’t it?”

“I wouldn’t say it’s awful. It’s just…not…you.”

Aww. He was so sweet and considerate, I almost felt bad for disturbing him.

Almost.

My Great Aunt

According to Mark Twain—or at least those who’ve studied him—comedy is tragedy plus time. Having spent decades taming and twisting tragedy, trauma, and personal torment into something funny and less frightening, it’s fair to assume that I would not disagree.

On the other hand, having spent some considerable time trying to write about my beloved Auntie Charlene, who passed away on July 16^th, I’m moved to wonder: how MUCH time exactly? By that I don’t mean “how long before I stop missing her?” but rather, “When will I feel like making people laugh again?”

Don’t think for a moment that Auntie wouldn’t approve. She may have been the person who hoped and prayed the hardest for me to find Jesus, but she was also the one who suggested I attend the church Halloween party dressed as Salome. It was also she who provided the scarves that served as the seven veils for my costume, as well as the Styrofoam wig stand that served as the head of John the Baptist.

Auntie Charlene—aka Cha-Cha and, later, Chachi—may have loved her lord and savior, but she also loved to laugh. It was she who introduced me to Carol Burnett, Erma Bombeck, and the comic strips Peanuts and Ziggy. She also taught me how to craft the groan-inducing puns that pepper this and other publications, and affectionately advised me on the appropriate application of alliteration. (Nailed it!)

When she wasn’t contributing to the development of my sense of humor, Chachi was subtly encouraging me to develop my mind. As the first person in our family—that I know of, anyway—to go to college, she was an anomaly to some, but an inspiration to me. As the only woman I knew—besides my teachers and school nurses—who had a college degree, she was my idol. In the meantime, she introduced me to crossword puzzles, logic problems, and Scrabble, and by her example, taught me to be helpful, considerate, and responsible.

Charlene tried to teach me several other things that, sadly, I couldn’t quite grasp at the time—if ever. For example, as a bird lover, she would scold and chase the cats that that lived on my grandparents farm for having the unmitigated gall to hunt birds the way nature intended. Although from this I did learn that cats are (fortunately) a lot faster than people, I never did learn to give a d@mn about the birds. In my opinion, if they don’t want to get eaten by a cat, they should build their nests higher. So on the matter of birds and cats, Charlene and I had to agree to disagree.

The same was true when it came to the purpose of Bible Camp. Now I may have been young, but I was not entirely stupid. So I fully understood that the mission of the staff at Camp Evergreen was to save my soul from eternal damnation. My question was, did that have to be our ONLY goal? Could we not kill two birds (yes!) with one stone, as it were? Could we not talk about salvation AND develop a killer backhand? Could we not learn about sin AND meet a few cute boys?

Apparently not.

But Charlene loved me, even if we did not see eye to eye on birds or Bible Camp. I know this because she stepped in after my mother died when I was four, and helped my father take care of me and my two baby brothers. Although others stepped up to help as well, Charlene was like the North Star. A constant. A guiding light. She fought for me, and taught me to fight for myself. She taught me how to sew, and that it was bad to lie to get out of trouble but okay to lie to avoid hurting someone’s feelings.  You know—the important stuff.

Charlene worked as a teacher, civil servant, and nursing assistant. She later went back to school to become a registered nurse. When she wasn’t working, she went out of her way to brighten the lives of others by visiting them, taking them to lunch or church, or just sitting down to a cup of coffee, a game of Scrabble, or a few hands of Cribbage. She talked to her sister every day, and called her brothers every weekend. She never married or had her own kids, but she was like a mother to me, my brothers, and to almost every one of my cousins.

Over the last few years, the tables had turned somewhat. Charlene couldn’t get around very well, and was having trouble taking care of herself. She needed help with errands, cleaning her house and getting to and from doctor’s appointments and such. But her friends did what friends do, and took turns picking up her groceries and prescriptions. And family members did what family members do. We drove her to her doctor’s appointments and the family reunion, took her out for lunch, and took her car to get gas or to have it washed. We did all the things Charlene would have done for anyone else had she been able.

Charlene died after a brief stay in a skilled nursing facility. She had fallen at the beginning of June and was learning to stand and walk again. She was in constant pain, but four days before she died she had kicked my you-know-what at Scrabble, and a week or so earlier had beaten my brother John at Cribbage.

I never imagined that those days would be Charlene’s last. Nor did I imagine as I was writing last month about the mock funeral I had helped my best friend plan for her mother, that only days later I’d be planning one very real funeral for the woman I called my second mom. How’s that for timing?

The funeral has since come and gone, and Charlene is no longer in pain or feeling frustrated and helpless.

She was a great aunt. And she is now, as they say, at peace.

Wordplay and Nonsense

While cleaning the floors this past weekend I was reminded of one of the all-time greatest things to come out of the eighties. I’m not talking about Duran Duran, Kevin Bacon, or even the giant cordless phone. Nor am I referring to shoulder pads, wide belts, or big hair. Although I loved each and every one of those things—and, sadly, have the photos and other memorabilia to prove it—what I love and miss more than any movie, band, gadget, or fashion trend from the eighties is the sniglet.

For the uninitiated and the slow to recall, a sniglet is a word that doesn’t appear in the dictionary but should. Popularized by Rich Hall on Not Necessarily the News, sniglets are to me, the writer, what I imagine a skid steer is to my brother, the landscaper: incredibly useful and yet great fun! Back in the day I would watch with intense anticipation for the sniglet segment of Not Necessarily the News, and delight in each and every one Mr. Hall had to share. So enamored was I with the concept of the sniglet that I even had a sniglet-a-day calendar to cement my status of a sniglet devotee. (Oddly, I never came up with a sniglet to replace the phrase ‘sniglet devotee,’ so feel free to submit your suggestions.)

Examples I recall from that calendar include backspackle, which refers to the muddy line that forms along your spine when riding a bike through puddles or on wet terrain, and hydroaclimation, which refers to the way people ease themselves into a body of cold water slowly, section by section, rather than jumping or diving in all at once. Others abound, but my favorite sniglet of all is carpetuation, which refers to the act of repositioning a piece of fuzz or other debris on the floor in order to assist the vacuum in picking it up after it has failed to do so after two or more previous passes.

Carpetuation is my favorite sniglet for two reasons. First, it’s an awesome word. It sounds so serious and real that you could use it in casual conversation about cleaning (assuming, of course, that one can have a casual conversation about cleaning; personally I take my cleaning very seriously, so it would have to be a serious conversation about cleaning) and no one would know it’s not an ‘official’ word except Rich Hall and his fellow word nerds. Second, it refers to something so silly and yet so COMMON to the human condition. I mean, who among us has not been fed up trying to vacuum up a clump of hair or piece of string that you are moved to move IT just enough for the brush roller to catch hold of and suck it up into oblivion? And yet, it seems so silly to reach down and pick it up only to put it back down and try to vacuum it up again. But we all do it—because no matter what it is you’re trying to vacuum up, it’s WAY easier to reposition it and try again than it is to shut off the vacuum cleaner and walk over to the trash can. And so we carpetuate.

It’s important—to me anyway—to distinguish sniglets from slang. Slang words are already words, and therefore, cannot be sniglets. So ‘booty’ is not a sniglet whether it refers to one’s bottom, a pirate’s score, or sexual congress.

And just as slang words do not qualify as sniglets, nor do words that are pronounced differently according to regional dialects. For example ‘ain’t’ may not be a ‘word’ per se, but as a mispronunciation of ‘isn’t’ it is. Just as the word ‘aunt’ can be pronounced three ways—ant, aint, and awnt—so, too, can other words be pronounced more than one way and be correct—like oil, which in the south is pronounced ohl, and radiator, which in the northeast is pronounced ‘radd/ee/ay/tor instead of ray/dee/ay/tor.

So what makes me such an expert on sniglets? Besides being a big fan of Rich Hall and Not Necessarily the News, that is.

Well, not to brag or take anything away from Mr. Hall, but my auntie and I were using sniglets LONG before the word sniglet came along. Mostly we used them in Scrabble, mind you. Because when you have almost all the letters you need to make an awesome word except for one, and the remaining tile, if used in place of the one you’re missing, would change the word you’re trying to spell into something clever or funny, you have NO choice but to share the word as well as its definition. Even if you don’t actually get to play the word, you must share with the class. It would be rude not to.

Some notable examples from our games include ‘topiamy’, which is a plant that’s been sculpted to resemble one of my sisters-in-law, and ‘wobblet,’ which refers to a wine glass that’s prone to tipping—presumably due to a manufacturer’s defect as opposed to operator error. Others include ‘ostretch,’ which we can only assume is the love child of a large feathered bi-ped and a giraffe, and ‘boomering,’ which I imagine is what your ears do after you’ve been hit by a wooden tri-cornered weapon in the outback.

But not all sniglets are the result of clever wordplay. Some are comprised of pure nonsense, like pediddle, which refers to a car with one headlight out, and sniglet.

The same could be said of this column, I suppose. Sometimes it involves clever wordplay; but sometimes it’s pure nonsense.