That’s the back jacket of The Sins of Martha Leslie, one of many books I copped from my parents’ stash. I thought I was grabbing mostly Harlequins and other tempestuous romances for Cathy, but Don Holliday’s 1960 epic evidently joined the mad exodus from Wildwood. The reason we haven’t traded it at McKay’s Used Books yet is that I wanted to capture that back cover wording before I did. Can you imagine “Herbert Brock was a fag” appearing on a book’s cover forty years later? It would have to say, “Herbert Brock was gay, not that there is anything inherently wrong with this alternative lifestyle. Martha was just being closed-minded from years of Catholic school education and media subversion from the vast right wing conspiracy. In fact, Herbert wanted to adopt a bunch of kids with Martha (she’d obviously be a good mother for them) and raise them to find that homosexuality is fundamentally no different from heterosexuality. What is sexuality, anyway? Martha knows.”

I should write book jackets and abandon this dream of writing the contents. I’m just turning greenly envious of old Don. Having earned exactly $229 (rather lost about $15K, as my accountant would point out) over the past eight years for my writing, it eats at me that Don Holliday not only wrote this piffle but obviously got paid for it. And his words survive forty years later.

2/3

Cathy and I are both into the job hunt again. I feel like I’ve been looking for a job perpetually since I was 13. My thinking then was that anything had to be better than being a paperboy and that philosophy hasn’t altered much over the years. The company gave me a “Surviving a Layoff” book (gracious, but inaccurate of them; I think “layoff” still means both sides are holding out some hope that the employee will return. I prefer “shit-canned” but everybody thinks this is too harsh. Honestly, wouldn’t it be easier if the cleaning lady could just carry me out to the dumpster with the rest of the company’s cast offs?) One of the book’s question combinations to expect at an interview is “Where are you going and how do you intend to get there?” When Cathy and I were practicing, her answers were, “To hell in a handbasket” and “I just told you. . .in a handbasket.” Is it any wonder I love this woman?

To get political for a paragraph, I’m liking McCain for Prez. I was leaning his way even before New Hampshire mainly because he had been a POW. As I put it to Cathy, “He’s used to being tortured” (which explains a lot about how I think of management jobs). She suggested I offer this campaign slogan to his staff. He seems to think of government’s role the way I do and we have a lot of the same likes and dislikes. It’s never been clear to me why George W. has been so moneyed up, unless it’s that Republicans think Ross and Bill dicked it up for his Dad in ‘92. This is probably what got John Q. elected in 1824 when it looked like that wild-haired Tennessean (check your $20 bill) had it won. I hope if McCain doesn’t get the nod that he at least stays in the race until the Tennessee primary.

2/5

We had to take Kate and Luke to the UT Dentistry school to see about having them put under general anesthesia for their tooth work. The dentist explaining to us what to expect was in his mid 20s and Cathy and I were so distracted by feeling older than dirt that we probably missed some good advice. The other distraction was the race to get this taken care of before we lost dental coverage.

The other piece of the visiting Philly/Wildwood story that I didn’t tell was traveling with Luke. It took a while to get him used to male restroom etiquette. The not making eye contact with anybody was the easy part, since he doesn’t anyway. However, getting him to leave appropriate unused urinal space was a trickier problem. “Luke, when there are a line of unused urinals and one guy at one, he’s going to get highly suspicious if you pick the one right next to him.” Even worse, he used to pull his pants and underwear down to his knees even to stand in front of a urinal. Guys would come in, catch a glimpse of butt, and immediately start counting ceiling tiles. I finally got him to buy into merely pulling it through the fly like a normal guy, but there was a lot of herding him into a stall to pee (or acting like I wasn’t with him) before he figured out this and proper urinal spacing. The other thing he sometimes still does is hoot because it’s different from going at home or at school (or because the echo sounds pretty cool bouncing off all those tiles, maybe). But the hooting is almost a blessing, since any other occupants just assume he has some kind of mental retardation and it makes it seem not so weird that I’m reminding this huge teenager to wash his hands before we leave.

The recent drive back to Tennessee had an added twist. Luke must have had a stomach problem, because he seemed okay except for eating lunch way slower than he normally does. Then a half hour after lunch he threw up on his pants. Just as I was thinking, “Okay, what am I going to do about this?” I saw a rest area ramp and had to back up along the shoulder to get back onto it. I got him new pants (which were checkered and look really odd with the striped shirt he was wearing). But coordination (which thankfully he wasn’t as fussy as usual about) didn’t matter because there were three more throw ups and two more rest stops before we got home. If I ever eat another Burger King Chicken Sandwich, it won’t be soon.

I had two out of place incidents that were almost the opposite of each other. While in Philly and driving west on Cottman to get to Mike’s apartment, I was waiting at a red light behind a car with a Tennessee license plate. I didn’t think anything of it at first, but then it was “Hey, wait a minute here.” Same with the seagulls roosting in the Oak Ridge Mall parking lot. I walked by thinking, “Seagulls. Rats with wings. They’re all over the place.” But then realized I was a full North Carolina inland for them. Seeing them in Wildwood is fine, and in Port Richmond is weird enough, but understandable. What’s next? Oklahoma?