“Do you have your glasses on you?” Karin asks. Before I can check, she reaches into my shirt pocket, plucks them out, puts them on, and peruses the content label on a bag of chips.
We’re both waiting in line at the cafeteria. I need to write a check—but I can’t find my pen. So I grab her purse and rummage through it. She looks up.
“Need something?”
“My pen,” I answer, finding a suspiciously familiar writing-stick tucked into her checkbook. I hold it up.
“You can use it,” she says, “Just put it back.”
I shake my head. “But it’s my pen.”
She shrugs. “Hmmm… must have fallen from your pocket.” She tilts her head just so. “Mind if I keep it?”
I sigh and smile wanly. “What’s mine is yours, dear.”
She gives me a peck on the cheek.
***
After 30 years of marriage, “community property” has taken on a new meaning. I’ve gotten used to it except when our cat Oscar shares his half-eaten gophers, depositing them on the porch.
Such treasures I can do without.
All our big-ticket items like cars we manage without much fuss—usually. I’m OK as long as my driver’s seat is returned to the all-the-way-back position. I don’t think this is too much to ask. But sometimes the short people in my family seem to have equally short memories. There’s nothing like starting your day, running late, jumping into the car Batman-style, impaling a vital part of your anatomy on the armrest, and then bouncing off the seat and landing in a heap on the driveway.
No wonder why Robin the-boy-wonder’s voice never changed.
Now Karin’s good about seat-etiquette, but the #1 hazard of loaning her your ride is tied to her unique, automotive-superpower. She can drive a car when it’s absolutely, positively out of gas. I know this because she’s given me her car on several occasions when the fuel-gauge needle was invisible, hiding far, far below the big “E.” Once, I had to push her car to the pumps. Other times, I’ve called the auto club. Whoever said “stop and smell the flowers” must have had me in mind as I waited in the center divider next to the oleander bushes.
Mostly, though, I’ve been lucky when it comes to cars I’ve loaned. I get them back in one piece. You can’t take this for granted in my family. For example, my father and grandfather borrowed their dad’s Cadillacs without permission and proceeded to inflict great bodily harm on innocent sheet metal. Dad wrapped his father’s car around a telephone pole and Grandpa flipped his dad’s new horseless carriage, landing it upside down in a ditch. Both of them had snuck out for a middle-of-the-night rendezvous with girls.
I learned these stories from Mom shortly after my first automotive misadventure.
I remember the day well. I was 16, and I’d just finished one of my first solo trips to the grocery store. I was so proud to be running an errand for mom, right up to the point that I backed our nine-passenger wagon into another car, rearranging its grill. I returned full of dread. Mom took the news well, but then … I still had to tell dad. I waited for what seemed like a month-long afternoon. He finally returned from work hot, tired and irritable. But I couldn’t stand to wait another minute.
So I told him before he’d even cleaned up and cooled down.
“Dammit,” he snapped, “Didn’t you even look?”
“Honestly, Dad, I did.”
“Really? If you had, would we be talking?” He scowled.
“I guess not,” I admitted.
“So what were you doing?” he demanded.
“I think… I guess… I was… distracted,” I said.
It was at this moment that Mom stepped in. “At least he wasn’t undoing a bra strap,” she said.
I blinked. I had no idea what she was talking about. But apparently dad did. He turned and walked away, thus ending the scolding. His hasty exit also allowed Mom to tell me two of the juicer stories about my family.
I may have been a klutzy- driver, but at least I had a clean conscience.
Kids and cars are a tricky dance for all parents. It’s understandable that autos are among the top items most people loan with great reluctance. Just because you share some DNA with another creature doesn’t make it easier to trust them.
But my list of the untouchables, things that just ought not to be loaned, is short and simple—dirty socks, mangled toothbrushes, and underwear with more holes than a whiffle ball. You won’t find these on Modern Bride’s top-10 list of something-borrowed. After all, how desperate must you be to share bacteria and body odor? If you really want to know, try forgetting your luggage on a week-long stay at a remote cabin.
Gross? Yes, but even so there’s valuable lessons to be learned. My mother had a theory about camping and marriage. She believed that if you wanted to really know a person before you married, spend two weeks together in the great outdoors. This advice is both useful and surprising, since Mom’s entire courtship lasted just seven days.
Toiletries aside, there are three things that I loathe to loan.
- My keys.
Ask anyone who’s been foolish enough to try, and they’ll tell you I’d sooner donate a kidney without anesthesia. Keys are sacred. They represent freedom, independence, truth, justice and the American way. Besides… why would I loan something so precious to someone who has just misplaced theirs?
This attitude does not get me a lot of back-rubs. But in my defense, I do claim brownie points for offering my sweater, without being asked, when she-who-shall-not-be-named forgets hers on a chilly night.
So chivalry isn’t dead. Remember, Arthur never gave up his car keys.
- My books.
There’s a line in “Out of Africa” that fits. Robert Redford plays big-game hunter, Denys Finch Hatton. Denys admits that he’s no longer speaking to a friend because the man failed to return a book. An astonished Karen Dinesen, played by Meryl Streep, says: “You wouldn’t lose a friend over a book?”
Redford’s reply. “No. But he did.”
Unlikely? Sadly, not. I once loaned out a book I’d used in my graduate studies. It was expensive, rare, and heavily annotated. As you’ve guessed, I never got it back. That was hard, but I accepted the fact. What really irked me was that my “friend” has no recollection of ever borrowing the book.
He still swears I’m making this up.
And finally…
- My cell phone.
Recently, a stranger asked to borrow my phone to arrange a ride home. I said yes, thinking, What’s the harm?
I soon found out.
Two things happened in rapid succession. First, the call became three or four calls, some of them a quite heated, and through it all this person coughed repeatedly on my phone.
It was, honestly, sticky when she returned it.
I walked away, worried about catching a mildly fatal phone-fungus. But I didn’t have much time to ponder this phobia because I immediately got a series of irate calls. Before I could say “wrong number,” they were screaming and swearing.
About the fifth call, I saw an unfamiliar number on the screen, answered the phone, yelling. “Stop these damn calls right now!” A feeble voice on the other end said: “Well, my, Sonny, you could have just said ‘No Thank You.’”
It turns out that lucky-caller-number-five was Myrtle-the-Fundraiser from the “Make My Day Foundation.”
Embarrassed, I ended up pledging $25.
So, I guess I have a Scrooge-like gene when it comes to sharing some stuff. I’m in the same camp as Shakespeare’s Polonius, “Neither a borrower nor a lender be.” The famous father-figure is best-known for his cautionary advice about money.
Money? Uh-oh, that reminds me…
I found a $20 bill in my pocket earlier. Hmmm…. Now where did that come from? It must have “fallen” from Karin’s purse when I grabbed my pen. Wonder if she minds….
I probably owe her a kiss.
Robb has enjoyed writing and performing since he was a child, and many of his earliest performances earned him a special recognition-reserved seating in the principal’s office at Highland Elementary. Since then, in addition to his weekly column on A News Cafe – “Or So it Seems™” – Robb has written news and features for The Bakersfield Californian, appeared on stage as an opening stand-up act in Reno, and his writing has been published in the Funny Times. His short stories have won honorable mention national competition. His screenplay, “One Little Indian,” Was a top-ten finalist in the Writer’s Digest competition. He has two humor books in print, The Doggone Christmas List and The Stupid Minivan. Robb presently lives, writes and teaches in Shasta County, Northern California.
