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Misers With A Heart Of…er…Gold

About the author blurbs are mini soap operas, not to mention emotional roller coasters. Gad, speaking of emotional roller coasters, right after I wrote that line someone came tap-tap-tapping on the front door, and since I was expecting a package I didn’t answer the door because it’s easier to wait until the delivery person has gone away and then get the package then try to deal with eight curious cats who want to see who’s out there. The delivery person wouldn’t go away, though, s/he stood there tap-tap-tapping for so long that I wondered if s/he’d heard The Indigo Girls blasting out through the mail slot before I ran over to turn it off. In the end, the delivery person went away and I excitedly opened the door to see what wonderful things had arrived. All I saw, though, was a bright yellow slip of paper, reading “We Tried To Deliver This Package…” and thought, “Damn!” and felt like a fool for not answering the door, then read further to the “We Left This Package On The:” then eighteen different choices, like “office, carport, garage” and — hurrah! — porch, which was checked off. I opened the screen door. No package. I checked the yellow paper again, yeah, it really did say porch. I looked down. Evidently the delivery person had stolen the welcome mat, which we bought one day at a hotsy-totsy furniture store because it was the only thing we could afford…but wait, no, it wasn’t stolen, it was leaning up against the porch railing. And aha! The package was hidden underneath it. So, happy ending, I brought the package in and had a wonderful time opening all of the mail people who visit my web site had sent me.

But anyway, what I started to say is that sometimes I get more involved in the about the author blurbs than the books themselves. Shelby Hearon, for example, was single, then she got married, then she had children and then on the back inside cover of her latest book — just Shelby again. No one else was mentioned. I spent the entire book worrying about what had happened to her husband. And Ruth Rendell, too. Years and years of “living in England with her longtime husband” and then he disappeared. And now Joyce Maynard. I borrowed two books she’d written from the library, one written in 1981, one written in 1995. 1981: “She now lives in New Hampshire with her husband and daughter.” 1995: “She lives in Keene, New Hampshire, with her three children.” I want to read the first book all over again, to see if I missed what was wrong with her marriage. I want to write her long, rambling letters, saying, “But Joyce, what HAPPENED? You seemed so happy!”

In other news, we’re going to be misers. No, really, we’re going to follow through this time. Last night Todd came home from work feeling tired and dispirited and we got gloomy over the fact that we don’t own a house and it’s extremely difficult to rent one with eight cats, which means that it’s extremely difficult for us to move, and frowned and heaved big sighs and then thought, HEY, saving up to buy a house doesn’t have to happen next year. Or even in six months. We can start saving up tomorrow. We both grew up as only children (well, for all intents and purposes anyway, since our little brothers didn’t come along until we were much older) and we know how to entertain ourselves without spending a bunch of money. We decided to look at every dollar we spend as a piece of our future house (this morning I made Todd two peanut butter and jelly sandwiches to eat on his way to work and put in a note in the sandwich bag that said, “2 sandwiches = $4.50 not spent on breakfast = 1/12000 of our house!”). Last time we tried this we thought we’d be misers who occasionally spend a lot of money, which as you might imagine was not exactly a roaring success.

I can see the Monty Python sketch now. “John Cleese stars as The Miser With A Difference”.

© 1997 QN Podcast (formerly Quirky Nomads).