Dave Barry - Homes And Other Black Holes

INCORRECT DIAGNOSIS: “So?”

CORRECT DIAGNOSIS: “Sounds like something is wrong with your, whaddyacallit, engine.”

If you find somebody who gives you the correct diagnosis, you should cling to him the way the remora clings to the shark. If you have a daughter, you should encourage her to marry him.

The major things we look for in a supermarket are:

1. A wide selection of browsing material at the checkout counter in the form of People magazine and tabloid-size newspapers with headlines like “BURT REYNOLDS WEDS GIANT UFO CENTIPEDE”

2. A policy whereby people who get in the check-out line clutching large, time-consuming wads of food coupons are actually charged more for their groceries.

3. Very strict enforcement of the ten-item limit in the express lane. Ideally, this enforcement would involve a trap-door. (“Oh? Do I have fourteen items? I didn’t reallllEEEEEEEEEEEEEE)

This is an excellent way for a newcomer like yourself to make friends with many local community leaders, all of whom will want to sell you insurance.

We always do this. Whenever they come around, we give them a generous contribution and a cheerful smile, because deep in our souls we have this nagging fear that they write your name down somewhere, and if you did not contribute, it will come back to haunt you:

You: Help! Please send somebody to 465 Magnolia Street immediately!

POLICE DISPATCHER: Would that be the residence of Stanley Johnson, the guy who stiffed the Benevolent Association for six straight years? The guy who always says he’ll send us a check “next week”?

YOU: Yes! Please! A huge insane man is pounding on our door with an axe!

POLICE DISPATCHER: That would be Lester Stubbins. Last year he donated, let’s see here, twenty-five dollars.

YOU: HE’S BREAKING DOWN THE DOOR! HURRY!!

POLICE DISPATCHER: Sure thing. We’ll have a unit there “next week.”

There are two major kinds of schools:

Public Schools, defined as “schools where the doors have been removed from the bathroom stalls.”

Private Schools, defined as “schools you cannot afford.”

The key factor in selecting a school, of course, is what kind of nurse it has. Remember that the primary function of the American educational system is to provide you with a place to leave your children when you go to work; if the school has the kind of nurse who calls you up every time some little thing goes wrong, the whole point is defeated. Also your career could be ruined:

SETTING: The chambers of the U.S. Supreme Court

YOU: In conclusion, your honors, I wish to state that my client...

CHIEF JUSTICE (interrupting): Counsel, I have a note here from the nurse at the Bob-o-Link Elementary School stating that your daughter, Jennifer, is throwing up what appears to be Yoo-Hoo brand chocolate drink.

So you’re looking for a school with a levelheaded nurse, the kind who would not think of calling you over something as minor as vomiting, which most small children engage in purely as a recreational activity.

Another thing: Whichever school you select, you must get your child into the “gifted” class. I imagine there was a time when the word “gifted” was used to describe only children who were above average, but since hardly any parents today will tolerate the thought that their child may be average, the term “gifted” is now applied to any student with more brain wave activity than a glazed doughnut.

The way you get your child into the gifted class is, you go to the school personally and make it clear to the staff that you are a Concerned Parent, meaning a potentially humongous pain in the ass. You should demand to see the curriculum, so as to make sure that, at each grade level, your child will receive instruction in the subjects appropriate for a standard American education, namely:

GRADE SUBJECTS LEARNED

K-2 Not to cross the street; not to take drugs; not to get in strange cars; not to talk to people; not to trust anybody; the Pledge of Allegiance

3-7 How to make science fair projects proving that ice is actually frozen water; the state capitals; designer jeans

8-12 Sex

Of course you need not worry too much about your child’s progress, because the school will keep you posted by means of report cards, which in most schools are now completely computerized to guard against the danger that anybody might be able to understand them. Our son’s report card looks like this:

AmStudSocBio 67 87 1123.43

54.45% PhysLangMath 1223.44343 4-4

SocMathStudAm—2948

BioPhys 09849238409

Cincinnati 001020 004 East Pass

NOTE: Your Mileage May Vary.

When we get our son’s report card, we make a big show of examining it with concerned frowns identical to the ones we use when our mechanic shows us broken pieces of our car, but the truth is we have no idea how well our son is doing.

Believe it or not, there was once a time when parents did not enroll their children in after-school activities. In those primitive times, when children came home from school, they’d just go outside, completely on their own, and engage in what professional child psychologists call “nonstructured” behavior, also known as “playing,” which is when you run around shrieking and getting dirt in your hair hold elaborate funerals for stuffed animals lie on your back next to a friend and make burping noises until one of you laughs so hard that he pees in his pants pretend you are fighting evil aliens from the Planet Kawoomba, who can be defeated only by spit

And so on. Of course, today we realize that children need to have a great deal of structure in the form of leagues and uniforms and referees and team photographs and trophies and dozens of parents standing on the sidelines shrieking like mental patients. So unless you are some kind of low-life child-abusing vermin, one of the first things you’ll do when you move to your new home is enroll your children in Little League, soccer, and midget football, as well as a scouting program, not to mention gymnastics, ballet, violin, karate, computer, tennis, and helicopter-piloting lessons. You want your child’s life to become so structured that he or she is incapable of fooling around in his or her own yard without detailed instructions from a coach. (“OK, Jason! Burp! NO, dammit! Not that way!”)

Not that we have time to worry about our child’s education or after-school activities. No, we are busy working and striving, in hopes that someday we will be able to afford something that most Americans dream of but very few ever achieve: nice furniture. We’ll cover this depressing topic in a later chapter. But first we need to look, in the next chapter, at the basic condition of our house, and see if we can’t, by means of various costly projects, make it worse.

You may have noticed that nowhere in this book do I ever talk about how to Do It Yourself. This is because I have done a great many things myself over the years, and in every case I have ultimately come to realize that I would have been better off if I had just walked around my house firing random shotgun blasts. No matter how hard I tried, my homeowner projects always produced highly comical results, such as the enormous concrete lump in the yard of the house we owned in Pennsylvania.

I am not making this lump up. We acquired it as a result of the project when I erected a basketball post, which I needed because, as a professional writer, I often had to go outside and gain artistic inspiration by pretending I was the U.S. Olympic basketball team, challenging the Soviet team for the gold medal. The part of the Soviet team was played by my dog. You will be pleased to learn that the U.S. team always won, because (a) the Soviet team couldn’t dribble—it would just sort of nose the ball around the court—and (b) the U.S. team had this very effective play where it would yell, in a stern voice: “No! BAD dog!!” which caused the Soviet team to crouch down on the court in a guilty fashion, and the United States would cruise past for an easy lay-up.