A DEVILISH DESIGN

I can tell people how to write. And I can read a written piece and know whether it's good.

But I've no clue about commercial products--until I suddenly see that they're all wrong. I recall with amazement those few products that lacked the essentials of simplicity and common sense, that were seemingly created by idiots.

Take my earliest stove tops, for instance. Suddenly it's clear there's a link between a succession of stoves, the door on a Lincoln Town Car, and a disastrous pair of tennis shoes—all suffering from unimaginable design flaws.

The earliest of these products was a ridiculous stove top. In order to remove the parts for cleaning, you had to use a screwdriver to take out a few screws, or in later versions, unwind certain parts, or shift one or two levers . . . in essence do a dismantling job reminiscent of Erector sets. The first designers apparently thought that without all these nuts and bolts, parts of the stove might come apart and blow away. The flaws went on through several permutations and various brand names—until some simplicity-oriented man finally figured out that gravity alone—plus a few well-placed grooves-- would hold everything in place. I recall my amazement when I finally bought a stove for which all the parts merely lifted off. No screws, no bolts, no tools. And sure enough, gravity did its job.

My Lincoln Town Car, a decade ago, embodied the height of freakish design. I hadn’t had my new/used Lincoln long before the driver’s side door, curved inward like a scimitar, took a chunk out of my left leg. The second time this happened, I sold the car. Only last night, four of us were comparing our brief and dangerous encounters with this vehicle. All four had suffered significant leg gashes before each of us offloaded our Lincolns. This flaw never achieved public notice but, in the manner of gossip, was damned quietly among its users.

The last design flaw could have killed me. My new tennis shoes, supposedly designed with ergonomic inner springs, were so thick, top to bottom, and so unstable, that occasionally I found myself lurching forward, tripped up by my own footwear. I should have tossed away the shoes. But I didn’t. What happened next was so traumatic that only now, a week later, can I bear to describe that event.

I was bending over to pick some theater tickets off my front porch, and was just straightening when one of my shoes "caught," that is, the toe stubbed and wouldn't allow me to stand straight. In my effort to regain my balance, I began pedaling. But all that footwork merely propelled me forward, and I was soon flying into space, out over our pebbled walkway.

The sensation was horrible. I was literally airborne, and would soon come down on the rocks. In horror, I still tried to regain my balance, but couldn't. I would land and land hard. Virtually on cement.

The sensation of hitting was as horrible as I thought it would be. From my position on the rocks, I tried to grasp how badly I was hurt. I saw that my right wrist was torn open, and some internal injury made it hurt to breathe.

With what breath I could gather, I screamed through the open front door at my husband, Rob.

He didn't hear me. The TV was on, and unknown to me the Challenger accident was replaying, and Rob thought the screaming came from the TV. Over and over, louder, and louder, I shrieked his name. Unaided, I couldn't get off the walkway--that much I knew.

At last, when I was nearly beyond any more screams, Rob heard me and came out. He was horrified at what had happened--but both of us knew he couldn't get me to my feet. At worst, he would go down too.

I said, "Call Chris," (our son--an orthopedic surgeon), and luckily Chris lived nearby and had just arrived home.

For ten minutes, Rob stood and comforted me--the greatest comfort for both of us being that I hadn't hit my head. My glasses were sprung, my wrist was bleeding, my insides were ablaze, but I was alive.

Chris and his wife, Betty-Jo, arrived to find me still sprawled and bleeding. Chris told Rob to go get our walker with the seat, (used in prior knee surgeries), and together, Chris and Betty-Jo gathered me under the arms and lifted me onto the little seat. The pain was horrendous.

With difficulty, they wheeled me inside to the couch. My breathing grew ever more difficult.

Chris did some tests. Gently prodding, he said, "Does this hurt?" "Does this hurt?" and to his relief he said, "You've had the greatest possible luck, Mom. You haven't broken any vertebrae, or injured your head. You've broken some ribs--the best thing that could have happened."

At the moment "best" didn't seem very good. But Chris knew how to be comforting. As difficult as it seemed, I WAS breathing.

"We don't do anything for broken ribs," he said. "We just leave them alone. " And then, with a smile, "Where's your Vicodin?"

And thus began a week of pain killers. But to everyone's amazement, especially Chris's, x-rays the following Monday showed no broken ribs. "I guess you just tore the cartilage," he said.

Injured or not, I managed to give a speech the next day--and a second one two days later. But in one area I flunked terribly. Rob and I are taking a "brain plasticity" course, and the day I arrived in class all doped-up on Vicodin, my scores dropped so low I appeared to be practically brainless. The two big lessons from the accident became agonizingly clear: You don't wear shoes that have ever tripped you, even once. And you can't fool your brain when you're on drugs. No matter how hard you try, narcotics will prove that you've become a moron.

Too bad we can't spread this lesson among all our teenage kids.

PRETTY BOY TAKES WING

The cats were my daughter’s fault. She kept saying to us, “Mom, you’re upstairs writing day and night, and Dad’s downstairs with nobody. He needs a cat for his lap.”

Rob, being Rob, never agreed that his own company equaled nobody. For years, raised as an only child, he’s been fully at ease with a state of aloneness. On the other hand, he’s always preferred cats to at least half the human population—and I certainly like cats well enough, though I generally veer toward creatures that speak.

Anyway, under continuous pressure from Tracy, we visited a green-spirited animal shelter and brought home two black and white kittens. They were brothers, and, as we soon learned, even related cats come with distinctive personalities.

As they grew, we discovered Bruiser was smart enough to pry open every sliding door in the house—at which point he followed us into room after room, settling down into nearby chairs. But he wasn’t into physical affection, and when we tried to pet him, he ducked. He preferred our company at a distance.

Pretty Boy, on the other hand, was smart enough to learn that Rob’s lap was a nice place for an evening’s nap. Exactly as Tracy had hoped.

By the time they were grown, somebody had given us a huge cat tower, which, as it turned out, was rickety. One day, with two cats aloft, the thing came apart and fell over. Both cats flew away from the spot as though from a roadside IED. Rob repaired it, but Bruiser never went near it again. Only Pretty Boy was willing to give it another try--agreeing to a second, tentative experience with the tower. But when Rob’s repairs failed a second, then a third time, that was it for the tower. The thing had become a mere blight in the room. The cat pyramid went out on the curb, where some unknown animal lover picked it up. I only hope he found larger bolts than Rob ever found. Or that he has a dumb cat.

Meanwhile, Rob’s lap was Pretty Boy’s late evening, slumbering retreat. They enjoyed many a companionable few hours together. Until one evening, sitting in his leather chair with cat aboard, Rob was struck by an attack of gas. At which point—how do I put this delicately? --he did what gentlemen never do. .

At the moment, Pretty Boy was nicely asleep. Beneath him, the chair suddenly rumbled, as though from an earthquake. From a state of utter relaxation, Pretty Boy sprang upwards, to a height of more than three feet. As Rob watched in amazement, the cat gyrated crazily while he rose, with his paws splayed out in four directions. He actually spun around like an gymnast with a pre-set routine, performing moves Rob had never seen before, cat-wise or otherwise.

Rob said, “I wondered how he gained so much traction—all this from a dead-asleep start.” The cat did not remain airborne long. Once his feet returned to the land of earthquakes, he was off. He streaked across the family room and into the breakfast room, seeking, I suppose, some kind of flatulence-free oblivion.

Since then, Pretty Boy has tentatively returned to Rob’s lap. But my guess is, Rob will choose a better solution for any future attacks of gas--especially on a hard surface, like a leather chair. Even Pretty Boy eventually learns what he needs to know. It would sadden Tracy enormously to learn that her dad managed to permanently eject Pretty Boy from his lap.

FAMILY STORIES--WITH THE WILLS

Welcome--to those who love family stories--in fact to those who love to read everything (even the backs of cereal boxes), and are drawn to real life tales, especially one family's collection of intriguing, often zany but true stories.

Starting today, and continuing every two weeks, this blog will consist of stories drawn from my book, "A Circus Without Elephants." Depending on length, I will include either a half or a whole chapter in each of my bi-weekly blogs.

"A Circus Without Elephants" starts with the day I met my unpredictable husband at Stanford, and continues into the early '80s. Assuming I don't run out of time and energy, I'll finish that book and go on to the sequel, "A Clown in the Trunk."

Of course, both of these books can be purchased from Stephens Press (link included) or, for an autographed copy, by e-mailing me at Maralys@Cox.net.

Here, then, is the beginning of "A CIRCUS WITHOUT ELEPHANTS."

***************
Chapter One: The Maverick "Hawaiian"

I DIDN'T GO to Stanford University to find a husband.

I went partly because of the wondrous Stanford mystique and the thrill of calling myself a Stanford Indian . . . and partly because it was such an exclusive, snooty-tooty institution, if you got accepted, you certainly had to go.

Before long, though, I was swept away by classes like Western Civ, where we dug around in the archives to unearth surprisingly modern truths from Plato and Aristotle, and by Russian History as taught by a guttural Russian. The campus beguiled me with its genteel Spanish Mission architecture, and I was soon rooting passionately for the plucky and gentlemanly, if somewhat inadequate, football team.

But I didn't stay long, only a year and a half, not nearly long enough.

And what I got out of it, eventually and to my surprise, went far beyond what I expected.

IN MY TREMULOUS teens before Stanford, I dreamed private, sensual dreams, conjuring up the man I would someday marry. My imaginary suitor never had a face, only dark, passionate eyes that consumed me with admiration and unspoken longing. His key trait, if not intensity, was surely unending kindness, for some part of me was searching for the ever-loving father I never had.

Among the qualities I sought in my unknown faceless lover, "oddball" had never made the list; it wasn't a trait that would even occur to a serious-minded girl.

Yet oddball was what I got.

I'D BEEN AT Stanford nearly a year when my life changed. I first saw Rob Wills at a summer get-acquainted dance euphemistically called a Jolly-Up.

At eighteen I wasn't expecting much, since so far the campus men seemed to fall into two categories--the nerds or the party animals--and those who didn't spend our date lingering on the mysteries of subatomic particles, were inclined to squander it instead guffawing with friends over last weekend's drunken bash at Mama Risotti's. (Never mind that to those who held such hi-jinks in high esteem I was certainly one of the nerds.)

To put it more accurately, Rob first saw me at the Jolly-Up, and I never saw him at all. The flirting I did with the men observing from the sidelines had a kind of high-water mark, based on the fact that I'm tall, over five-ten, and resolutely never made eye contact with anyone shorter than six-foot-two, or even noticed they were there. All my little smiles and coy glances went to the men who towered above the rest. It's faintly possible that sometime during the evening my eyes flicked across the top of Rob Wills' head, but I certainly never saw his face.

The truth was, I didn't know he existed until he cut in on me.

He introduced himself, and when he took my hand to begin dancing, I saw at once that he wasn't up to my height standards, his eyes being only slightly taller than mine, and when he looked at me it wasn't with anything close to desperate unspoken longing, but something nearer amusement. He seemed awfully tan, too, and more so because his teeth were so white. Furthermore, he didn't fit my physical ideal in other ways; instead of the comfortable filled-out shape I'd envisioned, he was as skinny as a mop handle.

All in all, he didn't seem promising.

"I tried to catch your eye," he said as he guided me across the floor, "but your eye wasn't catchable."

That's a novel opening line, I thought. Having no fitting response, I fell back on a conventional tack and asked him to repeat his name, learning he was called, formally, Robert Victor Wills.

"Where are you from, Robert Victor Wills?"

"Call me Rob," he said. "Where am I from, you ask? You mean last week or last year?"

Once again he threw me, and been an intensely-bookish type in those days and absolutely no good at fast repartee, I was still fumbling for words when he grinned and said, "I'm from Hawaii."

Well, that explained everything: the dark skin (I learned later he tans if he walks past an open window), the gaudy aloha shirt, the owlish glasses. What the glasses had to do with such an assessment has now escaped me, but I said, "Oh, you're Hawaiian!"

"Not exactly," he said. "That's just where I lived last. I'm transferring back to Stanford from U of Hawaii. My dad's a Naval officer, so we traveled. Never stayed in one place long enough to tire of it." He smiled again, a generous smile that conveyed uncomplicated enthusiasm for his nomadic life. "How about you?"

"I grew up in lots of places, too. Los Angeles. Denver. Rochester, New York. A ranch in Mt. Shasta, California." Unlike him, I'd hated the moving around. "My dad's a doctor, but I've never lived with him. My mom divorced him when I was two. She's not your normal, everyday mother, she's sort of a Bohemian." And she's been married seven times, I thought, which only my mom considers amusing.

The music changed temp and we danced faster. I was glad to see that the mop handle was graceful, that in spite of his shortness and not being an inch over six feet, I felt good dancing with him. When the piece was over he seemed reluctant to let me go, and instead pulled me off to one side and asked urgently, "Is anyone taking you home?"

"Yes."

"Who?"

I gaped at him, so surprised at his bluntness that all decent answers melted away. "You want to know his name?" Flustered, I suddenly couldn't remember the name myself.

"Never mind," he said, "I withdraw the question." And then an abrupt switch. "Do you like to swim?"

"You mean in a swimming pool or the ocean?"

"The ocean. It's the only swimming that counts. I used to be a surfer, learned how at Waikiki Beach." He gave me that smile again. "What are you doing tomorrow?"

Another blunt question; he was so full of them. Well, that depends, I guess, on what you're offering. Before I could figure out a way to hedge and be cool about it, he said, "How would you like to go to a beach party?"

"A beach party?" I was beginning to sound like a parrot, echoing every word he said, but I needed time to think and he never gave me any, he just kept peppering me with questions and throwing me off balance.

"That's right, at Santa Cruz beach. We'll go about eleven. You should come, it'll be fun, I promise." He said it with a smile, with conviction, as if there could be no doubt.

I guessed then he was a fraternity man and he'd waited until the dance to nail down a date. But he seemed pretty sure of himself, not at all concerned, and in fact all his words were positive and definitely self-assured. He was looking at me with an intensity that lent his thin face a kind of radiance. Rob Wills was awash in youthful energy and high spirits, but I doubted he'd be serious-minded enough, long run, or mature enough to interest me.

Still, one little date for the beach wasn't a lifetime commitment, and I thought, What the heck.

"I think I'm free," I said. "A beach party sounds fine, I'd love to go." In fact it sounded more than fine, because above all I'd heard the word "party," which meant I'd meet other men, some of whom would no doubt be taller and less frivolous and wouldn't ask blunt questions.

In due course I went back to my dorm with the somebody else, and whoever he was, he'd already become indistinct and shadowy, dimmed by the brightness of Rob Wills.

The next day everything changed.

************


Well . . . here's half of Chapter One. Hope you've enjoyed it.

There has to be a quicker way to do this. Look for the rest of the chapter in two weeks--the first week of January, 2011. By then I'll have learned how to scan--or how to cut and paste.

But more will be forthcoming, I promise.


I'D LOVE ANY AND ALL COMMENTS. I need to know. IS ANYBODY READING THIS?

Thanks to all of you have gotten this far. Maralys Wills . December 18, 2010.

This site is still under construction, but please visit again soon.