Of Brits and Bumper Stickers

Not that there’s any indication the world has noticed, but I haven’t posted to this blog in more than a month. I feel as if I’ve been failing to do my job for a long time now, posting with great infrequency. But then, that’s a big part of the problem: I’ve been thinking of this blog as a job. I’ve too often approached it as I do my day job—meticulously. In this case, as a process that begins with a specific idea and ends several hours later, after I’ve agonized over precisely which thousand or two words to employ, in what exact combinations.

I need a new approach. So, today I’m going to write off-the-cuff about a few different subjects, none individually at great length. Being me, though, I still like the idea of a unifying theme. It took me a while to come up with one, but then it hit me: Clive and Karen Scorer.

Clive and Karen are brilliant. Not necessarily in the IQ sense, although they’re certainly both smart enough. I don’t know if they’ve ever been tested—or, if so, what their numbers are. No, I mean in the British usage of the word brilliant. Clive and Karen are British, and what Lynn and I found when we met them in Iceland in the summer of 1999 is that they and their countrypersons use “brilliant” as a catch-all for anything that’s good to exceptional. To be sure, like our “awesome,” it’s a word that’s subject to being overused, and thus overextended to many things that are little better than fine or just OK. Still, I think of Clive and Karen as brilliant in a more effusive sense. They’re nice and kind and interesting, and it doesn’t hurt in Lynn’s and my book that they are roughly our age and, like us, childless by choice and crazy about cats. Their senses of humor tend toward the droll in that classically British kind of way. And of course, if they were writing the word” humor” as I just did, they’d stick an utterly superfluous “u” between the “o” and the “r” and insist that that is the only correct spelling. Which is, in my American eyes, rather brilliantly quaint.

So, anyway, that’s them. We’ve kept in touch over the years, and last fall we met up with them on Cape Cod, where their bus full of fellow Brits had stopped as part of a sightseeing/leaf-watching tour across Massachusetts and New Hampshire. One day the four of us rode in my car to Provincetown, on the other side of the Cape. That was a fun day, but its relation to this post has to do with the fact that Clive noted my several bumper stickers. Now, I don’t know if bumper stickers are rare in the UK or if Clive, in his somewhat reserved British way, deemed my sporting more than one to be excessive (I believe my bumper displayed a total of four stickers or decals at the time). At at any rate, when earlier this year I mentioned in an e-mail that I needed to have my bumper replaced, he cheekily inquired as to whether the old one had fallen off under the weight of my stickers.

First of all, wrong bumper. It was the front one that needed to be replaced. Second of all, snide British remarks aside, I like bumper stickers as a form of self-expression, as long as they aren’t lame. And by that, I mean lame in my own idiosyncratic estimation. Lame by my lights is anything from expressing one’s support for politicians and causes I deem abhorrent to insisting on advertising to the world that one’s child is an honor roll student at a given elementary school (damning with faint praise, plus, who cares?) or depicting one’s family with a like number and representational mix of stick figures (this being the inane “Baby on Board” of the 21st century). Also lame: too many bumper stickers. Show me the rear end of a car that’s plastered with stickers and decals and I’ll show you a vehicle that is the automotive mascot of the TV show Hoarders and a driver who, I fear, may be off his or her meds.

(Brief aside. Bumper stickers as self-expression: Acceptable, within reason. But, as regards another form of modern self-expression: Why must everyone have an array of damn tattoos? Nowadays, being tattoo-free is more an expression of uniqueness than are the veritable ink galleries garishly splashed across the fat asses and love handles of so many Americans.)

Anyway, I recently decided my old bumper stickers needed to go. Or at least some of them. Like the one advocating for gay marriage in Maryland, which was approved last fall. And the “equal” sign logo of the Human Rights Campaign, which now adorns every other bumper in the area, making me look trendier than I’d like. Also, while I enjoy trumpeting my cat love given the preponderance of pro-dog bumper stickers on the road, my “Meow” decal was looking tired and uninteresting. So, last weekend I spend considerable time scouring the web for replacement images and messages.

Here’s what I came up with:

·         A cat face in revolutionary red, framed by the words “Viva el Gato!”, with an added exclamation point upside-down at beginning of the sentence, in Spanish-language manner. (Pro-cat, but with attitude—something cats have in abundance.)  

 
·         One of those slash-marked red circles that mean “anti” or “no,” with the word “Guns” inside it. (I could’ve purchased one that slashed through the letters “NRA,” but in this weapons-mad country I consider my chosen design to be risky enough. Were I to call out  the NRA specifically, I'm fairly certain that my car, unlike the gasoline that fuels it, soon would be leaded.)

·         Two stickers related to my love of grammar and wordplay. I’ll likely display one or the other, but likely not both. One says. “Always proofread. You might have something out.” The other is a punchline that reads like the setup to a joke: “The past, the present, and the future walked into a bar. It was tense.”

I’m pleased. My one regret, though, is that I couldn’t find a bumper sticker nuanced enough to convey that while, from a “green” standpoint, I can see the wisdom of sharing the road with cyclists, the fact is that they’re hugely full of themselves, want to be treated like motorists but don’t follow traffic laws, make the roads far less safe for everyone, and I pretty much hate them all. To be fair, though, that’d be a lot for one bumper sticker to convey.

Anyway. I also thought of Clive and Karen recently when I stumbled across my new favorite word: “rumbustious.” One fraught morning recently, I needed to take a break from my workday, so I searched the Internet for an offbeat international story to amuse myself and perhaps share with a friend. I happened to find an Agence France-Press wire story that grabbed me with its headline: “China to Fine Sloppy Pee-ers.” The piece explained that officials in the Chinese city of Shenzen are planning to crack down on men who urinate outside the bowl in public facilities. (One guesses this is because China hasn’t any bigger problems in terms either of environmental degradation or societal grossness.) The article went on to note that the edict has been met with derision by Shenzen citizens, who smell both a governmental money-making scheme and an enforcement issue that raises the specter of uniformed aim-enforcers being stationed in restrooms. (Talk about your yellow perils!)

Suddenly I came upon the following sentence: “Users of China’s rumbustious weibo [Twitter-like] social networks poured scorn upon the measures.” “Rumbustious?” I loved the way it looked, and the way it sounded when I spoke it. But was it really a word? Could it have been some sort of mistake—a bad translation of French to English, perhaps? So, I looked it up online, and discovered that it is a “chiefly British” word that means “uncontrollably exuberant and unruly.” It’s more or less synonymous with what we Americans would describe as being “rambunctious.” But it’s so much better and more expressive. I say “rambunctious” aloud and it just kind of sits there in the air. I say “rumbustious” and I almost feel the clamor and tumult. It “busts” off from the tongue—fueled by intoxicating thoughts of rum, perhaps. I love this word. I will use this word. Thank you, Britain! And please, Clive and Karen, let me know if you ever use it. I like to think you do. Perhaps sometimes to describe unruly Americans who are being entirely too loud or otherwise obnoxious at one of your medieval cathedrals or historic sites?

The last thing I want to write about today is Lynn’s and my upcoming vacation—which also, in a way, brings Clive and Karen Scorer to mind. Again, Lynn and I met them when we were on vacation—or holiday, as they’d have it—in Iceland. And that destination was a perfect example of what Lynn and I like in a vacation venue: cold and under-populated. We like a nip in the air, hills on the horizon, lonely villages down the road. We’ve also traveled in Canada several times, and to National Parks out West in autumn—once the families are gone and the heat has diminished. Not that it was cold when we were in Iceland in July—it was light 24 hours a day, for one thing—but it wasn’t hot, either. Under-populated? Check. The entire nation’s population is about half that of Washington, DC.

This fall, however, we’ll be taking a trip that’s quite atypical for us. Far from cold and under-populated, we’ll be vacationing somewhere tropical and popular with tourists. We’re going to Hawaii. Specifically, Maui. Everyone who hears this sighs dreamily on our behalf and says this is wonderful news. It makes me feel pretty lame, however. Like I’ve sold out and gone mainstream. Like I might just as well get myself several tattoos and a Twitter handle while I’m at it, and buy stick-figure decals of a man, a woman, a cat and a dog to slap on the car.

But ah, there is method in our madness of normalcy. You may or may not recall that I have this desire to run in all 50 states. Not run a race, and certainly not run a marathon or triathlon in every state, like some really driven people aspire to do. No, just run for at least one uninterrupted hour in each of the 50 US states. On that same New England trip last fall when we met Clive and Karen on Cape Cod, Lynn indulged our driving us to Vermont and New Hampshire specifically so that I could cross the last two Atlantic seaboard states off of my running list. That made my state total 32. I am 55 years old. Most of my remaining states are very far from my home in Maryland, and none is farther than Hawaii.

I’d long figured that Hawaii would be one of my last running states, given the distance and expense, and that I’d arrive alone, spend just enough time there to do what I came to do, and fly home. Lynn will fly if she must, but she doesn’t like it. It scares her. Even now, a century into air travel, the idea of heavy machinery somehow defying gravity for hours at a time continues to strike her as a hugely counterintuitive recipe for disaster. Lynn also is prone to nightmares that involve drowning, and there’s an awful lot of water between the West Coast and the Hawaiian islands.

Lynn stunned me, however, a couple of months ago by proposing that we fly to Maui. She wanted me to be able to cross Hawaii off my list, she didn’t want me to have to go alone, and she’d discovered that a renowned Reiki master was going to be giving a two-day class on Maui in the fall. The Reiki opportunity would be her personal inducement to throw caution to the Pacific winds and jet high above a couple of thousand miles of ocean.

So, that’s where we’re going. Not kicking and screaming, exactly. We’re sure Maui is as beautiful as people say it is, and that we’ll have fun there. We’re not even ruling out that the trip could prove to be memorable. But it’s so not our kind of vacation, and the more people ooh and ahh over the word Maui when I share our destination, the more I wish we instead were going to one of my original options for this fall’s vacation, such as Minnesota, Wisconsin, or, better yet, Manitoba. (America says Waikiki, I say Winnipeg.)

At any rate, one thing’s for damn sure: Even if the improbable happens, and I return from our island vacation with a newfound appreciation for loud, flowery shirts and ukulele music, you will never pull up behind my car at a traffic light and read on my bumper, “I Heart Hawaii.”