My Lame Whitney Houston Story

In 1992, my life was between acts. I was between marriages, between jobs, teaching myself this whole new computer graphics thing that was changing the world. I was sad and depressed and things were still two or three years away from beginning to work out again.

I occasionally went to movies alone, mostly romantic comedies, for distraction.  In 1992, I went to see “The Body Guard” at the theater closest to my apartment. It was a two-screen movie house in the parking lot of a shopping strip on Midlothian Turnpike, not far from the channel 12 tower, far from upscale. That whole part of the highway was going downhill fast as businesses fled west.

I was not a fan of Whitney Houston. I sort of liked Kevin Costner, almost entirely for “Bull Durham.” I had never been to a mainly black movie theater before, and realized once I got in the lobby, that’s where I was.

The first thing I noticed was the food. Unlike other theaters, this one didn’t mind if you brought in your own food. The usher didn’t stop a single person. The theatergoers had bags of food, buckets of chicken, even coolers on wheels with food and beverages in them. There was even beer! They brought children and babies. The children ran loose through the theater throughout the movie, as if it was a McDonaldland play area. The babies cried.

The second thing I noticed was no one settled down in their seats once the movie began. Throughout the showing, people were up and walking around and talking. They talked to each other in loud voices. They talked to the screen. They ate meals. It was a regular picnic with just a movie incidentally playing in the background. I tried to follow the story, but there were so many distractions. This was a cultural difference for me. I don’t know if there are any theaters in town like this anymore. I haven’t experienced this since.

Where I go to movies, the only illegal food that gets in has to fit in a purse. People with babies and children are reported to the ushers for eviction unless it’s a children's movie. And talkers are stared down or get their seats kicked.

I remember nothing about “The Body Guard” plot now, and when I saw it on TV recently, it was all new to me. That's how distracting that theater was. It's not there anymore, and that part of town is still waiting to be rehabilitated.

Not the World's Biggest Breasts After All

As a child, I was fascinated by Marilyn Monroe, whose movies I saw on TV. In my child brain, I thought she was famous because she had the biggest breasts in the whole world, and that was an amazing thing. I was several years into adulthood before I realized that wasn’t the case. Many women had bigger breasts, even in the days before fake ones.

This realization really came home when I was just the right weight…for maybe a year. I had finally gained enough weight to have a chest, and my waist had not given up yet. When I measured myself, I discovered to my shock I had the same dimensions as Marilyn Monroe! Almost! (She had a smaller waist.) How come I didn’t look like her? How come I wasn’t a sex symbol now that made men giddy?

Because there was so much more to her than her measurements.

If you look at photos of Janet Leigh from the same era, she was just as big in the bosom as Marilyn, if not more, but she didn’t dress provocatively, and she had the face of a wholesome girl next door. She wore her hair shorter and straighter. From the neck up, she was a librarian. Where Marilyn sold it was her face, her hooded eyes that she knew just how to squint to appear post-orgasm; her generous, pouty smile that was sly and beguiling. Watch how she keeps flexing her lips, even when she's not talking. Her hair was short, too, but not too short. It was soft and tousled looking. Up until the last years of her life (from “The Misfits” on) when she adopted an unflattering, brittle, helmet bouffant, she looked fun to be with, someone who didn’t mind getting her hair messed up.

She and Jackie Kennedy shared the same breathy voice, but Marilyn had a sighing baby-like tease to hers, while Jackie’s was guarded as if she was trying to enunciate very carefully. You couldn’t imagine Jackie calling a man “Daddy.” Marilyn looked and acted like a woman who liked men and liked being with them. Jackie looked like she’d rather be sitting on a throne someplace…alone. Marilyn looked like she liked to laugh. Jackie did not.

So Marilyn was special, but not for breasts. They were just part of the package. In her last years – and you need to remember she had just turned 36 when she died – she was already looking worn out. Her girlish voluptuousness had faded away and the notorious nude photos she did for photographer Bert Stern at the end reveal an ordinary body, thin, with drooping breasts. Nothing magical there. Her too blonde, too straight hair isn’t helping the illusion. Only her eyes still deliver the sex appeal. Her eyes always had it.

A Long Jewelry Story with No Happy Ending

I am not a fan of jewelry. It might be because I have so many other needs or interests that it strikes me as a waste of money. It doesn’t seem practical. Jewelry just hangs there.

I do a lot of computer work, and bracelets bang against the keyboard. Rings twist around and get in the way of the keys. I wear a name tag all day to move through security doors. A necklace seems superfluous. It itches my neck. I have a difficult time with clasps. My favorite bracelet had a magnetic clasp. It snapped together. But I carry so many purses, book bags, lunch bags, and stuff, in the course of traveling, it got tangled up in the straps and broke.

Pins punch holes in my clothes. I have a utilitarian pair of hoop earrings that don’t hurt when I’m on the phone and I never take them off. I have a plain gold wedding band. The morning of my wedding, my husband presented me with a small diamond engagement ring that didn’t go with the band. His family had shamed him into getting it, even when he told them I didn’t want one. We were set with matching bands. Whenever I see it in the jewelry box, I get sad. It represents coercion to me, not my wedding. Despite knowing me well, he believed someone else who said I would like something he knew I probably wouldn’t.

I have been in my husband’s family for 16 years now, and surely in that time I have mentioned I don’t wear jewelry. I show up for things sans jewelry. I don’t talk excitedly about jewelry. Either they don’t believe me or they aren’t listening, or they think I can change. My husband is no help. When they tell him what they’re getting me, he never says, “Don’t. She won’t like it.” He says nothing. So I get jewelry.

I was now in receipt of three new beads for a bracelet I no longer had. There’s a commercial running where one woman admires another woman’s charm bracelet and she excitedly defines who she is by the charms on the bracelet. There’s a soccer ball! (Because she drives her kids to soccer? Or does she play soccer?) There are YouTube videos where you see a bracelet full of beads and a narrator tells you what each one means to her. I can see there is effort here to define me with these beads. One is my initial. One is a cat. I have cats. The other beads are generic.

But I no longer have this bracelet. Putting the charms on and then fastening it to my wrist proved insurmountable last year. A charm would always fall off and roll into the best hiding place it could find. They banged into the keyboard. Charms would snag sweater sleeves. I couldn’t just slip it off. I had to wrestle with the clasp, and when it broke my fingernail down to the quick, I was done with it. I sold it on eBay to a woman who needed it to fulfill her daughter’s 16th birthday wish.

The bead market on eBay is weak, so I risk the after-Christmas rush and try to return them without a gift receipt since the barcoded price tags are still on the charms. Kohl’s is ready and waiting, with directional signs to all the return stations.

This is how Kohl’s sells things. They put a tag on the item with an outrageous price. Then they put up little signs on the racks that translate the tags into sale prices. If the price tag says $58, it’s “on sale” for $24. So I knew going in I didn’t really have $80 worth of beads, but I might have enough for a blouse. I did. I had $58.50 worth of beads. The tags on the blouses said $58, but the little sign on the rack said $58 was actually $24.80, so I had enough for two blouses!

Heady with success, I decide to try to return a diamond chip tennis bracelet to JC Penneys that I actually got two years ago. It was still in the gift box, except the barcode and price were peeled off. I had looked it up that first year on JCPenney online where it was selling for $75, but figured there must have been a sale in the store. On both eBay and Craigslist, there are many dozens of similar bracelets and people aren’t buying them.

I wait my turn at the jewelry counter and when the saleswoman greets me, two women start shouting that they had been waiting “an hour.” They have not, but they were there before me so I shrug and my clerk goes to help them. They have thick Eastern Europian accents and severe Communist-era haircuts and blocky builds. The older woman wears an old fashion headscarf. The younger woman wants to see a ring. Then another ring. Then another. They settle on one, but want to pay on credit. They have no cards so have to fill out a new credit application. The clerk and I wait. They turn it in. The clerk asks to see their ID. They have none. No driver’s license, nothing. The clerk says she will have to check with the manager.

This clerk has Mad Customer Service Skilz because I know she knows the answer is going to be NO, but the ladies stand there like there’s still a chance. The answer is no, the clerk says very apologetically. They leave without any visible disappointment. I am convinced they knew all along. I develop a backstory that they are actually Romanian gypsies and they were hoping the counter would be so crowded today, the clerk would leave the tray of rings out, get distracted, and they could pocket a few. Because why else would this woman who has no cash need a ring so bad the day after Christmas that she will go in debt for it?

Well, turned out she wasn’t the only one. While I wait for this most patient of sales clerks to look through pages of inventory photos trying to find a match for my mystery bracelet, a short, obese woman with over bleached, frizzy hair comes up asking about layaway. There is no layaway for jewelry, fill out a credit application, she is told. She does. She has two rings on every one of her fingers, including her thumbs. I am not kidding. She smiles at me. “I can’t believe you don’t want that bracelet,” she says. “Give it to me!” And she waves her ringed fingers at me. Multiple bracelets jingle on her arms. I can’t believe she is going in debt for more rings the day after Christmas. On the other side of the counter, I see an elderly woman intently filling out a credit application.

There is some kind of need and loneliness going on here, these women alone, shopping for themselves, the day after Christmas. They don’t have gift cards, or, apparently, money or a credit card. They fill out applications for new loans. My sales clerk can’t find my bracelet in the inventory. I don’t tell her it’s from two years ago. I just smile and say, “it must have been regifted then.” The woman with many rings suggests again I can regift it to her. The clerk with the Mad Customer Service Skilz says if I can find it online somewhere with a price and an inventory code, to please come back.

I look at the bracelet. Apparently for some it is a cure for every kind of sad and lonely. It is worth borrowing money to get. And yet, I can’t see it. It works no magic on me.

You may think this story ends with me giving it to the woman with all the rings, but no, it doesn’t. I am still trying to figure out an alchemy that will turn it into something I need, that will cure my sad and lonely, even for a moment.

My Career in Education

I was a junior in high school when I got my second job. It was an unusual job. I was in an unusual high school, the International School of Bangkok. My father, in a mid-life crisis, had joined the foreign service division of the Voice of America and it was our first overseas posting.

My mother was beside herself in anger at leaving her home state of North Carolina. Her blood pressure shot up and literally never came down until she stroked out at age 57. My brother, who had just started middle school and wanted a major league sports career, felt he was being deprived of his future, even though his Little League record was less than stellar. My sister wasn’t going because she was in college and engaged to be married.

I was the only one happy to go. I hated North Carolina. I hated my high school and fellow students. And my very inadequate boyfriend was already on the other side of the globe in Vietnam, next door to Thailand. We would see each other twice a year instead of once. It was fine with me.

One morning, just as I was beginning my junior year, a student job was posted to teach English as a foreign language at a business college. I was used to having my own money. I had been working since I was 15 at a movie theater in North Carolina. I had played teacher to my dolls as a child. I thought I could do it. I had nothing better to do on Saturdays. I took the address and negotiated the bus trip across Bangkok to the school offices.

The bus cost a single satang to ride, equivalent to less than a penny, so it was the most economical way to travel, although the buses were always full and you seldom got a seat. People actually hung from the doors and windows and rode on the outside. Sometimes there were caged chickens on the bus. I could also spend a whole 25 cents and take a samlor, which was like a golf cart with a back seat. Or I could go deluxe and spend a $1 and take a blue Datsun cab. But that would be wasteful. The cab drivers, thinking I was a tourist, would ask for $5 or more, and I would have to use the little Thai I knew to tell them I was on to their tricks and knew the going rate for locals.

The head of the business school looked like Buddha in a business suit. He sat on a rug on the ground, surrounded by cushions, incense, and statues of…I guess Buddha and other gods with many arms and legs. I was lucky I wasn’t sold into white slavery. My parents had no idea where this school was that I went to every Saturday. If I had disappeared, they wouldn’t even know where to start looking. I never knew the name of the school. The English on the sign just said Thai Business College.

He hired me on the spot. I thought life was always going to be this easy. I would teach three classes every Saturday morning. I would take attendance. They would listen to an English-speaking person speak. I would turn in grades. I only had to grade them on attendance.

The first year was exciting. The students were thrilled to meet me and treated me with respect even though I was a few years younger. The movie “To Sir With Love” was very popular in Thailand then. They called me Sir. They gave me love. At the end of each semester, they gave me little gifts. We took turns reading out loud from their text books and I would correct pronunciation. They would ask me to explain the lyrics to popular songs. It is not easy to explain the meaning of “yummy, yummy, yummy, I have love in my tummy” by Ohio Express or “do wah diddy diddy dum diddy doo” by Manfred Mann. I tried. They would laugh. They looked at me like I was a fascinating animal in a zoo. They had many questions about American life.

The hardest part of the job was taking attendance because the English translation of Thai names are very long, full of vowels and consonants that phonetically sounded like gibberish. They would laugh at my attempts to get through the roll call, but that was essentially their grade so it had to be done. I never got to the point where I could identify them by name. One hour a week wasn’t enough time to connect, and they all looked alike to me. Everyone’s hair was straight and black. They all wore the blue pants and skirts and white shirts and blouses which were the Thai school uniform.

And I had 120 or more students, divided up into three classes each semester. I made $30 a month, which I picked up in cash from the Buddha superintendent at the end of each month when I turned in my attendance records.

It was a princely sum since I could have a dress custom made for my measurements from a magazine picture, including the fabric, even Thai silk, for $5. A manicure was 50 cents, a pedicure 75 cents. I bought a fake hairpiece for $15 and I could have a mountain of curls and hair loops built on my head for $1.25. If I slept carefully, it would last the whole week. It made me look six inches taller. Shoes and handbags were as cheap as I could get the price down. I had a set to match every dress. Jewelry was a pittance, and we’re talking blue star sapphires set in silver. My family had a live-in maid who cleaned my room, made my bed, and washed and ironed my clothes. Kongkao was paid $25 a month and a bag of rice. Life was pretty good.

Things were great until the end of the second year when I had disruptive male students in my class. This was unusual because the Thai culture is built around showing respect for authority. In American schools, disruptive students were sent out of the classroom. I tried that. Everyone was shocked. Having a conflict was embarrassing to everyone, even the ones being evicted. Face was lost. Theirs and mine. They got cocky and challenged it, but gave up when I held firm. The good atmosphere was ruined after that. Everyone became nervous and uncertain. We laughed less.

I was glad the semester was ending and since I was leaving for college back in the States, I turned in my resignation and didn’t teach the summer session. There was no love for Sir anymore. Buddha Superintendent was sad to see me go. I probably lasted longer than any other American high school student – two years – and had been diligent. The way it ended soured me on being a teacher and I never taught anywhere again.

Attacked by the Japanese, Order & Chaos

It started with an email from Apple saying it was curious that I had purchased the Order and Chaos app, an online game, from a computer I didn’t normally use in the middle of the night. Was I all right?

No, I wasn’t. That wasn’t my purchase, so I rushed to my computer to change my password, only to find my iTunes account had been taken over by some kids in Kyoto, Japan and left in shambles. Whenever I logged in, iTunes would dissolve into the Japanese version. Although my name and address was the same on my account, my city and country were now Kyoto, Japan. And I didn’t recognize the credit card.

They didn’t steal my money as they replaced my credit card with a card that would work in Japan, which changed my country code in the process. Nothing I did would move my iTunes account back into English. Because the credit card number had come up as fraudulent – the billing address didn’t match mine – Apple was insisting I settle that matter before I could make any changes to my account. And I couldn’t. Every time I entered one of my credit card numbers, it rejected it because it didn’t match my billing address, which was now Koyoto, Japan. And I couldn’t fix my address until I entered a valid credit card number. I was stuck in a loop.

How come it was so easy for my hackers?

Apple doesn’t make it easy to reach a human in iTunes support. They have robot operators who sound very human -- the precursors of Siri -- and many press 1 for this and press 2 for that choices that solve most routine iTunes problems, but "My Account Was Hacked by Japanese Kids" was a choice in any menu. I futilely hit every button and verbally requested “A human” at every menu, and finally, a voice came on saying there was a 5-minute wait for a human. By then I was already two hours into my attempt to fix my iTunes account, so this seemed like a blessing. As is often the case, the wait time is exaggerated to discourage you from holding. A human came on almost immediately after I agreed to wait.

I explained my dilemma and the young man with a Valley Girl lilt to his voice asked for my computer serial number. Do I have to turn the computer upside down to find it? And why do you want it? This isn't a computer hardware problem. He insisted he needed it. We found where it was hidden, three clicks into the About This Mac panel. He told me my 90 days of free telephone support had expired.

Well, I know that. I’ve had this computer a couple of years, and it isn’t a hardware problem! I don’t need support to explain something to me! I need these damn Japanese kids out of my iTunes account! He agreed that fraudulent activity was its own category and politely forwarded me on to another young man with a Midwestern accent. We both agreed this was a baffling crime since they had stolen nothing from me except my ability to use my iTunes account since it was frozen over the issue of the unpaid app purchase. “iTunes accounts are free,” he said, puzzled.

(My husband later suggested that maybe the credit card was stolen so they needed to weld it onto an account that couldn’t be traced to them. It was only a 600 yen purchase, which is about $7.74.)

It was a struggle to delete the purchase and forgive the debt, thus enabling me to change my address back to the United States and reenter my own credit card and reset my password. The first half dozen tries failed, and finally my guy had to kick it upstairs to another team of computer wizards. He would come back from hold and say, “Try it now.” I would try it and say, “Still in Japan.” This went on for another two hours. When we finally landed back in the United States, it rejected my credit card. The account was now flagged for “unusual activity” due to all our finagling. I was locked out. It took another 30 minutes to override that.

At the end, when the Apple guy should really have been tired of dealing with me, he patiently sat through my long tirade about what I had gone through to connect with him. I wanted an explanation of how this happened; how did the hackers do it when it was so difficult to undo it? And what was the point? He didn’t know and offered no theories. And so ended my 4.5 hours with Apple support.

But I have to say, they were good. The robot support menu would have solved most things. The first Valley Boy was good about recognizing a special situation and letting me go through the phone support portal despite being out of warranty, and the iTunes team really put in a morning’s work releasing me from Japanese attack. They should have been at Pearl Harbor.

Naturally, I had to google Order and Chaos and see what was so special about this game. The logo is one of those big-eyed Japanese anime kids in medieval dress. Then I googled "Order and Chaos hackers" and found complaints going back to the beginning of the year of similar iTunes robberies for this game and a Texas Hold ‘Em poker game. What the hackers were stealing were credits. Apparently many people don’t feel safe leaving a credit card open on their iTunes account so they purchase gift cards and enter the credits. Someone with a list of iTunes user names and passwords could write a program sweeping through the accounts and downloading all the available credits with purchases for poker chips or extra powers and weapons for this Order and Chaos game. And then they could resell them as virtual goods.

The credit card number that replaced mine was probably just a bogus one to sweep my account into Japan since it only worked for yen purchases, and the point was to steal credits, not actually use the card. At least that’s my theory.

And the other weird thing was I had just read in Steve Jobs’ biography that his favorite place in the world was the Kyoto, Japan gardens, and I had made a mental note to google it and see the pictures, only to wake up and find my iTunes account had gone to Kyoto without me that same night. Odd? Mystical.

My Hollywood Career

My first job was at a movie theater concession stand. The second I turned 15, I got my worker’s permit and applied to the first place that appealed to me. I was hired on the spot. I thought life was always going to be this easy.

An actual crone in the actual ticket booth
of the actual Pitt Theatre

The Pitt Theatre had been my social life since I was 11. We moved to a small North Carolina college town from the outskirts of New York City, and I might as well have landed on another planet. With my coarse, dark hair and harsh accent, I was immediately ostracized by a population of school girls who looked like cheerleaders and blonde boys with Mercury astronaut buzzcuts. So I spent the weekends in the two movie theaters in town, the State and the Pitt, one across the street from the other. My mother would drop me off. I’d see the 1 p.m. show; cross the street and see the 3 p.m. show. Then I would walk a block to the library and wait for my ride home. It was easy to do. A child’s ticket was 25 cents back then. I saw everything, and if the movie at the second theater was not to my taste, I saw the first movie twice. This was a time when you could spend the entire day in a theater. No ushers ushered you out.

The Pitt was the nicer of the two, so I went there first and asked to see the manager. I did not have to answer 20 questions posed by a panel of three. We came to terms immediately. I would report after school every day and work until 6 p.m. On weekends, I would arrive in time for the first show. I would sell candy, popcorn, soda, and snowcones. Snowcones were tricky to make, so I was glad they were seldom ordered. I was thrilled.

The elderly theater owner was also the daytime projectionist, and his elderly wife opened the concession stand each day, stocked the cash drawer and supplies. Another elderly woman sat in the ticket box. By hiring me, the owner’s wife could now leave as soon as I arrived and have the rest of her day free. I worked until the nightshift came on, another husband and wife team who worked as projectionist and concessions and closed the theater after the last show. Another old woman was in the ticket booth at night.

There was seldom anything going on during the 3-6 p.m. shift. I would serve less than a half dozen customers. The theater did inventory by cups, so if I bought a cup at the beginning of my shift, I could refill it several times for free. Candy was carefully counted at the end of the night and had to match the cash drawer, so you couldn’t stuff your face without paying. But there was a nice assortment of 2 cent candies, including Tootsie Roll Pops. A chocolate Tootsie Roll Pop, sucked slow, could last a long time.

From the concession stand, I could hear the movie, and if I opened the door in the back, I could see it. The 3 p.m. show would be underway by the time I had squared away my few customers, and my shift was over halfway through the 5 p.m. show, so I heard all the movies backward those years, the ending first, then the beginning. To this day, I prefer to watch films that way. And I like Tootsie Roll Pops.

Weekends were busier, but less fun because the other woman was there all day, too. I had to share my private little candy world. But I also got to work the much busier evening shift, sometimes as late as 9:30 when the audience for the last movie of the night had settled in.

I worked there for almost two years, until we moved. Whenever someone paid with a Kennedy half dollar, I covered it with my own money and took the Kennedys home. It was a flawed savings plan because my hefty bank deposits of Kennedy halves were exciting to look at, but when you withdrew your money, you didn’t get Kennedy halves back. I guess I could have asked for them, but in the end, my treasure trove didn’t matter. It all went to buy my incredibly bad boyfriend his first car, a Ford Falcon stick shift I couldn’t even drive.

My fondest memories:

The movies changed every week, but “Sound of Music” was so popular, it played for an entire month, and we even added weekend shows. There was a lot of overtime. People dressed up to come see it. I heard the soundtrack so many times, for years afterward I could sing (badly) the entire score.

I lived in a college town, and the Clint Eastwood spaghetti westerns would actually bring in business during my slow day shifts. College boys came to the matinees. They seemed exotic and dangerous and laughed at the over-the-top gun slinging.

On weekends, if there was a kid movie playing, too many parents would drop their kids off unattended. Sometimes they did it for horror movies, too (which looking back, were not that horrible compared to now). The scared kids would hang out at the concession stand with me rather than go inside the theater, all full of fake bluster and bravery.

Once in a rare while, the crones who sat in the ticket booth took time off. Usually the nightshift concession woman took over the tickets and I was called in to work night concessions, but if it was a really big movie, everyone thought she could handle concessions alone better than me, so I got the ticket booth. This was the most exciting thing, to be in the box, the face of the theater, distributing the magic tickets. It was even more heady when kids I knew from school, the cheerleaders and Mercury astronauts, had to stand on line for me to sell them a ticket. Somehow I felt vindicated.

Even though it was released in 1962, the film “Phaedra” with Anthony Perkins and Melina Mercouri played during my concession years. It was a racy movie and something of a local sensation. People almost wore hoods and masks when they came to see it, as if they were in an adult bookstore. The plot was the wife of a Greek shipping tycoon seduces his son from a previous marriage. It was adults-only, but no one thought to ban the 15-year-old girl working the concession stand. Even so, the film seemed so erotically steamy to me, I could only bear to open the back door of the concession booth briefly to see what was going on. Recently I watched it on Netflix and couldn't even sit through it, it was so tedious.

When we moved, this job was the only thing I missed about living in that town. I could have gone far in the movie business.

Hush Up

I used to cover the Hanover County Planning Commission for the Mechanicsville Local. The poor Planning Commission had to approve all the proposals from everyone who wanted to build something new, and listen to the complaints from everyone who had already built what they wanted in the county and didn't want anything else added.

The Nimbys -- Not in My Backyards -- were as united as any political party. Their platform was Stay Away From Me. They usually showed up at the public hearings with the Utopians, those who believed in a world according to their own rules and tastes that protected their God-given "quality of life."

The Nimbys and Utopians shared the same basic argument, no matter what the proposal was. Nobody wanted anything in their neighborhood. Everyone had a quality of life they wanted to preserve, an existence that was like living on the moon: no noise, nothing, for miles around them.

At one hearing, a neighborhood was up in arms about a new store in an existing shopping center that wanted to have gas pumps in its parking lot. It would destroy their quality of life, they said. One man told the Planning Commission that he could already "hear" the Home Depot, which was across the road from the proposed gas pumps, both about a mile from his house.

After the hearing, I drove to the Home Depot to hear what it was saying. What message was it sending out, and how did you hear it? I didn't hear anything coming out of the Home Depot, and I was parked across the street. How could he hear something from a mile away, a mile that crossed dozens of other houses with televisions, music, barking dogs and lawn mower noises?

I tried to write sympathetically about these residents whose quality of life was soon to be destroyed by gas pumps, but then I remembered I lived two doors down from a 7-Eleven with six gas pumps. Two doors! Six pumps! I had forgotten about that because I never heard them, and they were open 24 hours a day.

It made me reflect on what was spoiling my quality of life in bucolic Mechanicsville, what noise did I hear if not the gas pumps?

It was the birds, the damn birds in the woods around my house. They woke up before I did and tweeted with much enthusiasm, waking me up. They disrupted my quality of life.

The second thing I heard was cars. I was always amazed at how many people had to be at work at 5 a.m. because when I woke up at 4:30 a.m. (damn birds! Shuttup!), I heard traffic whizzing by at a steady pace. I blamed it on the early shift at the hospital, which was across the street from the nontalking 7-Eleven gas pumps. The hospital shifts were disrupting my quality of life!

The third thing I heard was NASCAR. I lived close enough to Richmond International Raceway to know when there was a race in progress. All day long, it was rrrr, rrrr, rrrr. But if the television was on and the air conditioner was humming -- which made the pots on my stove vibrate -- I didn't hear race cars. I had to stand outside and listen. Rrrrrr, rrrrrrr, rrrrr. It disrupted the quality of my standing outside and listening life!!

And the last disruption was the train. Decades ago, my suburb was a little town far enough away from Richmond -- if you traveled by Model T or horse -- to have its own train depot. The site of the station was just blocks from my house, and although the train didn't stop there anymore, it still came through the neighborhood several times a day. All the windows in my house rattled when it did, and the engineer blew a horn to let folks know he was coming through, get off the tracks! The train rattled along right beside a newly built, upscale neighborhood of $300,000-plus homes and was much louder than gas pumps, but the train was there first. The people came later with their 4-bedroom McMansions, four to an acre, 2.5 baths, whirlpool tubs, entertainment rooms over the two-car garage, and interest-only mortgages that would soon be underwater when the housing market collapsed.

The Utopians, and even the Nimbys, considered the train, as well as gunshots and buzz saws "country noises," while Home Depot and gas pumps were "city noises." There's a difference, you see.