I like to torture myself by looking into things I can’t afford and even if I could the change would probably freak me out. Yesterday, I was using my time valuably — entering dates and destinations on kayak.com just to see how much it would cost for a family of four to fly to London or Amsterdam or Dublin in June or July or next Friday for Spring break. You never know. There could be a last minute sale and the whole family could get tickets for under $1,000.
The lowest price was $6,000 to fly to Dublin, Ireland in July. I file that away in case I’m ever on the Price is Right and because I want to be prepared for when planets align themselves just so and we win $6,000 in the lottery we never play, except for that one day that I open my fortune cookie after a big greasy Chinese buffet, and the fortune is something stupid like “Eat your vegetable so you grow up big and strong like Popeye.”
I flip it over, still hopeful for a feelgood. Maybe I’ll get lucky and find the translation for a really awesome Chinese swear. But when I flip it over and look, it’s just the translation for noodle, which is “麵條”. How am I supposed to call people a noodle in Chinese if I don’t know how to pronounce 麵條? It’s useless for road rage.
I feel desperate to extract something from the writing on this tiny little paper, even though there is very little to work with and I’ve read it all twice, like when I’m in a hotel bathroom and I start reading the labels on the complimentary shampoo and hand soap to take my mind off the fact that I’m not on my own toilet reading the same old comics in December’s New Yorker.
I read the lucky numbers on the fortune and something magical happens, something exciting, that involves glitter rainbows and choirs of angels carried in on unicorns. Something I wasn’t expecting, but was hoping for.
My chair elevates…just a little…but not so much that I fall and bang my head and forget the lucky numbers on the back of the fortune, or I would never think to play them and win the lottery for $4 million. Too bad I happen to play the same numbers as a bunch of other people who had Chinese food that day. After taxes we each take home $6,000.
So I buy tickets for Dublin or London or Amsterdam and start imaging what it would be like once we leave the airport, our last contact with our motherland, and we start walking around the city of a country we know nothing about. And I panic because it’s sensory overload and I don’t know my way around and I get lost and all I can find is Big Ben but I can’t remember the way back to our hotel from Big Ben and everyone is smoking so I don’t want to ask them for directions, as if I could hear them over the loud traffic and honking and “get out of the road, you wanker!”
Me? Are they yelling at me? They are! So I yell back, “You…you…noodle!!”
Quickly, I mentally edit the destination from London to Dublin. You can have a do-over when you’re just working it out in your imagination. I change the destination as if it were Dublin all along. Dublin, where it’s not raining and no one is in a hurry and honking because they are all drinking and happy and singing songs that I don’t know the words to and I’m trying to sing along and get into the touristy groove, but I feel like I’m back in school again — faking the words to everything from the Pledge of Allegiance to the Our Father to Mary Had a Little Hand.
It’s not that I don’t have an appreciation for Irish folk songs, I just can’t remember the words to anything. Even with my Irish last name and pale skin, covered in a waxy layer of SPF 85, just like them, they still shun me because I can’t sing the ol’ Irish pub songs, or play a harp, or clog dance. They think I won’t, but I simply can’t. And so they diss me. These people, who are the nicest, most welcoming people on Earth, diss me because I’m an imposter. My genes are diluted. I’ve failed them and their entire country.
I try to explain, “But I’m one-quarter Irish! One-quarter!!” and I start sectioning off my body with my hands, quartering myself like a poster of a cow in butcher shop. Shoulders up, I show them, “See?” It doesn’t work. I could have gotten this red hair from a bottle. These frizzy curls from…okay, they accept that they are real, but they still think I’m an imposter so I start telling them about the gnomes in my garden. “I have gnomes! I have three gnomes! I move them around…”
They start to believe me. The creases in their lips that frame their crooked teeth soften. They are one garden gnome story away from fully accepting me, but suddenly, as my luck would have it, someone on the other side of the bar starts singing Danny Boy and they all turn their backs to me. Everyone is focused on the sad song. It’s rude to speak during a sad song. I don’t dare say, “I know this one! I do!” I just…don’t…know…the words…
Ashamed, I grab my boys and my husband, and we quietly tiptoe across the squeaky wooden, beer soaked floor of the pub and gently close the door of our heritage behind us and look at each other as if to say, “This sucks. I want to go home.”
That was yesterday.
Today, I’m googling homes we can’t afford, looking for open houses for homes with 1,000 more square feet, a better layout, a door to the backyard, a patio and a fence, so I can let my fat dog out.
I just need the right fortune cookie and we’ll have the down payment so we can move right in and then put this house on the market. Then just after we sell it and we can’t go back we find that the new house is haunted and the grass isn’t greener. It’s not even green. In fact, it’s full of holes. An extensive tunnel system, built by an eager, prolific nation of chipmunks, is about to cave any day and the property will get swallowed up into the earth! Any day! I’ll wish I had my old house back. I’ll wish none of this ever happened.
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