Yesterday I dropped my kid off at my mother's while I toodled around town and enjoyed some alone time. I have lived in the same suburb of Atlanta now for almost 30 years, so I have seen Lawrenceville, GA transform from a sleepy one-horse town known mainly for being the place where Penthouse magazine publisher Larry Flint got shot to being the county seat of one of the fastest growing counties in the U.S. throughout the Reagan years. When I get in my car I can't help but to play the I-remember-when game and point out how things used to be as opposed to how they are now.
One of Lawrenceville's strip malls that used to house a Food Giant, drug store, furniture rental joint and a barber shop among other things has made a 180-degree turn several times over. Food Giant apparently went belly-up some time in the early 80s and while it was briefly replaced by a mom-and-pop pseudo-equivalent named Quality Foods, and then that store also bailed out and the anchor unit in the strip mall has long since been the site of a Goodwill. Where there once was a drug store there now is a Latin American movie rental place. The furniture rental place is now a Cambianos Cheques and the barber shop remains the same, complete with confederate flag hanging on the wall.
I ventured into the Goodwill mainly out of curiosity to see what I could find. The clientele there is an interesting mix of immigres looking to furnish their homes, Middle American Anglos looking for some trinket they collect and hope to resell on eBay, and grungy high schoolers hoping to replenish their Spring wardrobe a la cheap and esoteric. The area where I live was once a major site for Bosnian refugee relocation after the war and it's not uncommon in the Goodwill to hear employees banter back and forth to each other in Croatian. Incidentally my next-door neighbors are also Bosnian and whenever they have company over, my wife and I enjoy overhearing their music from the Old Country.
Most of what you find at a Goodwill is a combination of acid washed jeans, dated tablewear and lots of Barbie dolls in various stages of undress and dismemberment. Worth a look-see though in my book is the corner all the way in the back where they hide the cassette tapes, books and LPs. Some of the album covers don't even have records in them anymore, but the picture on the cover alone might make the purchase worthwhile. As for me, I spent a good hour in the book section.
I have purchased books from the Goodwill before. You don't find broken Barbies in the book corner like you do in other areas of the store, but you do find their literary equivalent. I spent ten minutes for instance thumbing through Dr. Laura's The Ten Commandments and, had I been interested in continuing my psycho-babble self-help education, which I wasn't, I could have picked up a copy of Men are from Mars; Women are from Venus. Also available was just about anything written by Deepak Chopra.
There are occasionally a few treasures to be found there though. In my personal library is a small paperback I picked up from the Goodwill a few years ago. It's a 1968 edition of Boys & Sex by Wardell B. Pomeroy, Ph.D. It's basically a primer written for teenage boys to enlighten them in the ways of their post-pubescent development. My favorite line is on page 36 in the chapter on masturbation. It reads, "At some time or other it occurs to most boys to try to put their own penises into their mouths." If after reading that you feel frustrated, don't. The good doctor goes on to say that only about one in a hundred boys can perform this iniquitous act and of those who can, very few actually go on to adopt it as their major method of masturbation. Aren't you glad I shared? The book retails used on Amazon for the exhorbitant price of $1.13, but you're not getting my copy. I still haven't read the chapter on petting.
Just kidding.
I've read it.
Okay . . . more than once.
Anyway, on my most recent trip I found a somewhat less lewd but certainly more practical book from the godly people at Reader's Digest entitled Practical Problem Solver: Substitutes, shortcuts, and ingenious solutions for making life easier, published circa 1991. The book is just a treasure trove of hints from Heloise, only it's not just Heloise handing out hints in this oeuvre. It's all kinds of people with all kinds of professional backgrounds. This way the reader is sure to get the information he needs.
The tome is arranged like an encyclopedia with topics ranging in alphabetical order from abdominal flab to zucchini bread. Sure it's chocked full of the more prudent topics like foot odor and brake drums but shortly after discovering the book, I found myself standing in the Goodwill searching for those topics that satiated my more carnal interests. This is due largely to the fact that discount and second-hand stores for some reason bring out the giddy twelve-year-old in me. Go figure.
Unlike Dr. Pomeroy's book, this one offers no tips on masturbation (entries jump from marshmalows to matches with no onanism in between) but there is a diagram of a bra-bearing woman who has ingeniously used a shoelace to tie her bra straps together in order to keep them from falling. Isn't that something?
There isn't an entry for sex unless you count sex education or sexual harassment. For sex education the book advises you talk to kids on their level blah blah blah and for sexual harassment it says suck it up, Toots. Just kidding. It doesn't really say Toots.
Some of the more enlightening and entertaining tips though are about things that, had you not found them in this book, frankly wouldn't have occurred to you. One blurb in the Common Things with Uncommon Uses chapter talks about how to take a plastic bottle and make it into a drill holster to wear on your tool belt. I'm not sure if I like their design though. The accompanying picure shows a guy whose holster allows the entire drill bit to poke out and point directly at his unmentionables. Ouch.
Or get a load of this:
Halloween costume. Turn your youngster into a spaceman or Mr. Bubble by wrapping bubble pack around her arms, legs and trunk.
Right, like that's not an invitation to getting beat up on the playground.
Another suggestion is that several layers of bubble wrap be used on the floor as a guest bed. Please, if I come over to your house and I see you've made my bed out of leftover packing materials you used during your move, I'm just going to assume you'd rather I hole up somewhere else. How makeshifty! And that raucous twelve year old in me that I mentioned earlier wonders what would happen if you and someone you loved were cavorting on this substitute bedding. Can't you just hear it?
Pop . . . Pop . . . Pop pop . . . and then eventually pop pop pop pop pop.
I can't wait to see how my life improves thanks to this book. My plants will be greener, my skin will be softer and my meringues will be fluffier. That stuff is far more practical than what I ever learned from that Dr. Polmeroy.
Well, he did have a good tip on helping people fall asleep faster.
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