average life

I made a quick cell phone call to my mom. “I just want to you to tell Dad that I am getting tires.”

I sat in the waiting area of the tires store in Tucker. I’d been informed that the wait would be about an hour-and-a-half and I was wondering how I would fill my time. There was a McDonalds close-by and I was kind of hungry, but I feel weird eating inside a McDonalds. It would be perfectly acceptable to order a Big Mac through a drive-through and then park in an empty space to eat it while listening to boring DJ banter on the radio, but to voluntarily sit down and eat lunch in a yellow and red painted room supervised by a slightly-smaller-than-real-live fiberglass clown was a bit too ridiculous, even for me. Yes, the parking lot would be better, but without a car, the drive-through wouldn’t be an option. Wendy’s was across the street and I thought that a pig-tailed redhead was a desirable alternative. I’d probably go there, but I didn’t want to spend my entire hour-and-a-half with a cheap quarter pounder.

I spotted a mall and decided that there surely was an electronics store where I could idle away my time feeling the thinness of the new iPods, mentally mocking the new Zunes, and wondering what sized pants would be necessary to smuggle out a flat screen TV.

Upon entering this mall, I realized that there would be no such electronics store here. This was an older mall, surely built when this side of Atlanta had been considered the new “it” place for development. Development apparently didn’t happen and the mall dwindled to a Macy’s, a Sears, and mostly no-name clothing stores. I had crossed two busy roads to get here and would have settled for a food court with a Chic-fil-A, but even that was looking unlikely.

I saw a Borders Express. Apparently a smaller Borders in a mall provides people with a much faster shopping experience than a large Borders in a strip mall, thus warranting the “Express” surname. I was about the pass it by when I spotted Michael Crichton’s latest book on a doorway display with a large “40 percent off” sign. Critchon at 40 percent off? The doorway had accomplished its goal and I was in the store.

I haven’t read Critchton in years. It all started with the movie, Jurassic Park in the early nineties. I watched it at a theater in Montgomery with a friend that I saw once every six months or so. His dad called my parents to make sure taking me to a PG-13 movie would be appropriate. I was terrified that they would say no. The movie theater closest to my home town was miles away and it was a rare, almost Christmas-like event to go see a movie. My mom approved and we set off for the theater. We arrived late and we were forced to sit in the front row. For the next hour-and-a-half my mind was placed perfectly in the hands of a masterful Stephen Spielberg. I screamed at the right moments, I laughed at the right moments, and I’m pretty sure I even said “whoa!” in awe when the brachiosauri made their debut.

I became enthralled with dinosaurs for the next year-and-a-half. I was older than most dinosaur enthusiasts (being 12 instead of 6), but my age opened up the possibilities of ordering the novel Jurassic Park from the “mature readers” book order form at school. When it came 6-to-8 weeks later, I devoured it in a few days. I then read it again…and again. It made me want to study dinosaurs and contribute to dangerous science. I felt grown up reading such a thick book with its adult situations, violence, and language. But when my mom said she wanted to read it, I decided that it was probably too adult for her sensibilities. Starting with the prologue and a Pilot pen, I read through the entire novel, censoring it. I put brackets around the volence and inked out the swear words. My methodology was this: If the sentence made sense with the omission of the offending word, it was left as is, but if the new black smudge on the page created grammatical nonsense, it was replaced by a benign, handwritten substitute. Thus, on page 13 Mike Bowman’s lines was changed to “Oh, for (scribble) goodness sake. There are no snakes on a beach.”

I thought about this as I flipped through the pages of Crichton’s latest novel. Something about DNA and monkeys. I continued through the store. I found the short stories of David Sedaris. I looked at the monkey DNA book in one hand and Dress Your Family In Corduroy and Denim in the other and I realized how much my tastes had changed. One was a action-packed techno-thriller and the other was the memoirs of an author the made his living writing about how humorously mundane his family was. I realized that buying both would be too expensive and I was required to choose between the two. After stalling by thumbing through the PostSecret book, I ditched the monkey book in the travel section and proceeded to checkout.

I realized the significance of what just transpired. Other than angering some store clerk when he or she discovered a misplaced bestseller next to Zagat’s Guide to Italy, I had made a conscious decision about who I was and what I liked. I liked books that were promoted by NPR instead of 15 second ads on the Sci-Fi channel, books that had more depth, that were more literary. I stood in line as the woman before me bought a Danielle Steele-esque paperback. If only she knew the joys of witty, self-depricating short stories! There was something wrong with her credit card and my eyes started to drift around the store. They fell upon a “bargain books” rack and saw Michael Critchton’s previous book for on sale for $6. Something about evil corporations and dangerous science….

“Will it just be these two books for you sir?” the clerk asked me.

“Yep, that’ll be it,” I replied.