Odd-funny

I saw an ad a few weeks ago about a free and helpful booklet you could order that gives information for travelers in various vacation spots around the country. It's called "Where to go when you have to go." Something about that tickled my weird sense of humor - maybe it was the sample calling card to give business owners to explain your 'overactive bladder' and ask for the use of their non-public restroom. Anyway, we got on the internet to find out more information (giggle, giggle) as the ad invited us to. I'm not really sure, anymore, why it seemed so funny at the time. Laughing all the way, we ordered the booklet. And it came today.

Now Mark is wondering what sort of weird list he is going to appear on in cyberspace.

Anyway, it all brought back stories about our whacky California next-door neighbor, Jane. She was full of advice on this topic – where to go if you needed to go. She thought real estate offices and new car dealers were great places - usually had clean restrooms without the waiting that you sometimes find at more touristy spots. A fanatic clean nut, she wouldn't use regular public restrooms, a habit that fit with her 'high maintenance' personality. We once invited her along on an excursion to a botanical garden in Berkeley, at least a 2 hour drive away, and she announced, in the middle of a traffic jam coming off the Bay Bridge, that she had taken a diuretic before she left and we would need to find a suitable restroom soon! (No, she didn’t have high blood pressure or any other medical issue requiring such medication.) The obvious McDonald's fast food place wouldn't do - it had to be something less-used. We got lost, of course, first trying to find a place and then finding a way back on the freeway. What a mess.

But that's not the only topic for our 'Jane' stories. Another time she was talking about traveling and the inventiveness she has employed, as a single woman traveling alone, to still enjoy company on her trips. On a vacation to Boston she contacted a realtor and feigned interest in buying a house in the area - and conned the poor woman into days of showing her the neighborhoods and local attractions and buying her lunch. (I said she was weird, but did I mention ‘criminally insane?’)

One of our favorite 'Jane' stories is about when she was looking for people to rent individual rooms in a house she owned - and was putting up flyers in churches on Sunday morning (when they were open and there were people around, of course.) She didn't go to the service, mind you, just snuck in afterwards to put her notice up. One church was hosting a congregational breakfast (a $3.00 per person fundraiser) when she went in (her usual attire was shabby, to say the least, and she hadn't 'put on airs' to run this flyer-errand at all, but, oh well…) and she suddenly felt hungry… and the bacon and eggs and pancakes smelled sooooo good... So she dug into her pants pocket and came up with $0.58 and asked the nearest official-looking person how much food she could get for what she was holding out to him in the palm of her hand. What could he do? He told her to eat her fill, and "God bless." And she did. She owned 3 houses at the time and privately claimed to us that she was one of the richest women in Santa Rosa – which was patently untrue but at least she didn’t qualify for a free breakfast as a charity case.

She proudly recounted other instances of ‘saving’ money. Like the time she returned a set of dishes she’d had for 9 years – and demanded, and got, a full refund. Or the time she decided to go to a San Francisco Giants game with only $30 in her pocket to see if she could get a scalped ticket and parking for that amount. (I think she ended up paying nearly that for parking and then snuck in somehow and kept switching seats. Not sure how she got the hot dog, but we probably don't want to know.) So we had sufficient evidence, and should have been forewarned, but we were still surprised the time she invited us to a movie – her treat to pay us back for all the times we’d invited her along and bought her lunch and had her over for dinner etc. – and instead of just paying for the tickets, handed Mark a $10 bill and told him to buy the tickets for the two of us at ‘that’ window while she bought her own ticket at ‘this’ window… Movie tickets were pricey in northern California - $8 apiece.

When last we saw Jane, she was standing outside our CA house after we'd put it up for sale and during the realtor’s Open House, telling prospective buyers/neighbors that they had to be ‘white’ and couldn't own a dog. ("I have to look out for myself," she told our realtor. "No one else is going to.")

I guess not.