Something Was Definitely Missing...

As it turned out, it was squirrels.

When you go away to a different land, there are things that you notice right off the bat that are different from the place where you were raised, and then there are things that are less obvious, that maybe you don't notice at first, that you have to really think about. Or, not think about and they just come to you at some moment when you're thinking about something else. Like perhaps the way ponytails bob and whip around when college-aged girls are out jogging.

For... example.

When Mrs. Apron and I were honeymooning in Bali, one thing we noticed straight away were all the dogs. There were goddamned dogs all over the fucking place-- stray dogs, feral dogs. Dogs eating garbage, dogs sniffing incense and rice and banana peel offerings left out on the sidewalk for this god or that god. Dogs masterfully avoiding getting run over by speeding mopeds containing entire families.

The Bali dogs.

The guidebooks we read mentioned this phenomenon, but we would have noticed anyway, because they were everywhere, and you'd have to have your head stuffed pretty far up your own ass to not notice it. I'm talking, like, smelling-your-own-spleen territory here.

One of the things that was less obvious to notice about Bali was that everybody spoke English. I didn't pick up on it for a couple days but, I can remember energetically bargaining with a street art vendor on a painting I really wanted and thinking to myself, "Holy shit-- here I am, all these thousands of miles away from... anything remotely English or American, and every goddamn person I've run into here speaks at least some English."

Even if it's, "Jut loo-keen, okay!" from a shopkeeper or a somewhat bewildering "un, too, see, por, pibe, six, seben, ten" count-off from a Balinese traditional dance instructor.

Something that was even less obvious than that was the observation that nobody seemed particularly anxious about, well, anything. And maybe that's a stupid thing to say-- anxiety is universal.... I suppose, and I admittedly wasn't sitting at the kitchen table of a Balinese couple trying to make ends meet, but you know how you can walk along the streets of Boston or Philly or D.C. or New York and see some anxious-looking motherfuckers? Brows furrowed, hands thrust deep into pockets, eyelids absolutely creased in worry? I don't know, maybe I'm just a dumb tourist, but I didn't see... that. And it led me to think that maybe anxiety isn't as universal as we may be tempted to think it is. Maybe it's more of a Western construct. Maybe it's manufactured by Woody Allen and Pfizer to keep us all in check and in analysis and in the pharmacy lines.

In Ireland, the thing I noticed immediately was that the cars were different.

Renault Clio

Skoda Octavia

Peugeot 308

Nissan Micra

Volkswagen Caddy

Toyota Avensis

Ford Mondeo

Opel Vectra

Renault Laguna

(And those are the ones I remember, just off the top of my head. Which is... desperately sad.)

It wasn't until two days into our trip when I remarked to my wife, while strolling through the National Botanic Gardens in Glasnevin, Dublin, that, as far as I could tell, there weren't any squirrels in Ireland.

Which, for a native of the Philadelphia area, is disconcerting. And wonderful.

Buzz-Cut

I can have an ethical dilemma, even about hedges.

During our honeymoon in Bali, ethical dilemmas confronted us everywhere we went. In the artsy city of Ubud, it was the ethical dilemma about whether or not we ought to haggle on the street with a vendor with three teeth and five children to get an $11 painting down to $6.

In beach-front Lovina, it was the ethical dilemma of whether or not we should participate in the environmentally unfriendly, exploitative tourist-trap of going out into the Pacific Ocean in a tiny little boat, racing a bunch of other tiny little boats crammed with a bunch of sweaty Australians for the chance of seeing a few dolphins.

Back in Ubud, it was the ethical dilemma of whether or not to spend time at a dog shelter, playing with dogs we knew we would never even be permitted to adopt, even if we were crazy enough to do so. I fell in love with a dog named Bruno, and I donated $25.00, and bought a bumper sticker that said, "I <3 Bali Dogs" that my Focus wore proudly until the red heart faded to pink, and we traded the car in for my wife's Fit.

"Look," I would say to my wife as we fought ass-crack sweat tramping down unfamiliar streets, trying not to get hit by mopeds or eaten by feral dogs, "I just want to have a good time-- I don't want to have an ethical dilemma about everything."

An every-now-and-then ethical dilemma can, of course, be a good thing. It means we're not sociopaths, and that's kind of a good thing not to be. Too much of that horseshit, though, can be mentally and physically draining, as we found out many miles away in Indonesia.

Which brings me back to Pennsylvania, and our hedges.

We bought our house February of 2009. Our house is a charming little twin, built in 1928-- good bones. It has no lawn to speak of, certainly none that requires mowing-- it's all pachysandra. There are, however, hedges that ring the edge of our property, and run all the way down the side of our house, separating it from the neighbor's abode, and these hedges do require some suburbanite upkeep.

Otherwise, neighbors look at you. They keep the tsk-tsk'ing quiet, but their looks are loud.

Since we moved in, I have been tending to our hedges with a pair of manual hedge-clippers. You know the type-- they look like gigantic scissors. In 2009, these fuckers worked like the dickens. Nice and sharp, they sliced through those leaves and little twigs like a champ. Last year, I noticed that they had definitely lost some of their vim and vigor-- or I had. Really, though, I blame the hedge-clippers. Their blades were dull, the nut-and-bolt that held them together was loose and tenuous. Sure, I could have taken them to some hardware store and had them sharpened, probably for half the cost of what I paid for them in the first place, but I didn't think that was very smart. So, like a smart person, I persisted in trimming my hedges throughout the summer of 2010 with dull, fucked up hedge-clippers.

This late spring and summer, which has been unusually hot and unusually rainy, I have trimmed the hedges three times already. And, from the first snip, I knew the manual hedge-clippers days were numbered. On Sunday, I noticed that our hedges, after being trimmed last weekend, were sprouting bizarre, wayard leaf-arms, extending from the even base.

"Listen," I said to my wife, "I can't do it anymore. I'm going to ask my father if I can borrow his fucking electric hedge-trimmer."

Because, really? I didn't want to have an ethical dilemma about it anymore.

Sure, I'm still relatively young and (don't snigger) strong-- and, really, I should be able to take care of our hedges with a set of manual hedge-clippers. But, in temperatures that routinely hover at around 90, with humidity constantly over 80% and little gnats landing in your ears and sweat stinging your eyes-- why the fuck should I? Because an electric trimmer wastes electricity? Because it adds to the already increasingly nascent amount of noise pollution that is plaguing our neighborhood?

Look, whether I use the electric trimmer or not-- this one's still power-washing her deck with a gasoline-based machine, this one's using a power-mower, this one's buzzing her grass with a weed-whacker. There are rotating blades and little engines all over the fucking place. And, if one more is going to help me get the hedges done in half-an-hour instead of an hour-and-a-half so that I can spend more time doing something I actually give half-a-turd about: I'm all for it.

My father dropped off the electric trimmer Sunday afternoon.

"Here you go, Mummy," he said, handing it over to me like it was a golden calf, "and here is the power wire (see: extension cord) it's 100 feet."

"Thanks," I said.

"Now, Mummy-- you have used it before?" he asked, his brow furrowed in anticipatory concern.

Desperate to be spared of a lengthy tutorial in his loud and dubious version of English I lied and said, "Oh, yeah-- a couple times."

"Okay, good-- but listen, this is a trick I learned from Dr. Porter-- always, always run the cord through your belt loop, that way it is impossible for you to slice the cord with the blade."

Oh, Dr. Porter. Our next-door neighbor when we were growing up. An ancient, five-foot-tall troll-like humanoid with thick, black glasses, a nose that looked like the hood of a Volkswagen, and suspenders that hiked up his trousers to his nipple-line. He used to refer to my mother (to her face) as "The Bod" and, in casual conversation, he would routinely ask neighborhood kids if they were "getting any." He was a thoroughly ridiculous individual, but, nevertheless I heeded his safety warning. After all, how could you ignore a self-preservation tip from a man who fell off an eight-foot ladder into a honeysuckle bush below while trying to get a raccoon out of a tree with a broomstick?

No ethical dilemmas for that sonofabitch.

Travel Plans

My wife's funny.

We're trying to decide where to go on vacation this summer.

"We should go on one last big trip before we have a baby," she says. That sounds reasonable enough.

"Great," I reply. Where?"

"Oh, I don't know. Somewhere on a plane."

"Ah."

My wife loves to try and get me to do things I hate doing-- like recycling. And flying. She's not particularly dying to travel somewhere intercontinentally, but she wants to fly somewhere with me-- to get me out of my comfort zone. She feels this is good for me, the way that fathers feel that football is good for their pale, gawky, awkward sons. This sometimes covert, sometimes overt prodding is very similar to her insistence that I hold other peoples' children. I know part of the reason she wants me to do it is so that I get comfortable doing it, so that I'll hold our own child when we have one, and part of the reason she does it is so she can get that warm, gushy, schmoopy feeling a woman can only get when she sees her husband cradling a child, thus proving that he's not a total immature, knuckle-dragging, incompetent, retarded asshole. Every woman wants not to think that about her husband, and, even if it's true, no man really looks like that when he's holding a child, unless he's holding it upside-down, or over a balcony railing (no offense to the recently deceased).

We were originally planning on returning to Maine, like we had done last summer, only we would venture a little farther North than we did last year, to explore more of the state. I have recently been reading "Northwest Passage," an extremely poorly-written (lots of misuse of the contraction "it's" which is just unforgivable in a published work) biography of Stan Rogers, and then the idea hit me.

"Hey! Why don't we go to Maine for a little bit and then, you know, just keep going-- up to Halifax or Nova Scotia. We can go to a different country-- without flying!"

At first, my wife saw this for what it was: a totally transparent cop-out by an errant, insipid coward, but, the more I talked the idea up, the more it began to grow on her. Her parents had been up that way for a wedding recently and had nice things to say about the area. Bob, our friend who is building a master closet for us had been there with his wife and son and loved it.

"You know, instead of doing the drive, which friends of mine have done and they say it's lovely, but long, you can catch the auto ferry from Portland."

My wife's ears perked up at this. Here was an opportunity to go where I wanted to go, but to make me do another thing I don't like: travel by water.

Several years ago, we took the auto ferry from Plattsburgh, New York to Vermont and there are a couple pictures of me clutching onto the railing for dear life with a wince on my face that gives the impression some unseen bully had just smeared fresh blueberries all over my pants and called me a "faggot" but I was told I still had to smile for the picture. I think I ended up negotiating with my wife that, if I made it for the first half of the trip (probably around six minutes) that I could sit in the car for the remainder of the watery voyage.

I am very well aware that I am going to die one day, probably of a respiratory-related ailment, and though I'd like to put that off for as long as possible through constant calls to my doctor and a steady diet of maintenance inhalers, I am also pretty fanatical about avoiding dangerous situations that may hasten my demise. These situations include, but are in no way limited to:

Flying.

Taking the train.

Going out on a boat.

Flying.

Mowing the lawn.

Repairing the roof.

Walking during a thunderstorm.

Driving during a thunderstorm.

Flying during a thunderstorm.

Shoveling snow.

Getting into altercations or arguments with unknown entitites.

Parking near a BRINKS armored car.

Visiting an ATM after 7pm.

Eating the contents of any can with a visible dent.

Consuming food products past the expiration date.

Consuming medication past the expiration date.

Using public lavatories.

So I try to minimalize my chances of early demise by avoiding as many of those, and other, activities as I can, and yet, I still do lots of them-- though I'm pretty diligent about the dented can rule. You can easily spot me in the supermarket: I'm the guy obsessively fondling every goddamn can in the aisle like I'm a blind fetishist or something. But I'm really not at all crazy about flying, especially if there's no pressing reason to other than to get me to do it more (and of course, statistically, the more frequently you do it, the greater are your chances of dying while doing it-- so there) especially right before we're about to start trying to conceive. It'll make for an absolutely awful local news interview with my mom or sisters after we die over the Atlantic:

"And they were just about to start trying to have a baby.... *Boo hoo hoo!*"

Jesus-- fucking awful-- is that what I want the community to hear about me and my wife? During our honeymoon flight from Jakarta to Bali, the plane started going up and down like a fucking Yo-Yo, and that was all I could think about-- the inevitable, terrible interview sob-story that the vultures would just eat up:

"And *sniff sniff* they were on their honeymoon!"

Awful. Just fucking awful.

No thank you. I'll take that goddamn auto ferry, though. When's the last time one of those went down?

No, seriously-- will someone wikipedia that shit for me? I'm too scared to do it myself.

Indonesian Air

Another airplane crashed in Indonesia. This, of course, brings back fond memories of our honeymoon.

In May of 2007, Mrs. Apron and I celebrated our marriage in Bali, Indonesia.

We called it our "Balimoon."

It's hard for me now to even believe it happened, but there is plenty of photographic evidence to prove that it did.

Like all poor twentysomethings, (at the time, I was making $11.00-an-hour as an EMT, and my cute new wife was a graduate student), who want to do something extraordinary, we took incredible advantage of the kindness and comparative wealth of our parents. Specifically in this instance, her parents. More specifically, their frequent flyer miles. If we hadn't, the trip would have cost us approximately $9,000 in airfare, and, instead of having a Balimoon, we would have ended up having a Trentonmoon.

Mrs. Apron desperately wanted to go to Bali, almost exclusively because of her deep love of Balinese gamelan music, a percussive, rhythmic, beautiful music that Mrs. Apron played in ensembles in Pittsburgh and in Rochester, New York. Ever flexible in the heady days of our courtship and engagement, I agreed to go to Bali.

Before I ever looked at a map.

Bali is very far away from Pennsylvania, for those of you who are geographical nitwits like me. It's fucking very far, people. The first time I actually realized where it was, I distinctly felt a slight lump in my throat, and other one near my testicles. It wasn't cancer, though. I had it checked.

I can remember sitting in the back of ambulance #402, my partner doing his architecture homework in the driver's seat, the radio sitting on the stretcher and being on the phone with our travel agent trying to schedule the trip to and from Bali.

"Well, we can get you from Philadelphia to Bangkok, or JFK to Vietnam, but that flight would have to leave a day earlier, and you would miss your connecting flight to Jakarta. There's another option, of course, but you don't want to go through Russia..."

My head was spinning. What the fuck was this guy talking about? I didn't want to go to any of these places, let alone Bali. I mean, I was sure it was going to be beautiful and worth it and there would be sex when we got there and everything but, wasn't there a direct flight from here to there and an injection I could receive so I could sleep through the whole thing?

Alas, there was not.

We flew out from Philadelphia to Washington, D.C. We had less than forty minutes to board a plane to Japan. Then one to Jakarta. Then one to Bali. On the way back, it was Bali to Singapore, then Amsterdam, then Philadelphia. This, friends, is what happens when you use frequent flyer miles in an effort to circumnavitage the globe.

There was a big clusterfuck in the airport at Jakarta. I don't remember exactly what the problem was, my wife probably will-- I have little head for details, but they weren't crazy about letting us on the plane from Jakarta to Bali. So they didn't. We missed our flight, diminishing our chances at experiencing Bali and cross-time-zone nookie.

"Next one. Very sorry."

Well, "next one" came in and went-- we could watch the planes coming and wenting from the open-air gate. People got on, people got off. Bye-bye, plane! Every twenty minutes or so, an Indonesian person in a uniform jacket would walk in and stare at us. Clusters of Indonesians in uniform shirts would cluster around a single phone, talking, staring at us, even pointing at us.

"Yes, they're the ones with SARS," I'm sure they were saying. "The short one with big boobies and the tall Woody Allen. Take them as prisoners."

Now, I don't like flying. And I like it even less when there are complications. My wife was flipping out, but eventually she resigned herself to the probable conclusion that we were not going to Bali, and that we were going to have to live in Jakarta for the rest of our lives because, apparently, we were un-planeworthy. She laid down on a bench in the airport and put my hat over her face, wanting to shut out the world. I stood up and walked over to the edge of the gate so I could watch the action on the tarmac.

You're not going to believe what I saw.

Around five police officers or army officers, I really couldn't tell you which, were standing on the tarmac of this pinkydinky airport. There was a huge plane, sitting at the gate. The police officers were systematically searching, and I mean patting down, like on COPS, the flight crew and the flight attendants before permitting them to enter the plane. The captain and co-captain of the plane were standing there, on the tarmac, with their arms fully extended outward and their legs shoulder-width apart as they were being felt up by big, scary guys with guns.

And I thought, hmpf. Why do they feel the need to do that to the flight crew? And, if there really is a need to do that to the flight crew, then I'm very scared. And, if there is a need to do that to the flight crew, then surely there's a need to do that to all the passengers. And, if there is a need to do that to the flight crew and all the passengers, then I am very, very scared.

I've always been very, very.... very scared of plane crashes and air disasters. In an effort to master my childhood fear of airplane accidents, I obsessed over news coverage of the PAN-AM Flight 103 bombing over Lockerbie, Scotland in 1988. I gathered my mother, father, my two sisters, and my sister's friend who had the misfortune to be spending some time at our house on that particuar day, into the living room for a funeral service for the Lockerbie victims. I had a CASIO keyboard set to pipe organ mode on which I played a slow dirge. I had ten "victims" of the disaster (Playmobil action figures wrapped individually in a tissue) all lined up, as the real victims were on the news footage my parents *ahem* allowed me to watch continuously. The living room victims were carefully loaded into a 1/24 scale model hearse (that I had spraypainted gold, for some reason-- Saturday Night Fever hearse?) and that concluded the service for the Playmobil figurines. Therapy sessions should have began the very next morning, but I just went to school.

So, my fear of perishing in an airline disaster/terror attack/explosion has deep roots, and the sight of airline crews being methodically searched on the tarmac of a country that has 18 different Wikipedia pages devoted to air disasters was somewhat disconcerting to me. But I didn't have much time to think about it, as a mustachioed, swarthy man in a Garuda Airlines short-sleeve uniform shirt came sauntering up to me.

"Sir, you flight is ready. Come please. Quickly please."

I pointed to the plane just outside.

"It's not that one, is it?"

I grabbed my wife's hand and held it tightly as we followed this man down two flights of stairs until, oh my fucking God, we were actually on the tarmac. A silly little jitney truck came barreling up to us at a high rate of speed.

"In please," said the small mustache man.

We got in and the fucking thing went racing across the tarmac, headed towards a Garuda Indonesia plane off in the distance.

"We will make it," the lunatic driving assured us, grinning. I wondered if he had been searched yet today.

We did make it, both on the plane and to Bali, though this flight from Jakarta to Bali encountered heavy turbulence that even had normal people freaked out and letting out gasps and even a shriek or two. For my part, I wanted to die with dignity. I just held onto my beloved's hand with a force that probably turned most of its bones to a cocaine-like consistency.

"Okay, you're actually hurting me now."

I wanted to say, "What's the difference? When this thing explodes, the sudden change in air pressure is going to make the gasses inside our bodies expand to four times their normal volume, causing our lungs to swell and then collapse."

But I didn't. I just loosened my grip. A little.