It Looked Different on the Model - Laurie Notaro [75]
Dear Homeland Security:
This is going to sound crazy.
I bid on a kitchen timer on eBay. A guy outbid me three times for different kitchen timers, and I clicked on his feedback to see how much he usually paid for items to judge how high of a bidder he was. On his feedback, I saw that the man buys nothing but kitchen timers. At least 150 of them since the middle of May when he joined eBay, and that’s just what he has feedback on. All kinds of kitchen timers and darkroom timers. He buys nothing but timers. If anyone went into Bed Bath & Beyond and bought 150 kitchen timers in one shot, someone would think that was odd. But on eBay, he buys one at a time from different people all over the world, mostly old ones. No digital ones. Probably nothing, but I thought I should mention it.
Hopefully, he’s an art student working on a kitchen-timer installation. My friend Mary suggested he was boiling thousands of eggs and was perhaps the Easter Bunny. I know that’s probably not very funny. But I already feel like Lucy Ricardo even writing this email, so that’s all.
Thanks,
Laurie Notaro
And then I put the email in my “saved” folder, but after writing it, I still didn’t know what to do. One day I thought it was crazy, and the next I was convinced the person was a terrorist.
My husband, however, was not so unsure of what to do with the email and told me point-black that he considered the whole thing “an episode of insanity.” I took his comment to heart, until I realized that we’ve lived in this town for years and he still doesn’t know how to get to the movies and is unable to change lanes without my “help.”
“I don’t even remotely understand how someone who bid against you on eBay suddenly became a terrorist,” he argued. “For all you know, he’s building a Kitchen Timer Museum.”
“A hundred and fifty timers, of all shapes and sizes, in fourteen days?” I replied. “That’s a pretty hasty Kitchen Timer Museum. I wouldn’t pay to see a bunch of kitchen timers slapped together. No one would, especially not Germans, who are masters at design!”
“I think this is all crazy talk, and I, for one, am against sending that email!” my husband informed me.
Which was fine. He was entitled his opinion; I’m cool with that. I just want to see him try to get to the 3:45 showing of the next Kate Winslet movie on his own. Especially if he has to change lanes.
I found another kitchen timer, this one a Westclox bakelite timer that was cool but looked pretty beat up, figuring that I could not only get it cheap but that there was no way any curator of the Kitchen Timer Museum would consider it for a collection. There was no way: It was missing a hand. I positioned myself at my keyboard in the last minutes of the auction; I bid; and a second before the auction ended, someone outbid me.
KOOKAROO knows no bounds, I thought, my fury building, my face flushing. KOOKAROO is selfish. I wonder if KOOKAROO ever thought for a moment that someone might not feel like eating burned chocolate chip cookies after forgetting what time she put them in the oven when she got a little carried away with some toenail cutting, and frankly, even though I understand it’s a matter of perspective, burned cookies are a bigger bummer than not having the right parts for your stupid bomb.
Sorry. But that’s the truth.
I hate you, KOOKAROO, I thought. I really, really hate you. Can’t you even let one other person buy a timer? How many timers does it take to make a bomb, anyway? How many parts do you need? Don’t you have enough for your jihad jamboree by now? I hope every one of your virgins looks like Tori Spelling. I really, really do. You deserve that. I hope they all look like praying mantises with lopsided bocce-ball boobs and a bristly coat.
Lummox.
Oooops.
Send.
Believe it or not, I actually won a timer later