Life Story Short on Excitement

Friday, February 24, 2006

Page 15

AT THE SIDEBAR (Column)

Life Story Short on Excitement

By J’AMY PACHECO

Hello, and welcome to my mini-autobiography.

I’ll be the first to admit that I’m not the most interesting person in the world. I’m a wife and mother, a writer, and a rather non-committed housekeeper.

So what makes me think I should write an autobiography? Because it’s the thing to do, apparently!

Do a Google search under “write autobiography,” and you may be surprised to see how many companies are out there waiting to get their hands on your life story. I know this because I ran across one site by accident, and discovered that if I spent just two minutes telling the company about myself, they would help me turn myself into a book. Curiosity led to the Google search, and now I realize that recording the life stories of ordinary humans is a big business. And you don’t have to be interesting to qualify!

An autobiography could be sort of fun. For me, anyway; I doubt anybody would have that much fun reading it. I have, however, had a few unusual experiences that might make for interesting reading.

For example, I was in a beauty pageant once. I was younger, thinner and blonder then, but I didn’t win. While I did okay on stage — even in the swimsuit — I bombed the interview. It’s been 30 years, and I’m still embarrassed about what a dolt I was.

I also once drove a police car. I even had a passenger — a big police dog that was contained in the back seat and barked furiously at me the whole time.

I didn’t steal the car — a police officer told me to drive it back to the station when I was on a ride-along. He even gave me some helpful advice: “Don’t crash, or I’ll lose my job.”

The hardest part about that experience was pretending not to see the nice old lady driver who tried to flag me down for directions. Fortunately, when she followed me back to the station, some officers had the good sense to stop her and render aid.

Once, I accidentally locked a police officer out of his patrol car while he was responding to a late night burglary in a remote industrial park. Oops.

In high school, I held a record in the Girl’s Two Mile Run for a year. I wasn’t a stellar runner, so it really ticked off my coach when I lettered in track.

Years ago, I took a scuba certification course while working temporarily in New England. I was the only female in a class of men from the Special Forces Reserves, and we took our first open water dive in the waters of Newport, Rhode Island, on a day when a hurricane raged off the coast. We celebrated our graduation (and survival) by drinking flaming zambuca and eating the coffee beans that floated in the glass.

I went scuba diving at night once. It was dark, scary, and I’ll never do it again.

I once won a pillow by singing in a talent show, and I twirled a baton for my junior high school’s band.

Years ago, I met a Saudi Arabian prince at a Las Vegas casino. He bought Dom Perignon for everyone at the craps table. He treated a bunch of us to dinner, then decided to treat the whole restaurant. I signed a lot of the dinner checks for him.

I coached a soccer team for 6-year-old girls for a season, and once was a passenger in a small airplane that flew low over an erupting volcano. The experiences were equally frightening.

I’ve been interviewed on television twice, saluted by actor Charlie Sheen once, and got the Jack London Award from the California Writers Club.

I had the good fortune to get to write for the Roy Rogers family, and sometimes wrote AS them. The nicest thing anybody ever said to me was that I sounded just like Dale.

But here’s my big claim to fame: I invented Google. Not the concept, but the name. When I was a teenager, in the 1970s, my younger brothers one day annoyed me to the point that I lost control and apparently started speaking in tongues. I clenched my fists and shrieked, “Would you two stop your googling?”

My brother Kev turned to my brother Ken and said, “Ken, were we googling?” That story has been repeated enough to have earned a solid place in our family history.

But is that enough to fill an autobiography? Nah. I think I’ll leave that up to the people who have really interesting lives — like the police officer who once got locked out of his car while responding to a late night burglary…