Marriage
is a continuous learning experience, but there are a lot of things I still don’t
understand and some survival techniques that I’ve learned.
One
thing came to mind today while looking for my shoes - pillows. I’m talking about colorful, frilly, decorative
pillows. What’s the deal with piles of
these pillows at the head of a bed?
Sometimes you can’t even find the bed.
I
just toss them in the closet. Now I
can’t find my shoes, because they’re buried under a huge pile of pillows. But the next time we have company, out come
the pillows. All of our friends have
massive piles of colorful pillows on their beds too, so it must be some kind of
strange obsession that hits only women, because a man would have to be awful light
in the loafers to play with pretty pillows.
Then
there’s the house cleaning syndrome.
I’ve always maintained that dust is nature’s way of protecting the
furniture. Try convincing a woman of
that profound truth. And cob webs…I know
what a spider is and what a spider web is, but what the hell is a cob? No one has ever seen a cob, yet one of my
tasks is to look for cob webs. Cobs are
obviously elusive little suckers. I hope
to find one before I leave the planet.
My
wife is omnipresent. She suddenly
appears when I’m searching the cupboards for the chocolate she hides for
herself. Chocolate is the drug of choice
for women. There is a documented case of
missionaries taking cocoa away from the native women in a primitive
village. The women killed the
missionaries. That’s a true story. Seriously.
So never get between your wife and chocolate.
Old
husbands learn new tricks. No matter how
I organize the dishes in the dishwasher, it’s never right. Gayle takes over and re-arranges
everything. You have to know scientific
stuff, like how water splashes. I
learned to put the dishes in upside down and backwards until the job
transferred automatically to Gayle.
This
trick of incompetence works in many areas.
When assigned cleaning, if I don’t do a good job, Gayle steps in and
does it right. Eventually, she doesn’t
bother to ask me to do the work. When we
travel, I lug the suitcases out and stack them behind the car. Gayle is the only one who can pack it right,
so I go back in the house, relax, and finish my coffee. The “incompetence” ploy can work in numerous
situations.
No
matter what I lose, Gayle can find it.
“Where’s the ketchup?” I ask while digging through the frig. “What’s the rule?” she responds condescendingly. Her rule is to move something. I move everything, but there is no ketchup - until
she finds it. She knows where everything we own is located. To prove she knows where something is, she
will get it for me. Asking her where
something is hidden saves me valuable time for more important things.
One
of the first things married men learn is the “hearing” trick. It’s called “selective hearing.” It’s a proven fact that a woman’s voice hits
a certain sound frequency that is difficult for older men to hear. That’s your medical fall-back position, guys.
Gayle says that I don’t pay attention to her when she talks. Sometimes I seem to go deaf. So now she leaves notes on the door when it’s
time to take out the garbage and little post-it notes on the refrigerator to
help me make it through life.
Another
trick I use is to act like I’m having trouble getting out of my comfortable
leather chair. I blame old football
injuries, back problems, or my new knee, for my slow rise when the phone rings. As I peel myself out of the chair, Gayle’s
got the phone on the third ring. It
works every time. The trick is to move slowly physically, but always maintain
your mental agility.
Confusion
is a technique that can apply even outside the home. If you find yourself in an embarrassing
situation, just act confused. If you pat
a woman’s butt in a grocery store, thinking it’s your wife, just act confused
and embarrassed. If the woman happens to
like it, remember that your wife is in the next isle.
The
great Walter E. Williams takes it a step further, while demonstrating great
compassion. He said that for her
birthday, he buys his wife useful things, always thinking of her safety. He once bought his wife golf shoes, so she
wouldn’t slip when washing his car. On
another birthday, he bought her a small snow shovel, so she wouldn’t strain her
back when shoveling the snow in his driveway.
I’ve learned from Williams. I
think I’ll buy Gayle a small lady-size chain saw for her birthday this year. Mine broke.
Lethargy,
confusion, selective hearing, and incompetence are only a few techniques older men
can use to make life easy. When all else
fails, you can always go back to being deaf.
