Happy Anniversary
Well it’s my wedding anniversary today and here I am about as far away as I can be from my man, at this conference that made my bottom hurt with sitting all day through the great programming put on my the National Society of Newspaper Columnists. I talked to him on the phone at around 9pm but it’s not the same of course. This is the first time we’ve ever been apart on a June 20 and it feels sad here at five minutes to midnight, so I thought I might post something I wrote about him a few years back:
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Dave Barry wrote a column once about women festooning their houses with candles you can’t burn, wastebaskets you can’t throw trash in, and frilly pillows and shams you must never sleep on. Why do they do this? Because they’re crazy, he says.
Now Dave Barry is a smart and funny man, but he’s wrong this time. We women don’t do this to our homes because we’re crazy. We do it to say, “This is mine.”
I read somewhere that most women just assume the inside of the house is theirs, and so mark it, as any cat or dog would do; and I have to say, it makes sense to me. After all, we’re the ones who pick up the place day to day, who furnish it and clean it – far more often than our male partners do, especially during playoff seasons. And studies show that even women working full-time jobs STILL do the lion’s share of work around the house. No wonder we come to feel the place is ours and begin taking it over, room by candle-filled room.
My man claims I do this According to him I have gone through our whole house leaving little pyramids and piles of my own invention on every surface. Once, he pointed to the rickety cane-seated chair in our bedroom where he parks his pants nights. “This little chair,” he said sadly. “In this whole house it’s all I have left.”
So OK, MAYBE I’ve frilled things up some around here too. When we first moved here, I did our room over in candles and lacy shams myself.
“Isn’t this awfully… feminine for a man’s bedroom?” his mom asked in that certain mom-in-law way. (“His bedroom!” I thought but did not say out loud. “This is my bedroom, into which he gets invited nights!” (I mean, isn’t that the fun of it on a certain level?))
All right so I'll admit I’ve sometimes taken the whole House Beautiful thing a bit far. I think of the night I was trying to sleep in this very bedroom, as my mate followed one ballgame on the radio while monitoring another ballgame on TV – only the video portion to that ballgame was blacked out in our area, causing the screen to be filled with wild and staticky scribbles.
“Hang something over that thing before I lose my mind!” I finally yelled. And when he got up and did that, covering the screen with an ugly beach towel, I screeched again. “No, no! A pretty towel, that matches the decor!”
He shot me a deadpan look, whisked the towel off the TV and let the scribbles at me.
So I lost that round, I guess. But I figure if a person understands that any house really belongs to the one who cleans its bathrooms, she can afford to lose a round here and there.
Anyway, I won a round just last week, when I decided to pay some bills in the bedroom. I so set a card table up among the candles and the lacy shams and pulled up to it the nearest chair.
My husband just shook his head on coming home that night and seeing me sitting in it.
“There goes my one chair,” he said wistfully. “Good-bye, little chair!”
It was adorable. And I like the guy, somehow, even though he’s never once cleaned the bathroom. He can bring in four extra radios and catch five broadcasts at once, if that’s what he wants. He has that sweetness, see.
Call me crazy, Dave Barry, but you find a sweet man like that and you just feel like inviting him into your bedroom.
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And there it is: an old love offering for David Marotta who took my youth, my tiny waist and my last name too. We’ve had a lot of fun though haven’t we Dave? Here’s to 38 more with a man out standing in his field!
