We'll Always Have Paris: On Hanging In

What Mindy Kaling says about her parents' marriage is all well and good but are WE pals, the many rest-of-us coupled up and marching together in life? Based on my experience, here’s how you can tell:You’re pals if you started married life thinking it was funny to throw cups of cold water from the bathroom sink over the shower curtain and onto your spouse, all nice and toasty and soaped up in there.

You’re pals if, even decades later, you both still laugh when one of you reaches for the drinking cup while the other is just stepping into the shower

The two of you are pals if you say nothing about the fact that a CERTAIN PERSON in the marriage never, ever wipes off the sink after shaving, leaving puddles that drip down to leave white marks on that nice wooden vanity you had to really stretch to buy.  (You used to say plenty about this habit, but your remarks had no effect so you gave up. “Pick your battles,” wise older souls have told you all along and now you get what that means.You’re pals if that person says nothing about the fact that for some reason you can no longer cook a meal without opening all the doors to the kitchen cabinets and then leaving them open. (It’s a mystery why you do this. “Creative ferment?” you try telling your spouse, who just gives you that studiedly neutral look on seeing them and before quietly going around shutting them all.You’re pals - and you can stay pals - if you can master this neutral look, as it is far safer than a smile, which can be seen as a smirk, or a gloat, or what it usually is: the ill-fitting mask for a scowl.In fact in the name of marital accord you must ban many looks, from the I-Told-You-So look to the I’m-a-Saint-For Putting-Up-With-You look. Facial expressions like these send malevolent veils out into air that twist and curl and choke off all good will in a marriage.Kaling says no, she never did see her parents gazing into one another’s faces - unless perhaps her mom was administering drops to her dad’s eyes. She says gazing isn’t necessary when you are pals and I think she's right. If you hang in long enough to become pals you can tell how the other one’s day has been, just at a glance.When I first got married, my mom started referring to my husband as ‘Silent Sam,’ as a joke, just because, unlike the rest of us in the family, he didn’t feel the need to talk until his listeners all lapsed into comas. Maybe I too wished he talked more at first, but after a time I began to ‘get’ him.I remember thinking he didn’t care that much for our little cat - until after she went missing for several days. Then one morning she suddenly popped out of the bushes. “Here she is!” he cried from where he stood in our driveway and just for a second I saw his knees buckle with relief.I think Mindy's exactly right: Spend enough time living right close to people and you can’t help starting to love them . And gazing and pretty speeches hardly come in to it at all.Oh and that's us, above . November of 2004, Paris. Gooood time!

Meet in the Middle

I had never fought fair until I fell in love I had never learned to ‘fight fair’ with anyone. To disagree and be civil? It was a skill I never possessed. I was raised by a mother and an aunt, two sisters who were used to saying the blunt frank thing, as siblings will do.Certainly I did that with my own big sister, as she did with me. We said harsh things and we did harsh things. When we were still young, maybe ten and 12 years old, she still got a kick out of knocking me down, sitting on me, then slowly releasing a long thread of saliva over my face, sucking it back up at the very last second. It was like something out of Edgar Allen Poe.I was 12 and she was 14 that time locked herself in the bathroom with my diary, and then threatened to share my adventures with our mom.But I gave as good as I got and took my revenge a week or so later when she was bleaching her hair on the sly. I watched for the moment when she stepped out of the bathroom for the 20 minutes it took for the bleach to work, then zipped in there myself, slammed shut the door and locked it too. I wouldn’t let her in, no matter how much she begged and pounded. It didn’t matter to me how crucial it was that she get back in to apply the neutralizer that would halt the work of all that peroxide. She went to school for a whole week with hair the color of straw – green straw, in actual fact.But that’s how it is with siblings. There often are no rules.  It isn’t until you take a vow to stick with someone through thick and thin that you start to be a little more careful.That’s what happened to me when I met this boy. Before two months had passed we knew we were in it for keeps.And so, slowly, we learned how to fight – ‘disagree’ is a better word - without scorching the earth all around us.I learned to say “That’s not how I see it,” instead of “You’re crazy!”He learned to say, “really?’ instead of “Don’t be ridiculous.”We both learned not to give a superior smirk when the other one took a position we didn’t agree with.We learned – slowly! - to change the subject and move to a more neutral topic. We tried not to nitpick, find fault, so that kind of case-building we all can do when we’re just so sure that the other guy is in the wrong.And mostly we have learned to stay connected. To brush a hand across the other one’s shoulder after a disagreement. To say a decent goodbye instead of slamming the car door after one of our tiffs if they took place in the car, which they often did.We don’t agree about everything. He thinks the sponges and the bottle brush belong in on the kitchen counter while I think they belong in the sink. He takes them out. I put them back. Neither of us ever speaks about this or criticizes the other.It’s just too important to us to remember that we are one. Maybe it’s important for us as citizens to remember that too.

Velcro!

What is it that binds people in marriage, really? I wonder this often. Especially I wonder it after yet another tussle with my mate over whose turn is it this time to clean the cat-vomit from the rug where an artsy feline of ours likes to 'work,' creating colorful collages of grass and fur and mouse parts, all bound in a matrix of recycled cat-chow. What is the agent, that cat-chow-like, holds couples together? For some maybe it’s the flowers and greeting cards that bind people like duct tape over the years of birthdays and anniversaries. For some it’s the vows alone maybe. What I think really holds couples together? Shared moments of humor. For me the real glue comes from the laughs you have, which hold  you together not like duct tape (stickily)  or like Superglue (permanently)  but more like the scratchy kiss of Velcro, which by its nature binds like to unlike.Study Velcro up  close and you’ll see it: A zillion tiny hooks catch a zillion tiny loops and there it is: the good firm fit, the yin and the yang, the unification of opposites. So too, my mate and I are vastly different. While I sleep like the dead at night, he has trouble sleeping at all and says he ponders shaving my eyebrows off or drawing whiskers on my face as I snooze on, oblivious to all. Me, I can‘t sleep mornings. By 5:30 I'm up, organizing the world and running loads of wash. I can’t stand to see others indulging the sleep-late habit, which to me shows weakness of character.He claims I barge in and make the bed, even while he’s still in it but I deny it. Much humor in marriage arises from denying the obvious.Another difference between us, between many men and women in fact: Men like teasing and find it funny. Women hate teasing and find it cruel.Old Dave and I were brushing our teeth together one day lately and when he got done he leaned down, as is his habit since boyhood, to slurp water directly from the faucet.“What are you, 12?” I said, pointing to the two nice ruby-tinted tumblers. "When will you start using one of the cups?!”  “Never,” he answered. “The cats drink from them.”That stopped me for less than a second. “Only from yours,” I said,  thinking, “Ho! This wiseguy stuff ain’t just for the fellas.”  The truth is, we get a kick out of our differences. And, after all this time, we’ve stopped trying to change each other.  So big deal, we’re apples and oranges, hooks and loops. So we pull away from each other with a good rip now and then. The laughs we have join us up again. 

Old Dave in days of yore. The poor guy didn't stand a chance

Adam's Apple

Yesterday was Father's Day, today's my anniversary - how much fond personal narrative can  the blogosphere stand? And yet, I can't resist...Robert Louis Stevenson called marriage "a sort of friendship recognized by the police."I guess that's one person's account of it.  Here's another, from Annie Dillard's beautiful novel The Maytrees.The Maytrees are in this scene a young husband and wife, living in Provincetown: 

She lay shipwrecked on the sheets. She surfaced like a dynamited bass. She opened her eyes and discovered where on their bed she had fetched up. She lay spread as a film and as fragile.… She loved Maytree, his restlessness, his asceticism his, especially, abdomen…Maytree, flexed beside her, was already asleep. He usually fell asleep as if dropped from a scarp. From above he would look as if his parachute failed. Intimacy could not be unique to her and Maytree, this brief blending, this blind sea they entered together divng.His neck smelled as suntan does, his own oil heated, and his hair smelled the same but darker. He was still fresh from an outdoor shower. Awareness was a braided river. It slid down time in drops or torrents.Now she as he woke the room seemed to get smarter. His legs moved and  their tonus was tight. Her legs were sawdust; they were a line old rope shreds on sand. All her life the thought of his body made her blush."We should get up"  Maytree said and moor the dory. Tide's coming in."Now he stood and brushed sand from the side of the sheet. They always had sand in the bed it. It was a wonder she was not slimmer....

I'm happy to say I find marriage to be more like this second account than the first. Friendship is crucial of course – also the ability to laugh at yourself, to forgive and to admit that you’re no picnic to live with either. But if you also have those times when you get taken outside yourself? Well, that’s just the icing on the cake. :-)

Because He's a Pro

My tactic in the face of trouble: whine for a while, then curl up with a book and forget about it. In a kitchen that is for the third night in a row  far too cold to cook in I say the heck with everything, make a fire in the living room fireplace and do just that.

Old Dave has been doing this for hours already and is now cozily reading one of his bizarre futuristic semi-sci-fi tomes. His solution for any frozen pipe: let God thaw it. Sooooo on this third cold night, I suggest a plumber.

“He’s not going to tell you anything different,” sez Dave.  “How do you know?” say I. "Because I know” sez he. "So now you’re the Energy Czar? I mean, you’re no professional” say I. “Yeah but I’m right,”says he.

Then about ten minutes later up he gets and disappears down into our 1890s cellar. When he comes back up he asks if we have a space heater but - ack! - I have just hours earlier donated our one space heater to a family in much worse shape than we are with our books and our fireplace and the wise-cracking wife giving continuous grief to a nice quiet man.

“Come down and see,” he says and so I go down and  see what he has done which is to stand first on a rickety old chair and then on a very tall radiator and then  pry off a two-by five-foot length of paneling fat with pink insulation to reveal the bare earth floor under the kitchen addition , where running its entire length is the skinny ice-filled pipe that is causing all the trouble.

“Let’s see if this helps,” says Dave, turning the antique black knob on this radiator we have never used, and back upstairs to the fireside we go and whaddya know, what do you know, what DO you know, within 30 minutes we suddenly hear hot water coursing  through a well-thawed pipe and into kitchen baseboards. Hurrah!

So maybe he IS the professional after all, what do I know? But hey: I’m the Queen. Oh and I meant to say: this is Dave at the top  with that 'I told you so'  look he so often gets  ... And down at the bottom here, well that's  me in the rocking throne from which I rule this roost, allowing my subjects to sometimes approach (as  long as they stay on their hands and knees. :-))

WHO'S Dumb?

I once had this quiet but sneaky boyfriend who was always doing the weirdest things: “Let’s roll down this hill right now!” he’d suddenly enthuse as we’d be standing on some grassy cliff. “OK!” I’d gamely say back and down I would go, rolling clear to the bottom, and look around for him – and there he’d be, still standing at the top and laughing his head off.Once we were approaching a set of escalators to go upstairs in this fancy mall, me chattering away – I was quite the little one-man-band in those days – and before I realized what was happening he was making the “after you” gesture and I was trying to stumble UP the DOWN escalator because that’s the one he was trying to put me on  - I guess to find out just exactly HOW absorbed I was in my own narrative.Pretty absorbed was the answer. I tried going ‘up’ those fast-moving ‘down’ stairs and ended up performing a series of lightning-fast stumble-jumps to keep from breaking my neck.He actually caught me at the last possible second and handed me on to the right escalator but still - what kind of boyfriend takes pleasure in  another’s confusion?The kind you marry of course so you can keep on with the teasing and sabotaging until you’re both pushing 100 but hey I DON’T MIND because tell ya the truth his ways rubbed off on me. Tonight I lift the lid and seal the toilet over with Saran Wrap. :-)And now this funny video ad just because it ties in so nicely with our title:[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oRBchZLkQR0]

Lucky He Doesn't WHAT?!

David has been away  for 2 days but I still feel like killing him I don’t know why, maybe it's the heat. Or maybe it's because he never listens when I talk  - but just goes “Uh huh, Uh huh” while continuing to read his newspaper the way a man will do. Or sometimes he isn’t even reading but just keeps silent anyway when I'm telling him something, which  makes me do what a wife should probably never ever do: take shots at his mother. Who is dead. Who he worshipped.“What, your mother didn’t teach you to speak when spoken to?" I bray at him in such cases.  "Oh I know how it was in your house, I was there! Four male galoots lazing about on couches while their poor widowed mother waited on them hand and foot! What, she never mentioned that in civilized society people acknowledge others when they  speak?”Turns out it’s a mistake to go after a man’s mother  -  and it's a worse mistake to complained TO a man's  mother ABOUT her son. "He doesn’t even  talk to me when he comes home from work!"  I said once to my mother-in-law, hoping for a little female solidarity and what  did she say back?  (a)  "Most  men don’t speak until you’ve fed them  dinner, and  (b) "You’re lucky he doesn’t beat you.” Hello!I remember this one time when I was just sort of mildly criticizing her behind her back: David fixed me with this piercing look he sometimes gets and said, “Don’t think YOUR mother doesn’t make a mighty wide target,” - which, I’ll admit, she did.  But  when she got in the kind of nasty mood I've been in lately she'd get herself out if it by suddenly stopping mid-kvetch to shout, “Gad! Somebody take me out in the yard and shoot me!” - which actually  gives me an idea: I think I'll go out in the yard myself now and pick a fight with the neighbor's cat but first I have to say it: We sure do miss our mothers though, don't we?

Countertop

It was bad news for me when the Wall Street Journal called the Gores’ breakup after 40 years the ‘new normal.’ because I’ve been married 40 years this month. AND, and my veil looked just like Tipper’s!And the similarities don’t end there. Dave was in Al Gore's class at Harvard, though he’ll be quick to tell you he didn't invent the Internet. He says all he did was play Freshman Football and, since he couldn’t afford to buy the books, read his course assignments in the library, starting around 48 hours before Finals. He also played cards by the hour and just generally did a whole lotta Not Much Else until I came along his Senior year and we began hanging out with my big funny family. And it's been such a Big Top of fun-and-fightin’ ever since I can't imagine walking away after the early innings like the Gores did,In that Wall Street Journal piece Jeff Zaslow also cites a survey sponsored by the British dating site ForgetDinner which reports that people married one year spend 40 minutes of an hour-long dinner talking. By 20 years, they're down to 21 minutes, by 30 years, 16, and by 50 years all of three. To which I say: fiddle-faddle. We sure never spent 40 minutes over those first-year dinners. We didn't have enough food for that. We could’ve eaten the roaches to extend things maybe, crisped ‘em up in one of the zillion fondue pots we got as wedding presents.By our 20^th anniversary it is true that our dinner-talk only lasted about 21 minutes but that’s just because we could hardly make ourselves heard over the offspring resulting from that yeasty early years. And by our 30th, we were too busy executing our kids’ desire to have people join us for dinner: pals of theirs, pals of their pals, even a doorbell-ringing solicitor if they took pity on him. And Dave and I, we just keep bringin’ on the chow. Who could talk?Since the survey is silent about what happens at 40 years in I can tell you right now: At 40 years in you can break all the rules, because it's just the two of you again.David has recently taken a notion to eat standing up like a horse, maybe because he can’t wait to get back to the crossword he’s afraid to bring to the table since that time I took a match to his Sudoku. It used to drive me crazy to see him standing and eating at the island like a commuter at a pushcart - until I got the idea of sitting ON the island countertop, legs crossed under me, to eat my dinner like that.And it works, We’re at eye level. We chew. We talk. And if  people look in the window and see two diners, one a standing man and one a woman in apparent I-Dream-of-Jeannie-style levitation, sure they might be flummoxed. Hey, we’re flummoxed ourselves most of the time, and if not laughing 24/7, havin' some pretty good times.

Hop on Pop

The man we're celebrating this Fathers Day had just one suit the year this picture was taken. It was bought for his middle school graduation. That was fine with him. We've been married 40 years today and in all that time I have never heard him utter a single boast. I remember before his 25^th college reunion he didn't want to fill out the survey. "Look I'll read the questions and write down your responses," I said, and took out my pen."It's asking for your special achievements. “Leave it blank,” he said.  “Or else put ‘My family.’” "It asks if you’ve served on the Board of Directors of any companies. You have!" ” I said. “Leave it blank,”  he said.He doesn’t care if the world thinks him successful. It just doesn’t matter to him. I remember asking him that day how many suits he had now. “One,” he said. “One that I can wear.”The year our son was going into 8^th grade he spent all eight weeks at a summer camp in the Berkshires.  On that first Visiting Day, most of the other campers had parents with fancy cars. At one point we found ourselves next to the basketball court where a lone father in fancy shoes and a Versace shirt was shooting baskets. David had on shorts and his Dr. Seuss T-shirt with Hop on Pop stenciled on the front.  I knew he wanted to shoot with our son, but was holding back, not wishing to interrupt this well-dressed dad. “Go on out there!” I said under my breath. “This guy's just some cardiologist! ”He laughed. He knew what I meant. I meant, "Some rich guy in fancy clothes? Some rich guy is no match for a man with just one suit."Happy Fathers Day Old Dave! And Happy 40 Years With TT who loves you even more now than she did when she snapped this picture.

It's Just that You're Such an ...

I bet everyone knows about that internet 'glossary' for what women mean when they say certain things to their men.  Like when we say ‘Fine’ and it means ‘we're done talking now and you should shut up.’  Or when you ask us what’s wrong and we sigh and say ‘Nothing’ and really what we mean is 'It’s just that you’re such an asshole.’ Well, in my house we don’t have that. In my house we have one brightly chirping saint and one lumpish mammal resisting all chirps.Example: Every morning I tell Old Dave how great he looks. “Blue is your color! “ I gaily call, or  “Who would have thought you’d have such wonderful silver hair!” and so on. He just gives me this level gaze and goes on tucking in his Polo shirt. It’s like he doesn’t believe me. Or doesn’t believe that I believe me. Or doesn’t want to be yet another recipient of my Ministry of General Chirpiness.He has a million Polo shirts by the way, all given to him by companies hoping to do business with the company he works for. He hasn’t bought a shirt of his own since 1993 – and yesterday morning here he was unwrapping his latest free one before putting it on. We were in the bedroom where I was simultaneously returning phone calls, ironing and affirming the houseplants.“That shirt’s kind of BIG isn’t it ?” I innocently asked and got the deadpan gaze again – only this time he didn’t look away. “But oh yeah!” I quickly add. “I guess you always tuck IN your shirts, don’t you? I guess it’s ME who has stopped tucking in shirts!”“You know it makes me wonder how I ever got dressed at all without you in my life,” he suddenly said. As if he could really remember back that far, I think to myself, he who couldn't tell you the names of his childhood pets if you drove hot toothpicks under his nails.But the remark did get my attention and made me see myself; made me flash on the many times I looked at one or another of our hapless kids and said, “Is that what you’re wearing?”I felt a tad remorseful, so went for the amend.Sort of.“What’s wrong?”I said in my relentless female hunt-you-down-in-your-cave  way.“Nothing,” he said with an airy sigh.And never mind that the genders were reversed I’m pretty sure I knew exactly what sentence he was leaving out. It looks like men really are from Mars and women from Venus. And what  Oscar Wilde said about Great Britain and the U.S applies to the genders as well: we're two countries divided by a common language.

Strange Bedfellows

I’m no better than the next guy in that sometimes I just feel like phonin’ it in myself. That’s when I get out Patti the See-Through Date and set her up in the bed in my place. She’s like the Visible Woman only cooler ‘cause as you can see, No Real Entrails!

Afterglow

Last Valentine’s Day this youngish dude showed up beside me at the supermarket register and slapped down six wilted dyed-blue daisies. He saw me look at them. “Hey, it’s the THOUGHT that counts!” he said, going for that most classic of Nice-Try maneuvers.Lost in memory, I held my tongue, because back when David and  I were first married, we marked our special days the right way, with flowers and candy and little dinners out. Love was in the air!  Later, when babies came, dinners out turned into Shake ‘n Bake chicken on the saggy back balcony of our saggy old apartment and that’s when we began having “issues,” over such questions as, “Can it really be called ‘minding the baby’ if you’re watching the ball game AND reading the paper at the same time, as the infant sits ignored beside you, ingesting soggy fistfuls  of the Sunday supplement?”With little ones around of course, we couldn’t really AIR these issues - except on joint vacations with other couples when we’d go off on what I came to call our “Fight Walks. “You should ask yourself if this FEMINISM stuff is really making you happy,” old Dave said to me on one such walk. And again I held my tongue, merely employing my special telekinetic girl Voodoo powers to stick mental pins in all his underpants.He got his revenge though: That year he gave me a can of 3-in-1 Motor Oil for Valentine’s Day. The next it was a book of Chinese love poems, still in Chinese. I meanwhile gave him boxes of fudge, small potted plants, dozens of stuffed animals because hey who doesn’t love a stuffed animal? But “You know,” I said one year, “you have never once in all our time together told me that you love me! So I think maybe you - (sob) - don’t!”“Don’t be ridiculous,” came his icy retort. “I wouldn’t have had CHILDREN with you if I didn’t love you,” a sentences I found to be so bleak and barren I embroidered it and hung it in the kitchen, right above my Cinderella mop.But all that was long ago, when I was first married to this odd fellow. More recently I was attempting to do therapy over the phone with an awesome Jungian psychologist when he said out of the blue one day, “I don’t get this therapy stuff. Why don’t you just DECIDE TO FEEL DIFFERENT?”My eyes widened and widened– and this time I couldn’t keep silent. “Are you kidding me? As if YOU’RE not an absolute Child’s GARDEN of Messed-up-ness!”We both laughed then, because lately... well we just seem to have called a truce. Anyway, last year he bought me a big fancy Valentine he was very careful not to sign in any way, which I found hilarious. And for his present this year I bought us a matched pair of travel mugs we can take on our Fight Walks, which, believe it or not, we no longer even fight on.So love is a minefield, yes it is but still all these years later I have to say: it's also one dandy source of humor!

Never Leave

Well that was dumb: I knew I’d made a mistake when I found out two of my dearest friends were practically drawing straws to see which one would call to find out if David really left me. Then I got a note from a guy I haven’t seen in 15 years who said he was sorry to read that my husband and I were having problems.That’s what you get for making jokes about marriage!David and I have been together since he was the only guy in a crewcut and every other young male in the western hemisphere had hair like Jesus of Nazareth. He was purposely out of it fashion-wise and I think that’s why I fell for him.Today I can’t TELL you all the ways he helps me, picks up after me, holds his tongue when I spill things, lose things, break things but instead let me copy here what I said about him in one of my books. I'll just say for background that he had no money at all in college, not a nickel. I didn't either. He was fatherless. So was I. He came from a houseful of many brothers and I came from a houseful of old folks and this meant that both of us were used to having lots of people around. When, at age 29, I was whining about whether or not I could manage to have any MORE babies after that first baby with all the WORK babies entailed and on and on he quietly said he had just kind of hoped to fill up all those spaces around the Christmas tree.We filled 'em all right.There are eight young people out there whom we have loved, fed, taught to drive, helped with the security deposit for that first apartment and lain awake nights worrying over.Now on to what I said in that second book of mine, back when David and I were just 'kids' in our 40s and our sweet youngest boy Michael was a 12-year-old away at summer camp. This chapter has another name in the book but in my mind it's always been "Hop on Pop" And it goes like this:+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++I don’t write much about the father of my children.I used to - jokey pieces, mostly - in which I revealed my own petty nature, enviously describing the way he was permitted to sleep late Saturdays by the same small children who wouldn’t leave me alone for three minutes together. Him they treated like a combination lounge chair and entertainment center, watching cartoons in our bed while balancing bits of toast on the shelf of his sleeping flank, leaning against his broad and gently-breathing back.It was after describing such a scene that a man came up to my husband. “You’re David Marotta!” he said with mystified look. “I don’t know how you stand it!” He meant being the subject of intimate revelation. He meant being described in the paper.Well, I had no wish to embarrass my husband, so after that I pretty much stopped writing about him. But he has always been there in the background.He was there the time a strange woman approached and began attacking me for a light piece I once wrote about Christmas cards filled with endless bragging. That lady went after me like a pit-bull. I tried everything I could think of to win back her good opinion.David saw how rattled I was. “You should just say, ‘Look, it’s my job. It’s what I write; it’s not who I am.’” Ah, but what I write IS who I am, which is why it means so much to me that the papers I write for print my address. I have learned so much over the years from my readers’ reactions.One thing I have learned is how much folks prize certain qualities in their fellow citizens.This husband of mine owned one suit when we got married, bought for his Middle School graduation. He was a scholarship kid, and has always identified with those who by virtue of birth or circumstance found themselves excluded from the great American bazaar of getting and spending.He never boasts. You can hardly get him to tell where he went to school or what his work is. Before his last college reunion, I had a terrible time getting him to fill out the class questionnaire. I finally said “I’ll read the questions and write down your responses.”It asked for your special achievements.“Leave it blank,” he said. “Or else put ‘My family’”It asked if you’d served on the Board of Directors of any companies.He does. “You do!” I said.“Leave it blank.”He doesn’t care if the world thinks him successful. It just doesn’t matter to him.What does matter to him, what he has saved the best of himself for, are those same untidy children who lean on him still. He plays golf, but mostly with clients. He never plays on the weekend. I asked him yesterday how many suits he has now. “One,” he said. “One that I can wear.” I like that. I can’t say how much I like that.This year, for the first time, one of our kids is spending all eight weeks at a summer camp. On Visiting Day, we noticed that most of the other campers are New Yorkers, with parents in fancy cars. At one point, we found ourselves at the basketball court where a lone father in Louis Vuitton loafers and a Versace shirt was shooting baskets.David had on shorts and his Dr. Seuss T-shirt with “Hop on Pop” stenciled on the front. I knew he wanted to shoot with our son, but was holding back, not wishing to interrupt this well-dressed dad.“Go on out there!” I whispered. “He’s just some cardiologist!”He laughed. He knew what I meant.I meant. Some rich guy in fancy clothes? Some rich guy is no match at all for a man with just one suit.Now these little stories will embarrass him, I know. But he said it himself: It’s my job.

I am a Saint and He is a Jackass

Last Sunday I bought the Christmas tree and dragged it onto the porch by myself. I was mad at Old Dave I’m not sure why and thought THIS’ll show him. I’ll buy the tree alone. In 11 degree weather. With winds gusting to 40 mph.All it did of course was bring frostbite to my ears and further injury to my crooked little spine when, once home, I cut the ropes that held it to my car roof, tugged it free and then tried to catch it. Boom! I went, right down on the ground under the 8-foot thing, but since playing martyr gives you super-human strength I toiled on, dragging it by its hair clear up the front steps and onto the porch.He did help me put it up - minus the lights and ornaments of course because Come ON! I’m watchin' the GAME here! – but now he’s gone all week on business.Luckily, I have this nice fake lights-attached tree that I’ve just now pulled from its cardboard coffin and set up in the kitchen.All I really want for Christmas this year by the way is to get rid of the old kitchen window which is etched with these chemical stains like permanent frost-blossoms so you can’t even SEE out it practically. All I want is a nice new little window to look out at the world from.Because I am a saint and he is a bastard. A Sudoku-doing, crossword-puzzle-addicted, sports junkie bastard but still, he should really come home now. Even the cats miss him, and all this time they thought he was a piece of furniture- but wait! What’s that noise coming from out back? You don’t suppose he’s been hiding in the garage all this time to get away from me!Da-a-a-ave?? Come in now Dave! This kitchen tree is so pretty we don’t even HAVE to decorate the real one. I’ll cook and you can just go on drowning in newsprint in front of your games - and the cats can sit on you, same as always.:-)

we all miss you. look, even the cats are crying!

National Boo-Boo Day

Yesterday was the birthday of Crisco, Crisco being LARD , pure pig fat, and right next door to mercury in terms of being in the doghouse these days but I tell ya what: you want to make a really good fine pie you’d best dig out the Crisco.

It was also Chinese Lovers Day, Editor Appreciation Day, and National Best Friends Day, though I didn’t make a pie or love any Chinese people either. I did get to thinking about Chinese Handcuffs which like a lot of things (Iraq, Viet Nam) are easy enough to get INTO but a whole harder to get OUT of.

I didn't do much about National Best Friends Day either except annoy the socks off my designated best friend/spouse talk about your Chinese Handcuffs. He was annoyed because he had JUST TOLD me that TVs with DVD players in them suck on account of how the DVD part breaks and then were are you and what did I do but directly disregard his advice and go buy that very thing. He hates it when people fail to take full advantage of his sagacity. Especially when it’s his moron wife who should know better but what can he do? Even if on nine levels I test his patience like you wouldn’t believe on that tenth level he finds me irresistible. (Smug smiley face goes here.)

But I guess I DID celebrate the day a little cone to think of it in the sense that I file my column on that day of the week and so appreciate my editors afresh on account of the crazy mistakes I bad make in my typing, especially right at the last second before I press “send.” Once I was trying to tell about this teacher who liked the kids and was liked in return but what did I end up writing instead ? “She licks the kids and the kids lick her” and no spell-checking program on earth would ever find that gaffe. It takes an editor, right? And so for the zillionth time THANKS GUYS and here's to boo-boos all around. Now let’s eat us some pig fat and catch some nice Olympic swimming!

Here's the pig fat: OH ya!

Watching the Watchers

“Pull Me Up,” which is what I called this week’s column, is about vigilance; about who looks out for the one who’s looking out for the rest of us.

I am married to Mr. Vigilance. Personified. When we travel I’m all the time talkin' to little kids in the food line or jokin’ around with the smokers in that walled-off leper colony of a cement room they’re forced to use.

Not David. David is practically testing the instrument panel on the plane. He lies awake the whole night before a trip and worries. Boards the plane and worries. Lands and worries.

It’s not because he’s a seasoned traveler and I’m some neophyte. For the last 23 years I’ve been flying all over the map, comin’ in to Tampa when it’s 93 degrees and soaking with humidity to be on some dumb magazine show for 90 seconds; screeching in to Tucson and taking a wrong turn in the desert at midnight; climbing into some little rental car just as dusk is settling over some godforsaken rustbelt city whose newspaper I’ve made arrangements to call on…. Wherever I am, I just look at my little map and set right out, full of delight and happy expectation, assuming some stranger will take care of me, get out of his car to draw me a better map than the one I have; offer to lead me to my destination even because this has been my experience. I expect cheery good will on the part of the universe if not big affectionate pats to the head.

David must just expect something else, though we don’t talk about it at all - maybe because he’s so busy looking after me. I say this because I..... lose things; I drop things; I walk out of the kitchen thinkin' I’m done in there for the next five hours, totally not noticing the six-inch flame still doing the Hula on an empty burner. And there’s more: Once I put a five pounds of flour down the garbage dispose-all, causing it to become instantly constipated. Once, while easing the baby into her carseat I put my purse on top of the car, off of which it instantly slid the second I accelerated, to be  picked up by a Bonnie-and Clyde style couple who the cops then gave lights-and-sirens chase to through three towns in central New Hampshire…

The other day was a real low point though: the other day I came trotting down stairs with my Innisbrook tote bag just as David was getting ready to leave for work. “Oh nooooo!” I shouted with dismay because inside this nice leather shoulder bag that he had won at his latest golf tournament everything was suddenly soaked.

Patiently he set down his own pile of stuff and took it from me. Out came the diary and the daybook, the three New Yorkers and the Time magazine, the nectarine and the cell phone,  all of which I clucked and mourned over and tried to dry off.

“WHAT have you GOT in this bag?” he was just exclaiming – until he came upon the full cup of coffee that had tipped over inside it.

“You put COFFEE in a tote bag?”

"Oh hmmmm... well I thought I had sealed it.”

Then he turned the whole thing over to shake out the pencils, the gum and the pacifier, the toothbrush, the carrots and the lip gloss – and found something that embarrassed even me: a half-eaten ice cream cone, the cone part anyway, now a soggy blob of waffley goodness still wrapped in its protective paper napkin.

He cleaned it all up anyway and handed it back to me after like ten whole minutes, and I couldn’t understand why he was smiling.

“Wait, I made you late for work - AND your hands smell like coffee and rotten Maple Walnut,” I said. “Aren’t you mad at me?”

“Nah” he said.

“Really? Why not?”

“Because the kids and I are gonna have a REAL laugh over this one!”

How grateful am I for the one who watches over me while in my manic way I attempt to watch over the whole known world? Really grateful - of course.

And hey: getting laughed at behind my back is a mighty small price to pay.

So thanks for all the vigilance, Davey Dave… NOW WIPE THAT SMILE OFF YOUR FACE!

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!