The Little Bottle of Nickels

The Man Who Puts Up With me left the world of over the road trucking, set down his several boxes and bags of "stuff" from his truck, and never looked back.

Somehow they were mysteriously supposed to put themselves away, I guess.  Slowly I've been sifting through his bags, or the bags of grocery goods and finding slots here and there for these cans of vegetables, or canned pasta, blankets and spray bottles of cleaning fluid, dirty shirts and towels.  Every time I walk into our bedroom I find something else to put away. 

So when I ran across a pill bottle lying on the floor, I shook it,opened it an found a handful of nickels.  I could understand a container of quarters since he often needed them to take care of toll road payments when he was traveling.  But nickels? 

Now I have to admit that my first reaction was that hubby was keeping a bunch of money set aside for some specific purpose.  My thoughts immediately flashed to stories of women who squirreled away money so that she might one day be free. 

Then there was always the Ole an Lena joke that goes a bit like this: Ole comes home a bit early from work one day.  In his desire to get a quick bite to eat, he starts snooping through the cupboards.  To his astonishment, he finds twenty jars of dried beans. 

Lena walks into the door a minute later and greets her husband.  "Well, you're home early!"

"yes," says Ole.  "I yust was looking for a little snack vhen I found this here bunch of beans.  Now howcome you got so many jars of beans up here?"

Her eyes dropped a bit.  "Vell, now I have a little bit of good news and some bad news for ya dere., Ole, you see, it was like dis.  Every time I was unfaithful to you, I put a little bean on that there jar."

Ole looks over the jars and then looks at Lena very sadly.  "Vhat's the good news?" he asks.

Lena brightened considerably.  "Vell, I sold fifty bushesl vhen the price was way up!"

For some reason, that little jar of nickels reminded me of that story.  So when The Man Who Puts Up With Me got home, I asked him. "What are you doing?  Collecting money so you can run away?  I can always just give you the money for that!"

He frowned, thinking.  "I doubt I'll get far on a dozen nickels." But I could see he had no idea what I was talking about, so I quickly retrieved them from the bedroom.

"Oh, those are yours!" he said.

"Mine?"  I didn't remember any nickels in a pill bottle.

"Yeah, you said they were silver or something. I got tired of them lying around so I put them in that thing."

My eyes flashed wide and I quickly checked it out.  Sure enough, every one of them were made before the government added a new  plating on them. Thank goodness I hadn't just tossed them into my purse.  

"Well, so much for my blog fodder," I joked.  "You were my blog fodder!"

"Ha! Your blog fodder?"  he laughed.  "Now you'll have to go fpdder yourself!"

We laughed at the sillinss of "Go fodder yourself!"  and then I got to thinking.  We have lived together so long, that we can laugh at things like this together. I don't have to worry that he'll collect so many nickels that he will someday run off with the floosy next door. And he doesn't have to worry that I have a stash of beans. 

Cavedweller

My husband has gone into his cave.

For those of you who are newly married, or not yet married to the most confusing species on the planet, let me tell you that caves are where men go to think.  Why they do this is a mystery to those of us who talk out our problems. 

I discovered this truth when I first married The Man Who Puts Up With Me a hundred years ago.  We had our first argument, and I walked out to take a drive.  I didn't know that he was worrying about whether or not I would come back or where I was.  I suppose in hindsight, when you live in a suburb of Los Angeles, and are not native to the area, there was cause for worry.  I drove to a nearby mall to browse, and found myself in a bookstore. 

Ninety minutes after I had left, I walked back into the house beaming.  "Good news!" I said, waving around my acquisition. "I bought a husband manual."

He laughed, more out of relieft that I had come back, I guess.  "Hm.  Men and From Mars, Women are From Venus," he read. 

I found out that night that he doesn't read self help books. His idea of self-help is to go for a walk on the tundra.  But he listens to me talk about them.

"Wow!" I said, wide-eyed as I read.

"What?" he asked.  This had been my ninth or tenth noise of amazement.

"It says here that when men need to think, they go into a cave."

He pondered for a moment. "Yeah, that's about right."

"What on earth for?" I asked, astonished.  "Why wouldn't you just talk about your problems?"

"What a dumb way to figure out what's wrong!" he cried.

We stared at each other for a moment.  And that's when I realized that I had married an entirely different species.  Mothers never tell you this lest girls never give them weddings and grandchildren. 

'Women don't go into caves." I explained.  "We talk about our problems." 

"I know," he said, and I couldn't tell if he said it with a sigh or a knowing tone of voice.  It might have been both, which is a sound that is hard to do.

Over the years I have learned some things about this odd creature that I have married. 

1. If I want to go in my cave, he follows me in and talks until I come out.  We both are probably better for it, but the double standard is annoying.

2.  If he goes in his cave, he can be in there for days.  I need to just deal with it and if I don't like that, too bad.

3.  While he is in his cave, he will often ponder problems that are either so big that no one will be able to solve them, or so small that I wonder why he went into his cave at all!

4.  When a man goes into a cave, a woman can go nuts trying to figure out what is wrong. Most of the time, she will assume it is something that she has done. Men feel it is odd that a woman might think she has done something wrong, or that he has grown tired of her. In fact, The Man Who Puts Up With Me insists that I think the world revolves around me, a theory I am coming to accept and make my own.  Cave dwelling may be important for him to work out an issue, but it is hell on women.

And so I am waiting as The Man Who Puts Up With Me is going through his brain to work out an issue. It may drive me nuts with curiosity while I wait, but I must be patient.  There are times he won't even tell me what he has worked out in his head, something that is probably all right in the long run.  I'm sure there is another self-help book out there just waiting for me to explore.

Five Men in my Bed

If you had told me sixteen years ago that on this date, today, I would have five men in my bed in one twenty-four hour period, I would have called you a fool.

In fact, that's exactly what happened. 

I crawled into bed last night at Amostten, the time before ten and nine-thirty, the time unidentified by humankind because no one bothered to look at a clock.  I was reading my son's library book.  Suddenly I felt a Kathunk! and the first of the household males landed on the bed and made himself comfortable.

It was Carmel, our oversized long-haired male cat, who is a dear love.  He completely won over our hearts with his gentle manner when he adopted us as his favorite dinner spot, and now winters with us to keep his arthritis feeling better.  I don't mind a furball in bed with me, but the first thing he did was to begin grooming.  It's not fair to complain, I suppose, but it felt like a bad date to have a guy land in bed with you and begin licking himself.  I was glad I wasn't his girlfriend.

Sometime after 11:30, I awoke to find the second of my nightly visitors.  Our eight year old had crawled in bed with me and made himself quite at home.  Normally I would have returned him to bed, but fatigued just overtook me and I went back to sleep.  He must have been related to The Flying Wallenda's, because he traveled ALL OVER that bed!  I don't mind sharing with humans, but taking up the middle seemed rude.  He and I need to talk.

At 4:30, I gave up trying to sleep with one kid and a cat and came out to clean out my e-mail inbox.  Soon an inquisitve Teenager showed up, wondering if his little brother had wandered down the street.  "He's not in bed," he whispered to me in a worried tone.

"He's in ours," I said back. "Go back to bed."

Apparently that meant any bed, which specifically seemed to be ours.  I knew that after he got tired of not being able to fall back to sleep, he'd poke his brother, and then a scuffle would break out.  Parents know how this is. 

"No, you can't sleep in there!" I called to him.

"Why?" he demanded.  He's going through a Fairnes Evaluation phase, apparently nonplussed by the old adage, "Life isn't fair." 

"No, you two will get into a fight or something and then neither of you will get any sleep," I insisted.

This set off a string of accusations, begging and whining.  "Where am I supposed to sleep?" he demanded.

"How about in your own bed?" I pointed out.  "You've been there most of the night!"

In the end, he settled on my suggestion to take the couch, though one hour of tossing later, he's up playing a video game.

In an hour or so, The Man Who Puts Up With Me will be home, and when he crawls in bed, he'll kick the black and white cat out.  Tux hasn't made it to the bed yet, but while I dress in the morning, he'll come in to hang out, lay down, and sleep like he's been pulling a plow all day.  How I would love to have the sleeping habits of a cat.  That will make 5 men in my bed in one day.

Of course, that's not totally true.  Both our cats have been "neutralized."  But if you had told me sixteen years ago that in one 24 hour period I would have three men and two eunuchs in my bed in one twenty-four hour period, I would have turned and walked away. I would have hoped, too, that you didn't follow me.

Toaster

I spent the day with my father, going through old pictures and dating them.  It was kind of a neat thing to find their ornate and beautiful baptismal certificates, confirmation Bibles, marriage license, and other items that my mother had tucked away.  But when dinner time came, I remembered to steer my father away from making toast for the noon meal.

You see, it's the toaster that has me full mode into avoidance behavior.  Perhaps you are familiar with the notion that "they don't make them like that any more"?  Well, the truth is, if they made toasters like this, the peasants of the world would rise up iwth their rakes and shovels and overthrow the small appliance makers.

I feel strongly about this because of Uncle Harry's toaster.  He's the Uncle that belonged to The Man Who Puts Up With Me.  This toaster was so cool, that when you put bread in, it slowly sank down, toasted it to perfection, then slowly brought it to the surface.  We were agog with toaster envy. Like the little green beings on Toy Story, we had to watch the toast go up and down several times, wide-eyed with fascination.  When Harry died, his new wife apparently did not remember how much we coveted the toaster. Who knows where it ended up.

My mother, on the other hand, suffered from Mine-itus, which is a bizarre disease that inflicts certain parents and keeps them from sharing the use of the household's appliances.  I never learned to use the washing machine or dishwasher.  I had limited experience with the toaster, and what was a blender anyway?  When I left home, I was lucky to be too young to fear technology, or I would have been screwed up forever. 

I decided early on that her toaster was possessed by the devil anyway.  I didn't want to get intimately acquainted with any small appliance that couldn't get its job right.  One side of the toast would be brown, the other side was soft.  None ever turned out the same color, though thank God we didn't have to worry about it burning.  When I told Mom that other toasters were for sale at stores in the area, she said, "Ach, who needs a new one?"  Once I even gave her one.  I think she must have sold it at a garge sale or taken it back for something else.

Father still has that darned toaster, and since he's 93, no one bothers to give him one that actually works right.  Since toasters in stores now have a short lifespan, his new one would probably die within a year and he'd have to pull this old one out of storage.  I have secret fears my sister will keep the damned thing out of sheer sentiment.

I have fantasies of dropping it in a lake, or smashing it with a sledge hammer, or running over it with a car.  I won't do it in front of my father.  But someday when I finally have the chance to rid this world of that rotten machine, I am going to put it out of our misery. 

And all of this over the chance of fixing toast for my father's dinner.

The Sexual Yardstick

I remember once as a teen, that a cynical teenage boy muttered to a friend, "Adults tell us not to have sex because they aren't having any!" I found that such a very odd thing to say, since it implied that he was sitting around thinking about how much sex that adult was having. I, myself, found it disconcerting to think of my parents kissing in bed, let alone thinking about having sex.  I reasoned they had sex five times and that was enough. 

When I married The Man Who Puts Up With Me, I found myself trying to figure out if there was a sexual yardstick for how good your marriage was.  To me, it somewhow seemed to be a good gauge on the health of a marriage.  Newly married couples, I reasoned in my Onceuponatimepeabrain, must have sex around three times a week to be normal.   That gave them a night off in between to "repair" or sleep or what ever. I was misled into worrying about this topic by shopping for food.  Once I got to the checkout line, the time I spent waiting to checkout gave me a perfect chance to read women's magazine articles. I could get information about how to drive him crazy, how he could drive me crazy, and all of these were supposed to help me keep my husband happy and faithful.

 As we obtained children, I wondered, as I had awaken one night for the third time, whether we were having sex whenever I was sleeping.  I even thought that people who just had babies, especially ones who were Night Owls like our Oldest, were someohow Sex Exempt from Reality Relationships.  Sleep deprivation, I decided, was probably responsible for women who weren't always able to act sensual.

Then I hit my forties, and the kids grew taller and I forgot about my yardstick.  What number of times a week is normal?  Was that cynical teen back thirty years ago really right?  Were middle age people just preaching abstinance because they weren't getting any fun of their own?

I wanted to take a survey of several middle agers, but then thought, "Who in their right mind would answer these questions?:  And if they were to answer them, would they tell the truth?

Somewhere along the way, I quit thinking about the sexual yardstick .  Instead, I found out the marriage with two boys in the house, necessitates secret liasons with your spouse.  It's sort of mysterious and goes like having an affair.  Consider a recent conversation I had with The Man Who Puts Up With Me while lying in bed one weekend morning.

She:  Are you sure you don't hear footsteps down the stairs?

Him: (pausing, lsitening) I don't think so.

She:  Mmmmm.

Then we hear a sudden sound of the toilet flushing upstairs and suddenly we are quiet.  We hear Oldest's footsteps as he come down to start the day.

She:  So much for that.

He:  You know.  I've just really enjoyed talking.

For the life of me, I cna't believe I ever used the number of lovemaking sessions per week to determine the health of a marriage.  Had I ever realized that there was so much more that could mess up a couple's intimate time, I might have just written a book about that.  As is, I am looking forward to a new decade with my sweetie and finding time together in our home AFTER our kids are gone away to school.  Who knows?  Maybe someday when I stand in the checkout line, I'll see my article in one of those women's magazines.  I'll title it: "Husband Tired?   Three steps to a wide awake lover." Now I have to go discover those tips.