An Ordinary Person

At the gym where I work out every other day, young people (high school students, college students, recent graduates) work at the desk to hand out locker keys and towels.

Yesterday, the young lady smiled broadly as she handed me a towel.

“You look happy,” I said.

“I AM happy,” she replied. “I am getting married in two weeks.” Her smile widened.

“In a week, my wife and I will celebrate our 44th anniversary,” I replied. She looked happy for us, also.

On the day of our anniversary, we will visit Random Granddaughter’s kindergarten at the school for Very Bright Children. Last night my wife and I chatted about it.

“She is supposed to perform in a play for the parents,” Mrs. Random said. “I hope she doesn’t break down and start sobbing in the middle of it. She gets herself so worked up.”

“She wants to be the center of attention and then she hates being the center of attention,” I said. “I hope she learns to deal with being just an ordinary person like the rest of us. Though, of course, she will be an extraordinary ordinary person.”

New Permanent First Post on My Blog

I have not been supporting David with $5/month contributions for some time now. I have not only not supported David, I sent $5 to someone else. Probably did not help the person in this case that much either. Not only am I unfaithful, I am cheaply and trivially unfaithful. No use in cheating unless I cheat cheaply.

How My Wife to Be Threw Herself Out of Her Mother’s House.

 

A while back, at David’s request, I told the story of how I met my wife, hugely embarrassing as the story is. I promised to tell the story of how she threw herself out of her house when she turned 18 and didn’t speak to her mother for a year.

After I had been going out with my wife to be, she told me that she was going to San Francisco to spend time with her favorite older brother, a bohemian artist whom she idolized at the time. (In the long run, things did not go especially well for him, but that’s another story.)

I think she was not sure she wanted to see me any more, so she left the impression she might not be coming back to Los Angeles. However, I sometimes drove “accidentally” across the route I knew she walked to and from high school, and sure enough I one day saw her walking home from high school and stopped to talk to her, telling her I had accidentally driven that way. I learned that without telling me, she had returned home from San Francisco.

I convinced her to go out with me again.

I began to spend time at her house with my wife to be and her mother. I worked diligently at sucking up to her mother. It was not easy to do for two reasons:

1. Her mother was a very difficult and insecure person.

2. My wife to be, now in adolescence, had begun the difficult process of finding and expressing her own individuality as a person.

Her mother had many admirable qualities. After her divorce, working as a secretary, she had, by herself raised and supported five children. She was a splendid cook and mistress of many other household skills, which she taught to my wife.

However, her mother was full of resentments and grievances. Just as I am the oldest of my parents’ five children, my wife is the youngest of her parents’ five children.

Each of my wife’s siblings had left the nest already, not always on the friendliest of terms, leaving their mother feeling angry, unappreciated, and lonely. As my wife had been a very obedient and unchallenging child, her mother had come to depend on her, the youngest of the five children, for a feeling of security and success as a parent.

Also, her mother had a bit of a drinking problem. I don’t think she was an alcoholic, but she tended to drink more than she should and usually became more and more angry as she became intoxicated.

Often I would have dinner with my wife to be and her mother. Her mother was a splendid cook, and tended to interpret people eating and appreciating her food as appreciating her, so she would offer me more and more food.

At these dinners, my wife to be would offer some innocent opinion and her mother would take serious exception and they would bicker and snarl at each other as I sat in uncomfortable silence.

A focus point of these arguments became my wife to be’s black pants. These events occurred before the word “hippie” came into wide usage, so her mother used the word “beatnik” to describe depraved children rebelling against their parents’ values. The black pants symbolized in her mind how her daughter was rejecting her values, much as children today reject their parents’ values with piercings and tattoos.

(Random Granddaughter gets to wear transfer tattoos that wash off after a few days. I don’t know if this little indulgence by the mommies is meant to inoculate her against getting real tattoos when she gets a little older. I don’t know if Anne Elise will reject them or end up with her body covered over every square inch of skin with real tattoos by the time she is 15.

On the other hand, I don’t know if there is a similar way the mommies can let her have “pretend” piercings in her nose or such now.)

As my future wife neared the age of 18, I helped her buy a Citroen (the cars my family adopted at the time following the lead of my eccentric uncle Donald), and began teaching her to drive. I don’t remember the exact sequence of circumstances that precipitated the crisis. It involved her getting a “learners’ permit” to prepare for taking her drivers’ test. She did not have auto insurance yet. Her mother refused to let her get a learner’s permit.

Up until that point, I had been a quiet and polite observer to many scenes of bickering and argument, desperately trying not to alienate her mother. As this disagreement escalated into hysterics, I lost it. I told her mother what I thought of her. Finally, we stormed out of her mother’s house. At that time, I was still living at home with my mother.

(I had flunked out of college at the University of California at Berkeley a couple of years earlier and was attending a community college in the San Fernando Valley area of Los Angeles to restart my college career in the college equivalent of kindergarten. Also, my father had died recently, so I was the “head” of my broken and incoherent family.)

With no other place to go, I took my wife to be to my mother’s house. I explained the situation to my mother and asked if my wife to be could stay at our place until the situation was sorted out. My mother, always complaisant agreed.

We were sitting around awkwardly a couple of hours later, when there was a furious pounding on my door. I opened it to see Mrs. Random’s mother and one of her brothers, L. L had just left the navy. He was always the “responsible” one in her family, eventually becoming a corporate lawyer.

At this time her mother demanded that Mrs. Random come home. She refused. At this point her brother seized her and began dragging her out of the house kicking and screaming. I remember thinking (in a absurd and ridiculous fashion) This is just like a scene from an overwrought Italian movie.

 

The Surprise Valentine’s Day Wedding

 

Recently, the Friendly Neighbors invited us to go with them to a Valentine’s Day concert at their church. The singer is a professional musician who recently joined a moderately well-known musical group founded in the 1950s. His music could be described as a mixture of pop, folk-rock, and light rock from the 50s and 60s. The musician’s wife (a successful writer of children’s books as well as a decent singer herself) joined him in a couple of songs. A couple members of the congregation (reasonably good musicians themselves) also joined him in a couple of songs. The performer played piano and guitar. The median age of the audience was around our age (mid-60s). My wife and I had a good time with the other old fogies, just as some of today’s rappers will some day sit around with other old hip hoppers and quietly beam at favorite lyrics insulting “ho’s” from the first decade of this century.

However, that is not my story today. The Friendly Neighbors, and in fact, the entire church congregation, were all abuzz about a “surprise Valentine’s wedding” held at the church service that day.

I don’t have every detail of the story, but it runs something like this. B, a member of the church, is a man of part-Navajo descent (though not much in touch with his heritage) about 40 years old and unmarried. About ten years ago he joined their church, suffering from alcoholism and other problems. His participation in the church helped him overcome his problems and today he is the sales manager of a large auto dealership. (As my wife and I have been seeking a newer used truck as we consolidate down to one vehicle, we had some contact B in his sales manager persona; not entirely successful but reasonably described as “no harm-no foul.” It’s part of a larger, rather irritating experience involving our vehicle purchase I won’t discuss right now.)

B has been seeking a wife in Russia, apparently using one of those lonely-heart services that match up lonely American men with attractive poverty-stricken Russian women seeking a better life by marrying an American man. This somehow involved a trip to Israel. I don’t know the whole story. Also, apparently a few years ago, B had married a Ukrainian woman but it didn’t work out. Romance is a difficult and dangerous business, but ever-optimistic, B was willing to try again, this time with M, a Russian woman.

B brought his Russian prospect to the United States and they became engaged. The wedding was set for late March. However, B apparently has a taste for the dramatic-romantic, and launched a plot to have a surprise early St. Valentine’s Day wedding (actually at the Sunday after St. Valentine’s Day, but close enough, don’t you think)?

 

As the Friendly Neighbor told us the story at dinner before we went to the concert, I asked, “You mean she got married without a wedding dress?”

“No,” said the Friendly Neighbor. “He told M that it is an American custom for the bride to wear her wedding dress a month before the wedding for good luck.” Deceived by this amiable instant legend, M wore her wedding dress to church that Sunday.

B had also clued in the rest of the congregation on his plan. He had already secretly brought her relatives to the United States, and scattered them in edges of the people listening to the sermon where M could not see them from where she sat.

The minister and the rest of the congregation were in on the plot. The Friendly Neighbor has a Navajo basket which he brought to the wedding; a friend brought an eagle feather.

In the midst of the regular church service, apparently B said something to the effect of, “Surprise!” “We are getting married, right now, right here!” Everyone then launched into the wedding. The minister, apparently an eclectic and flexible sort of cleric, worked some sort of Navajo rituals involving the basket and the eagle feather into the ceremony.

The wedding had occurred earlier that day. (My wife and I had not been there.) That evening, at the Valentine’s Day concert, the congregation were still buzzing about the surprise wedding. Apparently a scheme such as this represents pretty exciting hi-jinks for the members of this church. Everyone chuckled and muttered about it in a combination of lively delight and grave concern whether or not it will all work out for B this time.

How Much Wood Can a Devout Woodchuck Chuck?

The Friendly Neighbors have been incredibly helpful to us in many ways. When we first started scoping out the lot we eventually bought, we found them living on lot #1 in a trailer. They had just retired and were having their well dug, but had not yet built their house. When their well came up with good water, that gave us confidence that our $10,000 investment in putting in a well would not be a dry hole fiasco. (This can happen; it happened to one of Mrs. Random’s nephews in the high desert of California; now his marriage is over as well; having become another dry hole, so to speak.)

The Friendly Neighbors are serious Christians and are frequently inviting us to participate in activities at their church. My wife and I became atheists before we were married; in fact, I don’t remember ever not being an atheist. (My wife, raised as a desultory Christian Scientist, swore off the stuff a few years before she met me.) We are not likely to become religious believers, but just as some dogs and cats live together in harmony; we don’t regard Christians and atheists as inevitable foes.

While it’s clear the friendly neighbors hope we will find their church so inviting and rewarding that we will be drawn in, they approach the matter with a light-handed manner that does not offend or irritate us. We take each invitation on its own merits, and are quite willing to participate in an activity that interests us or we find worthwhile.

For example, some of the men in the congregation chain-saw and split some logs every Wednesday morning and then deliver it to elderly people and people in financial distress. They call it their “wood ministry.” I recently started participating with the group and help out with the activity every Wednesday morning. At 65, I am the babe of the group; all the other men are serious Christians in their 60s, 70s, and 80s. Despite their age, all the men are quite dynamic and active, and chuck enough wood in a few hours to make a woodchuck scurry back into its burrow in shame. After a few hours of work we gather at the church where the church ladies provide us with coffee and cookies and we chat in an amiable session of elderly male bonding.

(Next: the surprise wedding.)

Oh, no! Did We See the Randoms in a Church?

The following story will take several parts to tell. This is part 1.

My wife and I have been married for 43 years, though we are about 80% incompatible. My wife became pregnant on our honeymoon, as quaint as that sounds today. Not all adult children get along with their parents, but our daughter still speaks with us and visits us of her own accord, so we probably were not too awful parents.

My wife and I are both introverts. A danger as we get older is that we will become isolated on our five acres in the woods on a large island and not have enough human contact to keep us emotionally healthy, or we will get into trouble and not have anyone to help us.

Our “neighborhood” consists of four five-acre lots. At the moment, two of our lots are occupied.

The people I call the Friendly Neighbors live on lot #1.

Lot #2 is owned by Joe and Melinda, who married in their forties (though Melinda had been married before and has an adult son). They work on the mainland. At the moment, they are having a small home built, more of a vacation home than a permanent home.

We live on lot #3. We chose it because it had a permit for a “standard septic,” which saved us quite a bit of money, though even after the savings, it cost us quite a bit of money to put in a septic system.

Lot #4 is owned by a young couple with a five-year-old son. They live on the mainland, also, and probably will not move to their lot for a number of years.

My wife and I are both volunteering as a way to keep ourselves connected to others and to give us something useful to do besides kill each other, which is a possibility now that we have to be in each others’ company most of the day.

Next: the Friendly Neighbors slyly draw us into their church.

Truck Buying and Internet Dating, Chilean Version

We are trying to buy a pickup truck over the Internet. Over the years I have bought quite a few things over the Internet. I have used Usenet, also known as Newsgroups, I have used eBay. Most recently, I have started to use Craig’s List. In the past, when purchasing materials goods, I sometimes have had very good luck by placing Item wanted ads instead of searching Items for sale ads, though this method has not brought me invariable success and satisfaction. Still, at times it’s worth a try.

Most of our lives we have gotten along with one vehicle. We have never owned a new vehicle. I am not talented with understanding how cars work, much less fixing them. We did eventually reach the point where we were able to buy fairly recent economy cars from rental car companies. That worked fairly well, though there were some problems.

When we decided to buy acreage on an island, my wife decided we needed a pickup truck. We bought a used pickup truck from a man who had fixed and maintained it himself.  We were rather rushed; I found the process and the seller irritating. However, it worked out reasonably well, though we had to have some of the work he had done on the truck himself done over again by professionals.

My car is running OK, but it is burning oil and is clearly close to worn out. My wife’s truck is running OK, but it is leaking oil and is close to worn out. As soon as we buy a newer and healthier used truck, we are going to sell our close-to-worn-out vehicles. We will tell the purchasers that the truth about the vehicles. The truth is that they will need some fairly extensive work fairly soon and how long they will last is uncertain. The proper purchasers will be people who are skilled at working on their own cars and want to buy them cheaply.

I placed a detailed “pick-up truck wanted” ad on Craig’s List, explaining what we wanted in detail. Some of the features were extended cab (so we can carry groceries and other supplies, and transport Random Granddaughter in her car seat in a back seat), full-length bed, automatic transmission (my wife can drive a vehicle with a manual transmission, but she does not like to). Four-wheel drive is optional. It is useful once in a while, but temperamental and expensive to get fixed. We don’t need “gee-gaws” such as cruise control or an elaborate stereo. My wife is small in stature, so we need a small truck that she feels comfortable driving: a truck in which she can see out the windshield while reaching the pedals, etc. Many pick-up trucks are too large for my wife to drive comfortably.

When we settle on a likely truck for purchase, I will have it inspected by an excellent garage we know. My daughter and her partner have used this business for years; they are demanding customers; they are still happy with X auto repair. X auto repair has reviews on the Internet; the reviews are uniformly positive and happy. My wife and I used them a few times before we moved away. We had no reason to complain. They are skillful, honest, and trustworthy.

I received replies from several sellers with possibly suitable used trucks for sale. At first, the best truck was fancier, was more expensive, and had more gee-gaws than we needed. The owner obviously has a lot of money and a number of vehicles, but he seems honest and straightforward enough. While we were talking to him, we heard from Angelica.

Angelica’s truck seems to fit our needs very well. Angelica seems honest and straightforward. I have yet to talk on the phone to Angelica, much less meet her. She doesn’t always answer her email promptly. This is what I have learned about her so far.

Angelica lives on the mainland, not far from our island. Angelica is from Chile, as her mother, who was the real owner of the truck. She sounds like a Chilean “truck-driving momma.”

 Angelica attended and graduated from the University of Michigan and then moved to Washington where she got a job working in some sort of retail business. The truck belonged to her mother, who lived with Angelica while she was attending the university. Angelica and her mother drove from Michigan to Washington. Angelica is even shorter than my wife. Her truck, like my wife’s truck, is a Ford Ranger, a small “economy” pickup truck. My wife’s truck is a 1992 model and has about 150,000 miles on it. Angelica’s truck is a 1970 and has 70,000 miles on it.

Angelica at one time had a small, economy car but it was destroyed in a wreck. Her mother gave her truck to Angelica, and then returned to Chile. However, Angelica feels more comfortable driving a small car (though she can drive the truck); she wants to sell the truck and buy a car. However, she works long hours at her retail job and is in the midst of Christmas rush, so it has been hard so far for us to get together to even talk on the phone, much less meet and look at the truck, much less get the truck inspected. Evidently, after her job, Angelica is exhausted and goes home and collapses.

I have tried to call Angelica. She never answers her phone. I have asked her to call us. So far she has not done so. Sometimes it takes several days for her to answer an email.

Angelica’s story may all be perfectly true and reasonable. Also, it is possible that Angelica is not telling us something or is hiding something from us. Our experience so far is a little bit like trying to date someone over the internet. I am tempted to say to Angelica,

“For God’s sake, woman. You contacted me first! Now you are being all coy when I ask you to stay in touch. You sent me your phone number, and asked me to call you. Now you never answer your phone or return phone messages. You said, my truck has low mileage and is in very good shape; that is why I am asking the price I do. I said, I will pay the price you ask after my mechanic checks the truck out. I passed an opportunity to buy another very good truck to get your truck. I would like some evidence you are serious about this.

To put it bluntly, Internet dating sucks. I suppose if I press her on following up on her interest, I will be served with a restraining order and told not to harass her any more. I will counter with a breach of promise of promise suit, filed by a transgender attorney.

My Wife and I Finally Meet

 

When I was young I was so afraid of young women I could hardly bring myself to even speak to one. I’m not quite sure exactly why that was, but probably I thought of myself as so worthless a person no woman would want to have anything to do with me. This must be one of the reasons I feel a bond with David and his tales of being harassed and bullied by other children and feeling worthless as a child.

I wasn’t bullied as a child in the same way he was, but in a sense I bullied myself.

When I was a teenager, the thought of asking a girl for a “date” seemed more terrifying than climbing Mt. Everest without a scarf. I had no idea how other boys had the courage to approach a girl. I never went on a date with a girl while I was in high school. Aside from my timidity and terror, not knowing how to drive a car, not knowing how to dance, and always being an introvert in a new school (my father worked for a defense contractor and was always being transferred to help install computers at a new Air Force base for the Strategic Air Command, so I attended six different high schools in three states) also did not help.

In college, I did go out on two very timid and chaste “dates” with young ladies I considered so unattractive that I figured they would even go out with me. I am kind of disgusted with myself when I consider my thinking at the time. I hope the ladies involved eventually encountered someone in their lives who was a little more respectful than I was, even if I was perfectly polite to them and never laid an improper hand on them.

My brother was still in high school and already had gone through several girl friends. He was far less timid and inhibited than I was, not to mention so immature he would do any fool thing that came into his head.

One day after I retreated home in disgrace after flunking out of college, my brother and I were home alone. We were bored. As an introvert, I would have just buried myself in a book. As an extroverted immature person, my brother started flipping through the phone book and decided to call people with peculiar last names and make jokes about their names. I went along for the ride, listening on an extension phone.

After the first two victims quickly hung up in disgust, he hit gold, reaching a teenage girl sitting bored at home with her hair up in curlers. Even though she was bored, and even though she was only about 15 years of age, my WTB (wife to be) was already a cautious, strait-laced person, not the type of person to stay on the phone flirting with a couple of boyish pranksters.

Nevertheless, she even laughed when we made fun of her eccentric last name. (She was quite happy to change it to my last name when we got married. On the other hand, my daughter was quite happy to change her last name to her out-of-law partner’s last name after they had been not-married for a few years and Random Granddaughter joined the conversation.)

Actually my brother quickly grew bored with the conversation, but I started to improvise a comedy routine and she started to laugh. I don’t remember exactly what I talked about, though I do remember extemporizing some sort of pathetic routine about elves living under toadstools. I am sure it was exactly as bad then as it sounds now.

The funniest thing about this exploit is that my wife is generally not much amused by my sense of humor; much less so than the typical reader of my blog. But somehow or other I got her laughing that night and she not only laughed, she agreed to talk to me if I called her again. Well, I did have her number.

Well, you already realize I was a youthful loser-dork. What was my wife’s problem? It was her bra size.

My wife’s mother was quite buxom, as is her older sister. As my wife became a teenager, her bosom never developed much bux. She apparently figured this physical handicap meant that no men would ever be attracted to her, forcing to her succumb to a fate of being a lonely old maid. Intellectually, even then, she knew this was nonsense, and in fact, another teenage boy, named Bruce had actually asked her out on a date, but emotionally she considered herself as an unlovable flat-chested reject in a breast-obsessed society.

As two people who each felt ourselves utterly unlikely to ever find love, I guess our love was meant to be.

At the time we met by telephone I was attending a junior college in the San Fernando Valley section of Los Angeles (after flunking out of the University of California at Berkeley) and volunteering in the news department of KPFA, the Pacifica listener-supported radio station in Los Angeles. My wife-to-be was still attending high school, where she took a drama class with Sally Field. However, my WTB is quite unlike Sally Field. Her real soul sister in the world of entertainment stars is Carol Burnett. My wife can do a brilliant Carol Burnett imitation.

I had gone on two tepid dates in college. My wife-to-be had gone out with a boy named Bruce. Bruce, the daring rake, planted a timid kiss on her lips at the end of a date. According to my wife, no sparks ensued, and her hormones yawned. I hope Bruce found his own true love somewhere whose fire he lit.

At that childish time in my life, I did not even know how to drive. After my WTB and I had talked on the phone a few times, I asked her to go out with me. Our “date” (which my father drove us to as I couldn’t drive) was a real dork-fest. On weekends, as a volunteer, I wrote and read a 15-minute newscast at the listener-supported radio station KPFA (part of the Pacifica network).

Probably seven people listened throughout the Los Angeles Metropolitan area, six of whom were probably confined to their beds, and one of whom had already called the radio station and asked why the news sounded so amateurish on weekends. Evidently fancying myself a fascinating and alluring media star, I asked my wife-to-be if she wanted to watch me do a radio broadcast and see the inside of a radio station.

My wife told her mother that she had met me at a party at one of her friends’ houses.

We went out on a couple of other equally exciting dates. I think we took the bus to go bowling with my brother and his girl friend of the time.

My WTB (the youngest of five children as I am the oldest of five children) adored one of her brothers, L, who lived in San Francisco and pursued a life as an artist. The rebel in her family, L stirred my WTB’s inner non-conformist, though at the time he caused me to lose her.

One day I called to ask her out. Her mother told me that she had gone to stay with her brother in San Francisco. The implication-or so I interpreted it-was that my WTB did not want to see me again. I figured love had been glimpsed and then lost forever from my life.

Two Great Themes of my Life

Two of the great themes of my life are:

• I hate bullies and bullying.
• I love to play matchmaker.

My brother and I were bullied by our father. I tried very hard as a father not to be a bully toward my daughter. I am not in close contact with my brother and his children-he lives across the country from me-but I think he has made a similar effort for his three children.

My wife and I met by accident, and we are not particularly well-suited to each other, but so far we have made it work. “So far” will reach 43 years in November. Our motto is: We are too weird for anyone else to put up with, so we might as well stick together. After 42 years of marriage, we got brave enough to say, “I love you,” to each other.

When I was young, I read a science fiction story about psychic powers. I don’t remember the title (as usual), but I do remember the author’s name: Keith Laumer. (He was a talented but very tragic person, by the way.)

The protagonist develops a psychic power-he can detect people who need each other. Not necessarily romantic need-though sometimes that is the case. However, each party has some quality or characteristic the other needs. The protagonist puts them in touch with each other and something marvelous happens.

I thought it was one of the most wonderful stories I ever read.

I don’t know that I have ever matched people up successfully in a romantic relationship. However, at times I have brought people together who benefited from knowing each other in other fashions than romance.

My pledge drive for David Rochester may be my magnum opus for working on both of these themes. It’s too early to tell if I will have success on either in his case. While I am working on it, I will tell two stories, one on each theme. One where nothing happened from over twenty years ago. That nothing happened was probably good.

The other incident was quite recent. Only a little tiny thing happened, but it was good.

I will write these stories in the midst of incessant pledge drive badgering. I am eagerly waiting to hear about money coming into David’s mail box next week.

3/3 In a Series I Won’t Write about

One of the jokes I told her was about how my wife and I are incompatible. I said, “When people become romantically involved, they are in a ‘honeymoon’ situation. They think everything about the lover is wonderful. Then if they are together for a long time (married or not), they encounter differences and disagreements. The real test is if they can survive the conflicts.

“If I were running a ‘dating service,’ I would require people to have a big fight in the first month they are ‘going together’ so they can see if they are really compatible.”

Mary agreed that a pre-marital fight would be a good idea.

“My wife has a very bad temper. I also have a very bad temper. We agree with five acres of woods, whoever kills the other one first has to bury the dead spouse. My wife says I am safe because she can’t dig a hole deep enough to bury me.

“My wife got a job on the island. She was chosen from 80 applicants. We thought we were very lucky. But then one of her co-workers proved to be a very bad employee. This co-worker didn’t do much work. She gossiped to the boss about the other workers not doing their work. My wife hates work, but she is a very hard worker. (Instead of working she likes to ‘putter’ at home. If anyone else saw her puttering at home they would think she is working very, very hard.) My wife couldn’t stand having a co-worker who wouldn’t work. I said, ‘You will lose your temper and get fired.” So my wife quit her job before she lost her temper and puttered happily at home for a while. But she kept reading the want ads, looking for a part time job. My wife is a very responsible person and she knows we need the money. Especially now that I might get fired.

“When I told my wife I was in trouble on my job, she said, ‘I told you to be more careful and more obedient and more respectful.’

“I said, ‘You were right. You did tell me. Except it is impossible to do my job now.’

“She said, ‘You should do it anyway.’

“My wife applied for a job at a horse ranch. The job involves office work, not taking care of horses. The ranch provides therapy for troubled youths (and a few troubled adults). The therapy involves riding horses.

“My wife went for an interview. She said to me, ‘They want a lot of different things. I am not sure I can do everything they want. I am not sure this would be a good job for me.’ [My wife always wants to be perfect at everything she does. She can’t stand to be sloppy or careless or faulty in any work she does.]

“My wife said, ‘I don’t know if I will bother to send a follow-up letter.’

“I said, ‘We always send follow-up letters after applying for a job, thanking them for the interview. Not getting a follow-up letter is the easiest way to weed out applicants. You don’t have to take the job if you don’t want it, but let them make the decision if they want to offer it.’ [I thought my wife was trying to subvert her chance of getting the job.]

“My wife said, ‘I don’t know the last name of the person who interviewed me.’

“I said, ‘Call and ask the last name.’

“My wife said, ‘That would look really dumb.’

“I said, ‘I forget names all the time. I used to be embarrassed. Now I say, “I am really dumb. You just told me your name and I forgot it. Please tell me your name again.” People are usually appreciative that I am honest and that I care enough to try and get the name right.

“My wife said, “I don’t feel I can write a long flowery letter about how excited I am over the job and what a wonderful job I can do.

“I said, ‘Just say, “Thank you for the opportunity to interview for the job.”’ If Random Granddaughter was served a nice meal and didn’t want to eat it, but took two bites and said, ‘Thank you for dinner’ with a sulky look on her face without being prompted we would think, Those are very good manners for a four-year-old little girl and we wouldn’t get upset because she didn’t smile make an effusive speech about how wonderful dinner was. If you send a very plain letter, they will think, At least she knows how to be polite and they won’t refuse to consider you even if you aren’t effusive.

“So after 42 years of marriage we still keep fighting,” I said to Mary. “But we haven’t killed each other or divorced each other because we argue and criticize each other.” Mary laughed at my joke. She is very polite.

We expressed sympathy for each other’s plight and headed for our respective homes.