The way I interpreted it:
In the side yard — a narrow flagstone path between the privacy fence and the side of the house, where the outdoor kitchen stadium will one day arise from its present-day ashes (and weeds) — is a large dumpster’s worth of entrails harvested from Chez Mattison’s original kitchen, as well as from every other nook and cranny in the house and adjacent out-building.
Old cabinetry; boxes and odd-shaped Styrofoam chunks that once cuddled new appliances; various bags of dirt and bottles of spray stuff and rusted cans of unrecognizable wall color and random important pieces of wood and countless other representatives of merchandise once thought vital to sustaining life in our little corner of the world have been collected with abandon and piled in this once proud and vibrant alley.
It is here, after work on Wednesday, where I would find myself, I was certain, rooting around for the boxes that once contained the Roman shades that, for a brief time, occupied (with magnificent — if not surprising — laser-like plumb) one of the kitchen windows.
The boxes would be easy enough to find, although pawing across the top of the garbage heap was guaranteed to prove a bit more of a challenge. It was the packing materials, like the bags that once held the screws, the instructions, the paper insert that described the contents, and the various other things stuffed into a typical carton of merchandise, that would be more difficult to wrangle. I was sure of it.
I threw them away late Tuesday because I didn’t realize that once the shades were hanging in the window and working properly, they would have to be taken down, returned to the store, and swapped for shades that are 1 inch wider.
One inch wider. That’s “one.” With a “wuh.”
All that work to get them in the window, space them evenly, carry the ladder back into the garage, locate the remote, and get back to the ninth viewing of The Sopranos, Season 1 — all for nothing.
During the installation process, I didn’t realize the wind beneath my wings had brought home the wrong size shades. They fit. They kept out the daylight. What. One chore checked off the list; 12 more remaining … to be ignored for the time being.
I didn’t realize this because for one brief moment on Tuesday — when those shades were no longer wedged uncomfortably yet securely up my to-do list — it slipped my mind that no matter how difficult or effortless the project, I remain, until death do I part, severely married.
A main difference between a wedding and a funeral (I rarely, if ever, believe with all my heart) is that at one of them, the guest of honor gets to eat.
Also, the Hokey Pokey. But that’s about it.
See, I think one of the roadblocks in the whole marriage thing stems from the eventual realization that there will always be someone else in your space, under your feet, messing with your head, hiding your stuff, driving you to the edge, and making you do hard things twice (or more than twice), and griping about how you handle all of it.
I should have thoroughly read the instructions before installing the wedding ring. I was young and foolish. I mean smitten. Also, hungry.
But that doesn’t explain everything.
I have been going through the marriage handbook — skimming through the remaining pages and paragraphs that have not been entirely blacked out by a magic marker — trying to find where it says the wife has the right to make the husband repaint the living room a slightly different shade of green, even though he just finished painting it the shade of green the wife had previously approved.
Or why the husband has to hang the laundry room shelves more than once, even though the first time he hung them he did so in wife-approved locations.
Or why, as we fast-forward to today, the Roman shades have to come out of the window, back into the box, and off to their place of origin because someone in the marriage who is not me brought home the wrong thing.
It does not pay to complete tasks while the wind beneath my wings is off at work and I am home, on a day off from work, doing things I much prefer to do by myself so as to cut down on the number of times I am required to be reminded that the way I am doing it makes no sense. And I’m stupid.
When word came down on Wednesday that yet another chore had to be torn apart and redone, the first thing that went through my mind was: If I had a nickel for the number of times I have had to suffer through this inexcusable process, I’d have about 15 cents, if memory served. So that was immediately discarded as a weapon.
The second thing I thought of was pouting. Nothing beats a sustained, spousal pout when trying to convince a slight inconvenience that it would serve a greater purpose if it could more closely resemble a tectonic shift. I also spent some time alone in my office practicing my heavy sigh.
The way it really happened:
I didn’t have to climb through the garbage pile. By the time I got home, Karen had already grabbed the shades’ cartons, which I had tossed neatly on top of the stack, and placed them in the garage, with the accompanying packaging materials neatly stuffed inside. This immediately rendered moot my hours of sighing practice. So that very kind gesture on her part threw me off a little.
It originally took me about 30 minutes on Tuesday to hang the two Roman shades in the double-wide kitchen window. I’ve become quite adept at the task, thanks to the intuition of the well-paid engineers who sit at giant drafting tables with t-squares and protractors and sharp pencils who are constantly inventing easier ways for challenged do-it-yourselfers with their flexing muscles oozing from sleeveless t-shirts trying hard as they might to impress their blushing brides with their nesting abilities — me included, although not so much with the oozing muscles and the underwear.
It actually took longer to get the stuff out of the box, figure out what all the pieces do, determine if I am indeed supposed to have extra pieces (because there are always extra pieces) and figure which end of the shade faces front and which end is up. (Learned that one the hard way.) Securing the brackets and hanging the shade was nothing.
So replacing the wrong shades was a piece of cake. Snap out the old one; snap in the new one. Done. I even used the old hardware. Stuffed the new hardware back in the old cartons, unopened. Genius.
But none of this is the point.
The point is it’s a lot harder — down right impossible — to fake anger and earn sympathy if the source of all things evil and wrong tries her hardest to make my life ridiculously easy.
She cheats. Best thing for a marriage.
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