Tag: marriage

To the Marriage of True Minds

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So, I was at one of those parties today and I met a bunch of nice folks and spent time with some old friends too.  And one of my friends was telling a story about a relative of his who had a job that involved a lot of international travel including Europe where he met his future wife.  And because of his desire to build up some equity in a home he bought a house in a town where he did not necessarily want to eventually settle down when he returned permanently to the US.

So, when he and his new wife took up residence in this home, he had his eyes open for his dream house which would include a huge garage that would accommodate his hobby of rebuilding classic old cars.  And one day he found it.  It had everything he wanted and was in the part of town he liked best.  So, he informed his wife of his find and that they should get ready to sell their house and move to the new location.  What he didn’t realize was that since moving back his wife had put down roots in the neighborhood and made friends and after moving to a new continent she would be devastated if she had to pull up roots again and start from scratch.

So, he stayed and had to forego the dream garage.  And my friend finished by saying that he had always been extremely shocked that his relative hadn’t insisted that they move in order to get the garage he really wanted.  So, I said to him, “But aren’t they still happily married?”  And he said “Yeah.”  “Well,” I said, “what’s harder to find, a good wife or a good garage?  And what are the chances of finding a second wife as good as the first?”  He chuckled and said, “I see your point.”

Now mostly this is just an amusing story.  The whole reason that his relative didn’t demand a move is that in any halfway decent marriage there is always a whole continuum of tradeoffs and negotiations that go on between a husband and wife.  We all have our “garage” that we want badly and also a laundry list of things that come ahead of it in the calculus of family life.  The kids’ braces come before that man cave you lust after.  A minivan has to be financed before the fishing boat you’ve always wanted.  Sometimes by the time it’s your turn to buy your heart’s desire, your heart no longer desires it.  Or you’re too old to put it to good use.

But managing to raise a family in today’s society and still being married to someone you like at the end is something of an accomplishment and I guess that was what I was trying to say.  It’s a trite saying, “Happy wife, happy life.”  But if you’ve had a happy marriage, it rings true.  Now before I get too sappy, I’ll append the classic answer that Art (Deputy Marshal in “Justified”) gave to the criminal when asked if he loved his wife, “Well, most of the time!”  But even that limitation admits to the fact that (mostly) happily married men recognize that even if a marriage is fraught with feminine annoyances the alternative is much sadder and lonelier.

A Man, a Plan, Camera Girl’s Pond Project

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The things a man will do for his wife!  This is going to be a very long week.  Monday and Tuesday will be completely consumed in the service of Dunwich.  By late Tuesday night I will be moaning and groaning and repeating that law of nature “No good deed ever goes unpunished.”  And in Dunwich the punishment is always cruel and extremely unusual.

Be that as it may I had promised Camera Girl that I would build her a goldfish pond and so I have been working at it since it arrived off the third-party delivery truck that Home Depot contracted for the job.  Between Wednesday, Thursday and Friday I got to work with pitch fork, shovel, wrecking bar, rake and wheelbarrow.    I measured off the perimeter, removed the turf and started to dig.  And because this is New England (at least the parts of Dunwich which are tethered to our space-time) the ratio of rock to soil is something like 3/1.  This makes the whole procedure slow and exceedingly painful.  The good news was that the temperature was in the fifties and sixties which made the earth moving tolerable but it was still strenuous enough to prove to me that digging ditches is strictly for prison chain gangs and other equally motivated people.  It brought to mind those scenes in Cool Hand Luke.  When Camera Girl brought me out some refreshments I said in a southern accent, “Taking it off, boss!”  I don’t think she got the reference.

But finally, yesterday as the sun was getting low in the western sky, it looked like the whole hole was deep enough.  So, I lowered the liner into the hole and voila!  In fact, it’s slightly too deep and also it will need a slight adjustment to make it perfectly level.  But the fine tuning will have to wait until Wednesday.  After that I’ll start the back filling that’s needed under the parts of the liner that are raised into steps for the placement of water plants and any goofy ornaments that women feel are needed to amuse the fish and frogs.  That will probably take a day or two.  And then we’ll fill the thing up and buy some water lilies and those other little sea-weedy plants that pond supply stores hand out and then onto the fish store to get goldfish or carp or whatever hardy species are available.  Camera Girl doesn’t want koi which is probably a good idea since they’re expensive and the Great Blue Herons around here like those better.

Truth be told I’m interested in seeing if in addition to the numerous and varied frog and toad species around the yard we manage to attract other cold-blooded critters.  Since I’ve seen them in the yard, I’m guessing garter and water snakes will show up.  And the painted turtles don’t have far to go from the real pond.  But what I’m not sure about is whether any salamanders will migrate over to this new water habitat.  There are several species in the area and I’ve always wanted to attract them to the yard.

Before we moved to Dunwich, I had built a smaller pond for Camera Girl in the yard where we lived.  It always made her happy to sit and watch the various wild animals and insects that gather around water.  I’ll have this up and running before summer and she’ll be able to enjoy it the way she used to.  Ah, the things we do for love.

A Better Mousetrap

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Camera Girl is a courageous woman.  She will bravely rail against anyone who offends her sense of justice.  Unfortunately, she usually does this when it puts me in the firing line of whoever she is challenging or berating.  This can get a little dicey for me.

So, she has the heart of lioness, except when it comes to mice.  The poor girl is terrorized by the diminutive rodents.  Something about their tails fills her with horror.  And so, she wages a war of attrition against them in all the outposts of the Compound.  Specifically, the garage and the large shed that houses the yard equipment.  My own feeling is that areas outside of the house and its various attachments are outside of the jurisdiction of polite society and so a mouse or two more or less is not cause for alarm.  But she disagrees vehemently.  Part of the reason is that she has to go through the garage to bring the dogs to the fenced in areas she lets them out into at night.  And if the dogs sense that mice have been in the area, they become interested and this frightens her into thinking that one of Stuart Little’s relatives might make an appearance and trigger the dogs to catch and eat it.  For her this would be even worse than one running by her.

And so, she has taken to mining the garage and shed with mouse traps.  Interestingly, seeing a dead mouse in the snap trap is not frightening for her.  Once rendered inert, she discharges the traps at the edge of the pond and literally caws for Moe the Crow and Poe the Raven and their ancillary corvids to partake of the murine feast provided.  I find this to be one of her most eccentric rituals.

Anyway, a crisis has emerged.  A year or two ago we switched from the venerable wooden spring traps to a newfangled jaws-like version made of plastic.  She liked these better because they made it easier to release the dead mouse from the trap.  But recently these traps have begun failing.  Apparently, the mice were now able to extract the peanut butter that she baited the trap with, without the trap snapping.  She would come back from her trip to the shed, filled with a sense of dread and tell me this tale of woe.  The world turned upside down!

Because Camera Girl had never developed the knack for setting the older wooden traps I have, of course, been recruited to become the baiter of traps.  And also, I have been tasked with solving the mystery of the failed plastic traps.  And it has been implied that if I fail to diagnose the problem and correct it, I will have failed as a man, a husband, and an engineer.

O tempora, o mores!

So far, I have installed the wooden traps with the prescribed bait that was provided to me by Camera Girl.  That much have I done.  But I have only just begun to investigate a cause.  Could the traps be defective?  Could they have gotten rusty and thus less sensitive?  Might the peanut butter have become old and therefore easier to remove?

My mind has raced to encircle this mystery within a thicket of possible solutions.  But these are deep waters.  I cannot be too hasty.  A proper plan of attack is needed.  I’ll need a budget to purchase supplies, tools and instruments.  I’ll need a detailed schedule to properly scope the project and I’ll need a scapegoat in case the project is a failure.  Maybe one of the dogs.  Updates will follow but I felt this project was important enough to warrant an introductory post to benchmark the effort.

The single guys out there probably assume I’m suffering the beginnings of dementia.  The married men will probably understand that this is just one of the many accommodations a man makes to keep a wife happy.  And after all the expression, “Happy wife, happy wife,” Is not far from the truth.  But I do wish someone would invent a mousetrap with lasers.  It would make the who thing much more fun.

Update:

War Pig commented:

Mamaw used peanut butter in her traps as well, but when the diminutive rascals found out how to defeat that, she went to bacon grease. Mice, in Ohio at least, cannot resist bacon grease. Also the plastic traps tend to not give the same force as the wood-and-spring traps. A healthy mouse can get out of them and resist a broken neck due to their lack of dynage. Living on a farm meant constant vermin control. The little buggars aren’t stupid. We have to change out methods and baits from time to time. Thankfully, a generation of mice comes along a few times per year. So anything learned from the last generation is lost to the grandchildren.

Eureka

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After yesterday’s epic whine about the vicissitudes of home ownership I looked around for some kind of salve for my male ego.  And fate or something provided me with the opportunity to redeem myself.  A clogged bathtub drain.  For the last few weeks, the drain in our tub has been getting slower and slower.  Lately I’ve left the plunger near the tub and after every shower I played a game of trying to get it to break loose.  All I achieved was to dredge up a goodly amount of black flakes that were some kind of fossilized soap scum.  And all that achieved was to waste ten or fifteen minutes while I cleaned up the tub of this disgusting residue.

But today I had had enough.  I gathered my equipment:

  • Screwdrivers … check
  • Needle nose pliers … check
  • Accordion Toilet Plunger with Large Bellows for Extra Powerful Plunge, Black … check
  • Snake auger … check
  • Electric drill … check
  • Safety glasses … check
  • Disposable rubber gloves … check

All that was left was to let Camera Girl see that I was preparing for battle and even though I would be expending tens of thousands of dollars to have someone competent repair my home, at least I was capable of saving the cost of a plumber to get my bathtub back in good operating condition.

I solemnly explained to her how I would be removing the plunger from the trip-lever stopper to properly auger the drain line.  I don’t think it would be possible for me to overstate the intensity of contempt her look communicated to me.  Well, that’s the problem with women.  They don’t understand or appreciate technical genius.

So, I removed the drain filter and tried pulling out hair with the pliers.  Nada.  Then just for old time’s sake I put six inches of water in the tub and tried the “Accordion Toilet Plunger with Large Bellows for Extra Powerful Plunge, Black.”  I pushed down on the stupid thing once and the tub drained in seconds.  And of course, Camera Girl walked in just as it emptied and gave me the same look.  She picked up the plunger and asked, “How much did you pay for this?”  I said, “ten bucks.”  “And this?” (pointing at the auger).  “Sixty dollars.”  She shook her head and walked away.  Women don’t understand about contingency planning.  Very short-sighted.

Well, as pathetic as my victory was, it has transformed my attitude.  We’re definitely on the upswing.  And after she took a shower, she readily admitted that a working bathtub drain is not a commodity to look down your nose at.  And there’s no telling what I might do next.

Who knows, maybe I’ll tell my builder to stop all work, figure what I owe him so far and take over the job myself.  I mean how long could it take me to shovel ten thousand pounds of gravel?  And how hard can it be to jack up a building off its foundation?  And who needs a truck to pour concrete anyway?  What was it Archimedes said?  “Give me a place to stand and a lever long enough and I’ll move the Earth.”  Well, some of my ancestors came from Sicily.  Maybe I’m related to Archimedes (at least by marriage!).  Well, baby steps.  I think I’ll shock Camera Girl and brew my own pot of coffee.  How hard could it be?

Damn You Millan!

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Little Evil Dog (LED) is now about four months old.  And still in the midst of a teething frenzy as her milk teeth are falling out.  Sometimes Camera Girl even bleeds from the bites of this insane little basset hound.  There has been some improvement.  Lately she only draws blood once a week rather than daily.  Everything is relative.

Today I noted that Camera Girl was watching the Dog Whisperer on Nat Geo.  It’s that Mexican guy Cesar Millan who trains dogs.  Of course, there is nothing more absurd than Camera Girl trying to train her dogs.  They completely dominate her and systematically ignore all her commands.  It would be accurate to say that they have trained her.

I tried to imagine her attempting to use Millan’s techniques but I know that she could never assert authority over the dogs.  It just completely clashes with her babying of these canines.  And yet with her children and grandchildren she has always been able to maintain good discipline.  I think it’s the fact that intellectually dogs are like permanent infants.  They never reach a point where they can be responsible for their misdeeds.  Training always has to be a matter of dominance.  And so, she forever treats them like babies.  Even if the animal outweighs her.

And so, the problem of Camera Girl’s bad dogs can never be fully solved.  I have in the past had to force obedience from some of the larger male dogs on my own just for safety’s sake but she will never be their boss.

But as I watched the episode that Camera Girl had on it occurred to me that a wife whisperer would be an interesting show.  If some guy developed a format where he had men come to him with wives who behaved poorly and he came up with a regimen for bringing them back in line.  And of course, it should be a humane program.  No shock collars or whips; nothing like that.  It could all be done using positive reinforcement.  Even a muzzle probably would be unnecessary, although I could see where it would make life better sometimes.

I’d guess it would work with treats and gifts used to encourage good behavior and verbal cues to point out bad behavior.  I started to think how I could work some of these things into my home life.  I could use small rewards like buying her a turtle or a lizard if she behaved herself.  But I realized that my house would probably overrun with pets within a few weeks.  And since there weren’t any other treats, I could provide or withhold, there wasn’t a way forward with my wife whisperer idea.  It was a dead end.

But I did watch how often food was the treat that Millan used to train his dogs.  How he used it to reinforce good behavior or withheld it to show displeasure.  And then some things came together in my mind.  Grocery patterns and other aspects of my life.  And I was aghast.  She has been using Millan’s program on me!  Tonight, we’re having a pork roast.  That only went on the menu after I performed the winter yard close-up yesterday.

To Serve Man, it’s a training book!

photog Opines on Valentine’s Day

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Every happily married man has to have an opinion on Valentine’s Day.  And being in that category (most of the time!) my opinion is well known to Camera Girl.  Being a very wise woman, she pretends that Valentine’s Day is of no concern to her.  But that is a façade.  The point is for me to show her that I have a way of making Valentine’s Day a useful ritual within our domain.  In this way she doesn’t have to seem to be dependent on this odd gift receiving dynamic while I can demonstrate my romantic aptitude and at the same time rightly honor her importance in the whole male/female dynamic.

Wow.  That was weird.

Anyway, I’ve long ago given her all the jewelry she needs or even wants.  I usually check to see if she wants any perfume but she’s pretty well stocked there too.  So, this year I said I’d take her out to eat.  And at first, I thought we had a plan.  But at the last minute she changed it.  We were supposed to have the grandkids over for a luncheon of delicatessen food.  But someone got sick so we postponed it.  But apparently Camera Girl was in the mood for pastrami, which, as everyone knows, is the most sensual of the salted cured meats.

So, her idea for Valentine’s Day was pastrami sandwiches at home.  She is a thrifty woman.  And I should be more grateful for that than I am.  So today she served up pastrami on Italian bread with melted Swiss cheese and tons of brown mustard.  There was egg potato salad and dill pickles on the side and a giant mug of very good, hot coffee.  Afterward there was a big slice of apple pie with three big scoops of premium vanilla ice cream.  Now that is what I call a Valentine’s Day celebration.

It reminded me of that scene in the Maltese Falcon where Sam Spade serves corned beef on French bread and coffee with brandy to Brigid O’Shaughnessy as they warily circle each other in their dance of murder and passion.  And after all Camera Girl is a femme fatale.  Her allure has side-tracked me from my intended career as a classical philologist by, as far as I can reckon somewhere on the order of forty five years, give or take.  And there has been many a night that I suspected she was contemplating smothering me in my sleep.  I have no incontrovertible evidence for this.  But for someone who knows her moods all the signs were there.  But I digress.

So, the key to a successful Valentine’s Day gift or celebration is buy-in from the woman.  There has to be an effort by the man to imbue the ritual with some special significance for the pair.  And to do that requires good will on both sides and for an established relationship the desire to break the monotony of a settled routine with something different and in some way exciting.

And exciting doesn’t have to be the Hope Diamond or a trip to Bora Bora.  The excitement is breaking the routine.  It’s talking about different things.  It’s putting a little more of your personality into your presentation than you normally do.  And, of course, it doesn’t hurt if you drag her off to bed to consummate the proceedings properly.  But, just like Sam Spade, remember that she may be hiding a revolver under her side of the bed so sleep with one eye open.  Especially if she has two or three aliases.

Happy St. Valentine’s Day

Reclaiming the Family – Part 6 – The Miracle of a Traditional Wife

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I never tire of reminding Camera Girl that in my mind she and I are very close in behavior to the married couple in W. C. Fields two classic movies, “It’s A Gift” and “The Man on the Flying Trapeze.”  In both movies Field’s hen-pecked character has a wife played by Kathleen Howard a tall, stout woman who affects the character of a cultured, histrionic scold who constantly hectors and nags at Fields’ character.  And Fields’ answer to almost every utterance of his wife is a meek, “yes dear.”  And I tell her this not because there is any resemblance physically or temperamentally between her and this shrewish character but because this reminds me of the natural antagonism that husband and wife experience in the course of their wedded bliss.  Well, also because I am sort of a jerk.

A few weeks ago, we were sitting down to dinner and she had cooked a soup using the leftovers from a ham we had for the holidays.  It was a ham and lentil soup and she decided to make it so thick that we call it a stoup, meaning stew/soup.  As I started eating dinner it occurred to me that being married to a woman like my wife is probably the greatest good that a man can have in his life.

A traditional wife makes your house into a home and raises a family.  And a family is the only true wealth that any man ever actually possesses.  And if she’s also pretty and a good cook like mine then it’s as close to heaven as any man can hope to see on this side of the great divide.  That’s the information I can provide to the young guys around today.

But where can you find such a woman today?  All the American girls have been sold on the idea that they have to have a career to be fulfilled in the modern world.  That is the root of the problem.  There are only two solutions, either convince some woman that there is a better option or go outside of the local pool of women.

As far as convincing women to move away from careers I think a man has to have the wherewithal to convince a woman that he can support a stay-at-home wife.  Probably that means owning your own home and having a stable income.  It would be best if you are up front about your plans and expectations so that you can eliminate the girls that will never work out.  I’m too old to know anything about on-line dating services but I would imagine a primary function would be trying to line up marital expectations.  Correct me if I’m mistaken that they must have a profile that corresponds to a traditional homemaker.

One thing that might be a starting point is avoid any girl who is planning on going to some very expensive college.  Unless her parents have funded her entire education, she is going to have to pay back those student loans and that will make it doubly difficult for you to afford a one income lifestyle.  So maybe you should be looking at women who go to the local community college or even better ones working in local jobs that do not require high powered college credentials.

But however you find one, if she has all the qualifications I mentioned in my intro then marry her and never let her work a day of her life outside of the home.  Have a passel of kids and enjoy every day of it for as long as you both shall live.  Raising a family is a challenging and sometimes a confusing task but as you get older, you’ll find that it really is the only meaningful thing that most human beings ever accomplish.    Ray Bradbury wrote a story called the Happiness Machine.  In it an inventor tried to make a machine that would make a person happy if he sat in it.  It had all the sights and sounds that he imagined could make a person happy.  Music, exotic vistas, delicious aromas, everything he thought he would want.  But by the end of the story, he discovers the truth when he looks into the window of his own house and sees his family, his wife and his children, performing their routine daily activities together in his own home.  That is the true happiness machine.  And if a man can’t find happiness in that then maybe he never will.

Reclaiming the Family – Part 5 – Reinvent the Matchmaker – First Thoughts

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Two things are true about this particular item.  The first thing is I’m sure this is one of the most important aspects of trying to bring back family life.  The second thing I’m sure of is that I know almost nothing about how this would work.  I know almost nothing about women or dating or anything else having to do with human mating rituals.  I met Camera Girl by complete accident when we were both seventeen-year-old kids each separately skipping out on our separate schools and meeting at one of the most anonymous places in a city as large as New York.  It was at least a billion to one shot so no one should ever take relationship advice from me.

But I do know that kids these days and especially kids from whom their parents hope someday to receive grandchildren need a better way to find mates.  Sure, there are places like match.com and the like but this doesn’t seem to be getting the job done.  What is needed is some kind of sponsorship of social activities where the participants are vouched for by their families.  In other words, you want to keep the freaks out but still have a place for young people to meet.  Now this used to be taken care of by high schools and other teen age membership institutions.  But because college is the place where normalcy goes to die and because women now postpone marriage and childbearing until their mid-thirties, we’re in the place we’re in.  So, to my mind a new arrangement has to be formulated.  And the only ones who have the talent, the inclination and the opportunity are the mothers.  This brings to mind the scenes in Fiddler on the Roof where Tevye’s wife is trying to arrange a marriage for her oldest daughter through the village matchmaker and picks a terrible husband that luckily is sidetracked by a subterfuge by Tevye.  And of course, living in these liberated times no one is going to allow his parents to pick a wife for him and vice versa but setting up opportunities for young people to meet likely partners makes perfect sense.  I will have to consult with my daughters to see if this is an at all reasonable idea.  They both have children who one day (and in some cases soon) will be marriageable.  I am interested to know if they’ve thought of helping along the process by some discrete manipulations.

But one thing that would increase the chances for more women to find husbands is for them to look outside of the college pool.  A young woman right out of high school could do much worse than finding a young man in one of the trades, an electrician or a welder and setting up a home instead of wasting four or more of her most valuable years sitting around a college quadrangle watching the soy boys playing frisbee.

I really have to do more practical research on this and this is just an introductory post.  I am especially interested in getting the mother’s point of view on the practicality of trying to influence the courtship decisions of today’s youth.  But I’m convinced that this topic is of extreme importance in trying to somehow revive the traditional family from inside the modern-day Sodom and Gomorrah that we find ourselves trapped in.  Stay tuned for more on this.