THEY KNOW NOT WHAT THEY DO

I love kids.

From babies to teenagers, no matter what stage they're in, I get a kick out of spending time with them.

I like the way they think and the way they see the world with fresh, unjaded eyes. I enjoy their innocent perspective, their idealism, their energy and yes, even their pathos. Young people can't help but be sincere and it's a welcome relief after spending so much of my time among middle-aged cynics and bitter retirees.

So when my brother called me a few weeks ago from California asking me to play host to his sixteen year-old daughter Katie I jumped at the chance. 

It had been about a year since I saw her last and I was anxious to experience how the world looked to someone just starting out.

They say blood is thicker than molasses but I have to admit that after only a day and a half I thought I was going to lose my mind.

You see Katie came with a friend. A close friend. A friend so close and dear that they clung together like desperate strangers on a crashing plane. Even physically, they folded themselves up into such an intimate clench that one was hard pressed to see where one ended and the other one began. The way they walked together, always in sync and always locked into an almost eerie stare. It was such a struggle to get Katie's attention that after a while I actually stopped trying.

I was relieved when they left and I have to admit I'm still shaken by the whole experience. 

But then again, I'm an old guy so what do I know?

I AINT HURTING ANYBODY

I don't swim but I like to go to the Y on Lake Street, sit with the fellas and watch some of the local ladies work out in their water aerobics class.

Some of the gals find it odd to be watched but heck, why else would the Y have installed that giant window overlooking the pool?

Now not to over-egg the custard but there's something truly magical about a bunch of wet women wiggling their fannies to Taylor Swift's "Shake It Off."

I like Chinese Hot Pot dinners too.

But for some reason nobody finds that objectionable.

I guess that's why I don't like living in the boonies.

FALURE OF COMMUNICATION

My wife Betty and I were in our middle years when we both began to feel a bit crushed by the pressures of child-rearing. Our three girls were all teenagers and every night a new Greek tragedy would unfold in our living room. Kelsey was getting fat, Susie was getting thin and Daphne's eyes were always so bloodshot we were sure she had dysentery.

Needless to say our marriage, rather than being a source of consolation was a bestiary of small slights and major conflagrations.

I felt so desperate at the time that to soothe my ever increasing anxiety I began to compile a list or more precisely, a glossary of our misunderstandings.

I found it the other day and upon reading it I was amazed that Betty and I came out of the whole ordeal more or less in one piece.

I called it "What You Said And What She Heard: A Guide For The Perplexed."

Here are  a few highlights:

HOW WAS WORK? -------------------------------YOUR STUPID JOB IS BENEATH YOUR DIGNITY

WOULD YOU LIKE MORE SALAD? -------------------------------------------------------- YOU'RE FAT

REMEMBER TO PICK UP THE DRY CLEANING --------------------- YOU'RE AN IMBECILE

CAN YOU TURN DOWN THE VOLUME --- YOU THINK MY TASTE IN MUSIC STINKS

DID YOU BUY MILK --------------------------------------- YOU'RE A ROTTEN MOTHER

DAPHNE WAS SUSPENDED FOR SMOKING POT ------- YOU'RE A ROTTEN MOTHER

DAPHNE WAS SUSPENDED FOR DRINKING -------------------- YOU'RE AN ALCOHOLIC

ARE YOU COMING TO BED SOON ---------------------------------------------- I MUST HAVE SEX

WHAT TIME DID YOU GO TO BED LAST NIGHT ------------ ----------YOU'RE A FRIGID BITCH

I'M WALKING THE DOG ------------------------------------------------------------------------- FUCK OFF!

Etcetera, etcetera, you get the idea.

In my old age I've come to the belated realization that true, hard love is something one has to earn. All too often we turn our partners into these diabolical mounds of clay which we knead and mold into conveniently self-defeating forms in order to assuage our savage insecurities.

I retrospect, I don't think I could have survived if I didn't have HBO.  

Or Xanax. 

Or a mistress.

THE LIFE OF THE MILD

Some time in the not too distant past I began to feel the gradual erosion of my ability to yearn. I can't say with any great precision when it was that I realized my romantic impulses had irreparably drifted from the tender to the tawdry.

I assure you this is a painful confession for I have always taken great pride in my capacity for love. 

For me the word love, once uttered, ceases to be an accretion of soft, alternating vowels embraced by a pair lazy consonants but rather floats in an ether of sweet sound like a hymn or a prayer or a dirge.

I vividly remember the first time I was visited by this sublime and mysterious feeling. It was summoned by a high school infatuation that though chaste and unrequited, nevertheless lifted me into the odd air of mysticism. The name of my teenage Beatrice took flight long ago and I never saw the importance of trying to remember it. It's the feeling that I recall and it is a feeling that I have tried, with uneven success, to replicate ever since.

When my wife Betty and I first met I was flattered by the asymmetry of our relationship. Betty at the time was a beautiful shy woman who concealed her vulnerability with a curiously icy caution. Her early declarations of love were almost combative as if by their preemptive recklessness they could deflect my rebuttal. It was as if she planted the conqueror's standard square into my thigh severing the tendons of agency and dissent.

I was a willing vassal rendered powerless, not by Betty's charm but by her persistence. If it entered my mind to be suspicious of such a premature articulation of faith I don't really remember. What I do remember is that Betty was beautiful and knowing that love is but a premeditated act of will, I consigned myself toward what seemed like a worthy task.

I am happy to say that through our thirty-one years together I have had more than a few intimations of bliss. Having determined to assume the virtue of the besotted, I arrived through various mental and spiritual exercises to see my wife as the apotheosis of affection, fidelity and even, at times, passion.

Lamentably, like all fictions, hard reality looms like the angled blade of the executioner. With time my talent for intimacy has atrophied from neglect. The dance of benevolent deception has depleted my hopes and hardened my heart. The drunken boat of desire is now a rusted junk moored in the brine of disuse. I still love my Betty, of course, for habit is the strongest ballast but ultimately her early, irrational declarations could never realistically be reciprocated. And now as we sit across from one another nightly, sipping acceptable wine and nibbling on healthy and adequate dinners we accept our fate because that is the norm and to expect the extraordinary would be greedy. 

There's no need to worry though - Like most men, I've made some adjustments.

WHAT'S LOVE GOT TO DO WITH IT?

I had no idea how miserable my wife was until I heard her talk in her sleep.

My first experience with her somniloquies was about twenty years ago while on vacation in Vieques. (Why one would go to Puerto Rico when one could just as easily go to Florida is a mystery I will leave for later). 

Passed out by the pool after her third Cuba Libre, I noticed Betty's exposed calves were turning the color of steak tartar. (Why the French see fit to waste perfectly good hamburger meat is another matter best deferred to the future).  

Dutiful to a fault I fetched a fresh towel to cover my bride's bare legs and it was then that I first heard the grumble that has since dogged my nights with suspicion.

Nobody likes to imagine their wife in flagrante with another man so when the grumble turned plaintive and partially coherent I ignored it in spite of my curiosity.

A few years later when my wife and I would still occasionally go out for a leisurely lunch at a sidewalk café and idly watch the suburban world unfold in all its indolent splendor I noticed Betty's attention drift even more than usual. Being married is an interesting process where one gradually grows accustomed to being rendered insignificant. A perfect stranger will at least afford you the courtesy of feigning interest while a wife won't think twice before dozing off while you're in mid-sentence.

And so it was one summer afternoon when the heat and the chardonnay and my annoying voice all conspired to lull my wife into a prone siesta at Sally's Continental Bistro in downtown Elmira.

 Now I know that women are capable of all types of deception but I had never heard of someone faking an orgasm in their sleep.

It was brief but unmistakable.

That Betty was still capable of arousal should not have come as a surprise but of course it did. Like many middle aged men I mistook my wife's ambivalence towards me as a disinterest in intimacy in general. I foolishly saw it as something that occurs specifically to older women, as if they were from another species whose sexually curdled like milk when it aged.

I decided not to bring the matter up, for after all, one should never be held accountable for the content one's dreams. All the same I've often wondered if Betty's garbled, midnight syllabics was an imaginative article of longing or an involuntary admission of guilt.

Or perhaps it was just a prolonged campaign of calculated revenge after that unfortunate incident with the babysitter.  

 

REAL LOVE

Like K on the dock for some unarticulated offense I have been the object of my wife's tireless resentments for forty-two long years.

We've been married for forty-three and not unhappily, I hasten to add.

Happiness is accepting the ones you love for what they are without any abiding ambition to change them.

For me, being the readily-at-hand vehicle for emotional release and psychological abuse has been my privilege and my joy.

My bride Betty in the flower of her corpulent youth circa 1983

You see, I love my wife and if I could turn back the clock to those halcyon days of misspent, drug addled youth I would marry her again in a quivering heartbeat.

Look, let's face it, nobody's perfect and as Philip Larkin famously pointed out, our parents are always to blame for our inability to function properly as adults.

You see, Betty is cold which is surprising to most people because she's also fat and fat people are generally jolly. She also trims the nails on her left hand first, another telltale marker of the sybarite, but here again, Betty disappoints.

There's only one side of the bed for Betty and that's the wrong side. She greets the day as a grouch and she returns to our nightly nest with a slant of mind only slightly less impaired.

At work, I'm told, she's a dreamboat of equanimity and good cheer. It's Betty that arranges the birthday balloons, organizes the pot luck lunches and sends encouraging emails to her discouraging peers. Betty never wishes anyone anything less than a "great" day and at the office all is "awesome" and everyone is a "rockstar."

I know she adores me because she saves the brutality of her sincere feelings for me and me alone.

As Kafka pointed out, lying is a universal principle. My exemption from this principle vis-a-vis my bride is nothing less than the deepest expression of complete, deep and unconditional love.

Thank you Betty.

(and fuck you too)

SPLENETIC & CALORIC

My wife Betty is fat.

I'm no Jack LaLanne myself but Betty is a house.

  Getting fat doesn't happen overnight. Actually, it's rather hard and methodical work. One has to be fairly consistent in one's behavior. It's not a simple matter of eating a lot. One has to be careful to eat a lot of the wrong foods in disadvantageous combinations while expressing an extremely torpid attitude toward physical activity.

Basically you have to consume a great deal more calories than you actually need, every single day for an extremely long period of time with little or no deviation.

Betty during better days

I have to give my wife Betty a lot of credit. She doesn't let those fit fancy Hollywood actresses make her feel bad or self-conscious. Every weekend she straps on a tight bathing suit and spends whole days at the local municipal pool cooling off from our relentless summer heat.

I don't trust thin people. Their conspicuous self-denial is to them a badge of virtue whereas to me it's a futile abjuration of all things sensual and delicious.

Life is short and basically miserable. If a grilled cheese sandwich and a large Coke can mitigate the unrelenting pain, where's the harm? Between existential angst and a bag of potato chips I willfully lean toward the latter.

Thin folks are way too wholesome, consistently untrustworthy and above of all, unvaryingly attractive.

Uch!