MESSY MARRIAGE

How To Distract My Wife

Spicing things up since 1967

Photo by author

I was trying to help my wife put in her hearing aids this morning when she spotted a bit of leftover breakfast on my chin. She insisted upon interrupting me to pick it off, but it was well dried on. I chided her for becoming distracted so easily, but then I realized something important.

This is a superpower I have not been using advantageously.

If a tiny speck of dried-up milk can make her momentarily forget about her hearing aids, I might be able to use distraction to squash kerfuffles which originate with me.

For example, my wife likes Annie’s Cheddar Bunnies, a type of near-junk food that comes in three awful varieties: Annie’s Cheddar Bunnies, Annie’s Organic Cheddar Bunnies, and Annie’s Organic White Cheddar Bunnies. Our grocery store dangerously stocks all three. I say dangerously because the packaging of all three is quite similar, really indistinguishable at a quick glance aside from the name.

I am a master of the quick glance.

I’m a speed reader and a fast shopper. I have a list organized by aisle and I zip through a hundred-dollar grocery list as though I were on roller skates. In fact, I bet I could do it on roller skates were it not for other senior citizens clogging the aisles on Senior Discount Tuesday.

My eyes, accustomed as they are to a quickly flowing river of words, probably only register the box color and “Cheddar Bunnies”. Because of my reading skills, I might sometimes get the wrong box. In my defense, I average much more than the 1 in 3 chance the odds would suggest, but my wife takes offense when I bring home one of the other two. She wants the Organic White Cheddar Bunnies and no substitutes.

Dear reader, is that fair? I usually beat the odds, isn’t that enough?

Apparently not. I would add that careless store employees often put the desired bunnies on the wrong damn shelf, so is it my fault? I say nay, but the look of disappointment in my wife’s eyes when I pull what should be her treasure from my shopping bag bothers me.

“You got the wrong box again.”

There is always a slight bit of stress on “again.” Not enough to bring her up on charges, but it is there, a subtle dig that is quite unfair if you recall the sloppy stockers and my impressive speed reading skill. Couldn’t she for once be congratulatory?

“Darling, I am so happy that your advancing age has not affected your remarkable reading speed!”

Yes, that is slightly sarcastic, but it wouldn’t hurt as much as that subtly stressed “again”.

It might not be Cheddar Bunnies. It could be the wrong can of soup, soup which arguably all does look very much the same, and it’s all just healthy drowned vegetables or beans and such, so is it wrong? So it would seem.

I now have a plan to deflect her sharp tongue. I shop early to avoid the COVID-infected swarms of seniors who will crowd the aisles on Senior Discount Tuesday. My wife is always sound asleep when I leave the house and that is key to my distraction plan.

Before leaving, I will go into our laundry hamper and select a suitably wrinkled and hopefully slightly smelly shirt. If it is already food-stained, so much the better, but if not, I will have carefully saved a small amount of my breakfast that can be smeared across the shirt. I don’t want the supermarket people to see that, so I will cover it with my winter jacket or a light coat in summer.

Then, should my superior word wrangling again cause a perfectly understandable error, an error which is hardly my fault, I am covered, literally and figuratively. I will take off my coat as I unload my bag, she will spot the careless breakfast evidence and strike.

“Tell me you didn’t wear that to the store!”

I’ll contritely explain that I wore a coat and never unzipped it because, like her, I am a considerate person who does not wish to embarrass his wife with evidence that she is married to something not quite human.

This will distract her while I check each item to be sure it is correct and, if not, quickly slip it back into the bag to be donated at the local Food Pantry because Real Men do not return things.

I foresee greatly improved marital harmony.

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