Possumblog

Bully for Favorable Coincidences.

It has been a long couple of months at our house. And, tempers have been inversely proportional.

I’ve likened it before to that guy who used to appear on the Ed Sullivan Show and would spin plates on sticks. Start out with one, then work from there up to a whole forest of spinning plates on sticks. Quite a show.

After a while, it gets harder and harder to keep running back and forth from the ones on one end to the ones on the other end. Inevitably, one begins to wobble and then falls off with a big crash. The audience usually gives you a pass for that one, because they see the other hundred plates madly spinning, and you sprinting breathlessly back and forth giving each little stick underneath each spinning plate a quick wiggle to keep it going.

Now, on Ed Sullivan, the guy could just stop and let the plates all wobble and fall and crash and then take a bow. In life the plates have to be kept spinning, you can’t just stop and take a bow. Which is kinda stressful because you can only spin plates for so long before you have to stop and go to the bathroom or something.

Anyway, so, we’re busy. But big deal, you know? Everyone else is, too. But when you’re in the middle of it, and you look at your wife and she says, “You know, we need a date,” and all you can do is sigh and agree and keep plugging along--well, it just gets to be less entertaining than it otherwise might be.

And the plates just keep coming. As part of Reba’s classes, every three months she has to go to the main campus down in Montgomery and spend the whole day for a class. Not the worst thing in the world, but just another layer of stress--I stay at the house with the kids and she’s off on the road alone for several hours, and in an unfamiliar town for the day. She’s a big girl and can handle herself just fine, and I’m not really worried about her. But I am. She’s fully aware she's a full-growed adult, so it's not like she's really apprehensive about it. But she is.

So, with all the lack of one-on-one time, and crush of things going hither and yon, you just put your head down and keep going.

Last week sometime she said, “You know, it sure would be nice if Mom and Dad would keep the kids this weekend. And you could drive down with me. Maybe even go down Friday night.”

A glimmer, that.

“I don’t know what you’d do while I was in class, though…”

“Well, I suppose I could stay in the library and just read all day.”

We both looked at each other, and with the recognition that it was pointless to hope too much for such a silly thing, we both said, “Oh, well,” and let out a sigh. Silly thought. Head down, keep going.

Got home last night and she’d already started getting the clothes into the washing machine so there wouldn’t be so many to do the rest of the weekend. She was sitting with Rebecca in the laundry room floor separating clothes, so I gave them both a ‘hey’ and went upstairs to get out of my work clothes and put on something more comfortable. Kid’s laundry in folded piles all over the bed. Well, not quite the whole bed. I sure would like the laundry not to ALL be on MY side of the bed. ::sigh:: Snotty and selfish thought, quickly brushed aside. I’ll help them put it away after supper sometime.

Back downstairs, start getting plates and napkins ready for supper. “Hey, did you see those clothes on the bed?” How could I miss them? “Mm-hm.” “Well, don’t move them.” As if I was going to. “Come here.” ::sigh:: Not like I wasn’t already doing something else.

“You remember what I said the other day?”

“Uh, no.”

“How it sure would be nice if my mom and dad would watch the kids? I came in to pick them up this afternoon, and she asked what we were doing this weekend, and I told her I had class Saturday, and she said the Dad wanted the kids to spend the night Friday so that he could take them all up to Vulcan Park Saturday. The clothes on the bed are what I'm packing for them to take over there.”

Whoa-wha-waaaitttt--

“Which means if we wanted to, we could go down Friday night.--and I wouldn’t have to get up at dawn Saturday to get to class--and…”

SAY NO MORE, SQUIRE! Wink, wink! Nudge, nudge! Ay? Say no more, ay! A nod's as good as a wink to a blind bat! Ay?!

I believe is was Homer who said, “WHOOO-HOOO!”

NOW, there are probably some of you who cannot fathom the lure of a night spent in Montgomery, Alabama, it not being, after all, a wild, cosmopolitan, entertainment-laden burg like, say, Valdosta, Georgia, or even like Poughkeepsie, New York.

Well, that’s because you just don’t know.

My friends, there are few things more interesting than being able to get a quiet room with a big bed, in a town where no one knows who you are.

Posted by Terry Oglesby at April 15, 2005 09:30 AM