Looking back with Lot's Wife

June 28, 2000 As you get older, you can divide the kids into two groups, those who live near and those who don’t. And the unfortunate truth is that when the Far Aways come home for vacation, it’s a bigger deal than when the Already Heres come for Sunday supper. Also, the arrival of “guests” no matter how closely related, is a good excuse to get my husband moving and get some things done around here before I kill someone. This time I’ve gone a little overboard. I’ve replaced the carpet, redone the bathroom, re-landscaped the front yard, hired a carpet cleaner, gotten the windows cleaned, contemplated building a new deck, yelled at everybody—often, been to the grocery store four times and the nice bread store twice. And a big part of this hysteria is the momentum of it all. The single biggest difference between men and women is what they can stand to live with. Men’s entire worldview of the planet revolves around the idea of comfort. If an object feels good, if it’s been in the same plac...

June 7, 2000 Let me tell you about one of my favorite games. We played it this weekend at the benefit garden show for the hospital. It’s called, “What Other Husbands Do that You Don’t Do For Me.” You can play versions of this at furniture stores (“Why Don’t You Buy Me New Living Room Furniture?”) or bookstores (“Why Are You So Dumb?”) or romantic movies (“Why Don’t You Say Great Things Like That?”) The version we played this weekend is called “Why Doesn’t Our Back Yard Look Like This?” The game consists of making my husband feel as bad as possible without actually getting mad enough to reach over, open the car door and push me out onto the highway. First I had to set up the game, mainly getting him to go somewhere where they don’t serve salted foods, and convincing him it wasn’t unmanly to use a map to find places aptly described in the brochure as “hidden” gardens. But finally we got to our first patch—a place that can hardly be described as someone’s back yard. Let me say, in general...