Fun and Games
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, all of the gardens we saw had certain things in common. For one, each one of them had tons of plants. And they don’t have just the plants we ordinary mortals plant. These are plants with leaves and flowers and smells you only find in dreams. And there are entire Brazilian rain forests shredded at the feet of these little patooties to keep them weed-free and wet.
Then, every single villa has a village. You apparently must have at least on eight-sided out-building no less than 50 feet from your house with a tricky little stone path that has moss growing in the cracks. It must have something to do with the genetic coding of garden people because, strangely, they’ve all arrived at the gazebo solution for “What to do next after I’ve planted every single corner of the yard.”
Now for the piece de resistance, you must have a huge, multi-level redwood deck in a backwards Z shape. It also doesn’t hurt you to have an elaborate outdoor barbecue setup with a large gas broiler and umbrella tables and lace settings and statuary from the wonderful world of outdoor catalogues. I saw several things I’d balked at paying the $300 shipping fee on.
We have solved our redwood deck problem and our furniture problem at the same time with a vintage one-piece picnic table that provides actually, well, sort of a fun ride when all the people on one side of the table stand up at the same time and all the people on the other side flip over and fall in the grass with the table on top of them. We also prefer to buy the exotic 7-11, 24-ounce drink cups for our nicest outdoor picnics because we like the many different pictures on the front, they look divine with paper plates, and they’re easy to refill when you have to get up and go to the bathroom.
After seeing two or three of these gardens, I’m usually in the right mood to play the game. Mainly, I’m jealous and just a little ticked off.
I take my first shot: “Why don’t we have a big patio like this or a gazebo?” In other words, “Why haven’t you made our yard look like this?”
His first reply is not very creative. “Yeh, sure, if you want me to be outside every night until 10 working in the yard.”
I come back quickly with, “Why can’t we get someone to help us? We could at least hire someone to mow the lawn.”
I score 20 points here because I’ve used the words “get help” in a sentence. He’s got to either directly counter with the bold, “Why don’t you get out and mow before you bake the bread in the morning” or he has to chicken out. He chickens out. Twenty more points for me.
“We could get a landscape architect to help us plan something and then we could do the planting ourselves.” I grab him quickly by the arm before he sinks to his knees, staggered by this blow. I’m actually starting to gloat when a woman comes out from her home and tells us that she likes to come out and pull weeds to relax after work. The color comes back into my husband’s cheeks. She makes money and gardens. He triumphantly collects 20 points.
It’s time for me to make a daring move. I say sweetly, “So, did your husband put in that pond and the waterfall that cascades gently into it?”
“Yes, he did it over the weekend from a kit he got at Sam’s Club for $23.99 and stones he’s collected taking our boys camping in wonderful secret places where there are beautiful rocks that they’ve carried home in their back packs.
I’ve made an outside shot and it’s in there for extra points!
I go for the knockout as we get back in the car. “I have always wanted a hot tub and a lap pool.”
He slumps wearily over the steering wheel. He’s beaten. I give him a friendly shove in the shoulder. “I’m just kidding, honey. All we really need is a little trellis out back for the grape vine before it grows over the house and makes dolmades of us.” He’s so grateful he begins to sob quietly. “Oh honey, I’ll do anything you want.”
Game over!!! Next week, I think we’ll play “Why Don’t We Ever Go On Neat Camping Trips Like those People With the Waterfall?”
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, all of the gardens we saw had certain things in common. For one, each one of them had tons of plants. And they don’t have just the plants we ordinary mortals plant. These are plants with leaves and flowers and smells you only find in dreams. And there are entire Brazilian rain forests shredded at the feet of these little patooties to keep them weed-free and wet.
Then, every single villa has a village. You apparently must have at least on eight-sided out-building no less than 50 feet from your house with a tricky little stone path that has moss growing in the cracks. It must have something to do with the genetic coding of garden people because, strangely, they’ve all arrived at the gazebo solution for “What to do next after I’ve planted every single corner of the yard.”
Now for the piece de resistance, you must have a huge, multi-level redwood deck in a backwards Z shape. It also doesn’t hurt you to have an elaborate outdoor barbecue setup with a large gas broiler and umbrella tables and lace settings and statuary from the wonderful world of outdoor catalogues. I saw several things I’d balked at paying the $300 shipping fee on.
We have solved our redwood deck problem and our furniture problem at the same time with a vintage one-piece picnic table that provides actually, well, sort of a fun ride when all the people on one side of the table stand up at the same time and all the people on the other side flip over and fall in the grass with the table on top of them. We also prefer to buy the exotic 7-11, 24-ounce drink cups for our nicest outdoor picnics because we like the many different pictures on the front, they look divine with paper plates, and they’re easy to refill when you have to get up and go to the bathroom.
After seeing two or three of these gardens, I’m usually in the right mood to play the game. Mainly, I’m jealous and just a little ticked off.
I take my first shot: “Why don’t we have a big patio like this or a gazebo?” In other words, “Why haven’t you made our yard look like this?”
His first reply is not very creative. “Yeh, sure, if you want me to be outside every night until 10 working in the yard.”
I come back quickly with, “Why can’t we get someone to help us? We could at least hire someone to mow the lawn.”
I score 20 points here because I’ve used the words “get help” in a sentence. He’s got to either directly counter with the bold, “Why don’t you get out and mow before you bake the bread in the morning” or he has to chicken out. He chickens out. Twenty more points for me.
“We could get a landscape architect to help us plan something and then we could do the planting ourselves.” I grab him quickly by the arm before he sinks to his knees, staggered by this blow. I’m actually starting to gloat when a woman comes out from her home and tells us that she likes to come out and pull weeds to relax after work. The color comes back into my husband’s cheeks. She makes money and gardens. He triumphantly collects 20 points.
It’s time for me to make a daring move. I say sweetly, “So, did your husband put in that pond and the waterfall that cascades gently into it?”
“Yes, he did it over the weekend from a kit he got at Sam’s Club for $23.99 and stones he’s collected taking our boys camping in wonderful secret places where there are beautiful rocks that they’ve carried home in their back packs.
I’ve made an outside shot and it’s in there for extra points!
I go for the knockout as we get back in the car. “I have always wanted a hot tub and a lap pool.”
He slumps wearily over the steering wheel. He’s beaten. I give him a friendly shove in the shoulder. “I’m just kidding, honey. All we really need is a little trellis out back for the grape vine before it grows over the house and makes dolmades of us.” He’s so grateful he begins to sob quietly. “Oh honey, I’ll do anything you want.”
Game over!!! Next week, I think we’ll play “Why Don’t We Ever Go On Neat Camping Trips Like those People With the Waterfall?”
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