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...

May 31, 2000 I HAVE helped my husband on occasion and we CAN work together. Of course, there was the time 20 years ago when I painted the trim in one of the kids’ bedrooms. Okay, I’m not Michelangelo, but gees, Louise, it was just the trim for heaven’s sake. He’s a perfectionist; I like to think of myself as a generalist. But we CAN do things together. We can drive places together, as long as he drives. We do pretty well making Christmas lists together, as longs as I shop. We make breakfast together: he smushes up the frozen orange juice and doesn’t get in my way, and I make the eggs, bacon, hash browns and toast, and put it on the table. We CAN plan all kinds of things together—the garden, redecorating, vacations. However, we’re frequently a little impaired in the “to do” department because he’s of the “if it’s worth doing, it’s worth doing well” school, while I mostly just want to get it over with so we can have some fun. Lately, however, we’ve been trying to put our finances on the ...

May 24, 2000 “Fiddler on the Roof” is opening this week at the Springville Villa Theater. In case there is someone out there who hasn’t yet seen this brilliant play, I’ll remind you that “Fiddler” is about a father with three daughters who lets each of them go, one by one, with the man of her dreams. And with each daughter, the father is forced to give up one of the traditions he holds sacred. One daughter picks the young man she loves rather than accept the choice the matchmaker has made for her. Another daughter marries a young communist who moves her away from her family and finally, the last daughter wants to marry outside their Jewish faith. This is the one tradition he cannot let go and he disowns his daughter. However, at the end of the show, he begins to reconcile even with her. At the wedding of his first daughter, Tevya and his wife Golda sing a song about their wonder that their daughter has become a woman; “Is this the little girl I carried? Is this the little boy at play?...

May 17, 2000 In one of those moments that you have when you actually know what it’s like to be in a train wreck, I offered to have a friend’s wedding at our house last week. As a philosophical aside, I must ask: Why would I do this? Well, this was my friend’s second marriage and while she was happy and in love and sure she was getting a great guy, she was also cooking and cleaning for six kids while trying to find her birth certificate, which was filed with the vaccination records and school photos, so she could get a marriage license. With one thing and another, it was looking like the best thing to do was to go to City Hall one afternoon and say, “I do” and get the kids home for dinner. So I decided that it would be a simple matter to let the kids plan the wedding. I can now tell you, if you ever want a great marriage ceremony, get a bunch of the neighborhood rug-rats together and let them have at it. This was one swell to-do. We met Tuesday for our first planning session. The weddin...

Home equals sweat…pants I didn’t write an article last week. I was too darned tired. I substituted at work last week as a kindergarten teacher and grade school French teacher for about half the time I used to work and I was in a coma by the time I got home. It wasn’t just the hours, although I haven’t had to stand on my feet all day without a rest for months. It was matching my clothes. It was no snacks, no nap. It was the incredible pressure of Being on Time. My whole life has been a series of resolutions and angry people waiting for me. I KNOW I’m passive-aggressive, controlling, selfish—the label list is endless for the chronically time challenged—but I never can talk myself into doing what I’m supposed to do doing until it’s too late to finish on time and then, once I’ve started, I hate to stop. Plus, I hate to wait. I HAVE SUCH A HARD TIME BEING ON TIME. So last week, it was back to being a grown-up for a few hours a day. I loved being with my old friends, I LOVE substitute teachi...

April 12, 2000 Clay and I recently went grocery shopping together for almost the first time in our 21-year march towards eternity together. You know, I took those promises that we made to love and cherish one another forever as seriously as anyone, but we were young and in love and I never imagined any test would be as hard as this! For one thing, I see grocery shopping together as the next step before we officially become Ma and Pa Kettle putzing around the yard in our matching pastel stretch knits, but SHOPPING? Shopping is the last bastion of my independence. I know if we start shopping together, Clay will take it over and it will become another “guy” project. In other words, it will become more complicated, it will never get done, and I somehow will wind up being the bad guy. All this, and I’m not too wild about going to the grocery store in the first place. My friend Ursula says that taking her husband shopping is like taking a small child somewhere. The last time they went to K-...