Opinion & Comment

Pet Peeves And The Matrimonial 'We'

PUBLISHER'S NOTEBOOK

Pet peeves. Every couple has 'em, I suppose, and if they don't get the best of one spouse or the other, they eventually become great conversational items. For example . . .

You go on a trip, a family trip. Take plenty of pictures. After they're all developed and being passed around for review by family and friends, my wife has a tendency to tell you what's not in the pictures.

"You see this one. Well, over here (pointing about a foot outside the picture) is a beautiful garden and down here (at the bottom, just a few inches out of the picture) is what we really came to see!" And she'll describe what can't be seen in detail! Never mind she didn't bother to take a picture of whatever-it-was outside the picture that was so important it required a lengthy speech to describe it.

And it's the same thing around the house.

You can spend days painting, trimming, tidying up and creating basically an entire new room in the house with paint, trim, etc., which she had painstakingly selected herself, only to hear at project's end: "You know what we should have done. . .?"

A gutter fell down on the shed in the backyard. After a few days (or was it weeks?) of listening to "We need to fix that," I decided that Saturday was the day.

I pulled the old gutter down and immediately saw the problem. A wet and rotting board on which it had been resting. I got some help from the wife in measuring the length of the rotten 1x6 that needed replacing. Twelve feet ought to do it, we both agreed.

I bought a 12-foot-long 1x6, tore the old one out and got ready to put the new one up. Should have noticed that the 2x4 behind it looked a little water soaked and was in the first stages of rot, but I didn't. Never mind. Go get a 2x4 to fix that too.

It turns out the length was not 12-feet, but 12-feet, 2 and one-half inches. Never mind. Go get a new board (and a new 2x4, while I'm at it).

Labor long and hard in the midday heat, get the project done, stand back to admire it. Look for any and all faults that might be pointed out by the wife. Can't see any. call her out to inspect the finished project.

And what does she do? Walks around to the opposite side of the shack and says, "Did you notice that you've got the same problem around here?"

It's becoming a ritual with her. And I'm slowly becoming accustomed to hearing her reaction to what I consider to be a job well done. Just to entertain myself, I often jot a little note down in expectation of what her first comment will be. It's a little game I play (and, right now at least, I'm ahead!).

It's sort of like her occasional question: "What do you want for supper?" Stupid me, I tell her what I'd like.

"Well, we're not having that! How about . . . ?"

Of course, I end up taking the ". . .", being reminded every now and then how I should thank my lucky stars I was getting it (By the way, what are lucky stars? I've never seen 'em, nor have I ever heard of anyone who has. But I've been told myentire like that I should thank them!).

We both lead a (too) busy lifestyle and a lot of things that should have been done haven't been done and, of course, I hear at least a few of the items on the list every day or so. I know it's coming when the sentence begins with that dreaded pronoun "we." In the wife's household jargon, of course, it means "me," in virtually every instance. For example:

"We need to take the garbage out . . . We need to cut the grass . . . We need to clean the fish pond . . . etc., etc."

It's become so common, when she says "we," I'm usually up out of my easy chair headed for the front door on a very important errand I completely forgot about. Or, if I'm trapped with a cat on the lab and can't make the jump to freedom before "we" has cleared her lips, I'll pretend I didn't hear what We need to do not, and interrupt her with a statement sure to get the conversation moving in an entirely different direction (Don't try this yourself. It takes years of practice to perfect).

And sure as I'm siting here behind this keyboard, grinning ear to ear at the opportunity to write such a tell-all column, I have a feeling We are in trouble!

-- Paul Roy