Your Wife is so Lucky


A yoga class.

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I teach yoga two evenings a week at the local community center. Class size varies from one session to the next but there is a small core who sign up every time. One of them is an older lady who lives down the street and for 76, having never done any yoga prior to starting classes with me a year ago, she is incredible spry and limber. It’s amazing to see her progress and to know how much she enjoys and values the instruction. Introducing people to yoga and watching them find themselves in the practice is even more joyful than teaching grammar was back in my public school teacher days of yore.

During the winter months, Rob usually walks me over to the hall where classes are held. It’s not even a two-minute jaunt. Just out the back door, down the drive, up the alley and across the street. But it’s dark, icy and made more precarious by the bags I schlep with me. He carries my equipment and I point the flashlight, and the process repeats in reverse an hour later when class in complete.

Last night, Rob ran into our sweet elderly neighbor as he was hustling up the alley to walk me home from class. Greetings were exchanged, but Rob stopped to chat because she had halted in her tracks and he had a feeling she wanted to tell him something.

“Your wife is so lucky,” she said.

He didn’t reply and she continued,

“You carry her things and walk her to class and then come back to help her get home. That’s just so nice.”

“Just doing my part,” he replied.

He told me the story later and I concurred,

“I am lucky and I know it,” I said. “I read so much about men who have no idea that it’s the little things day in and out that matter the most, and here I have you. I never have to ask you to pay attention, help out, or for much of anything really. You just do.”

Kind of reminds me of the lyrics to a song I shared not long ago,

There’s no way to describe what you do to me
You just do to me, what you do

Except it’s more than what’s done to me but what is done for me.

He would argue, correctly, that this is a mutual thing, which is as it should be.

But, I am very lucky. I don’t take that lightly or for granted.

We Might As Well Have Cable


Image representing Netflix as depicted in Crun...

Image via CrunchBase

Rob got a Netflix subscription for Christmas from Edie, and Dee received an iPod touch from Santa which quickly led to the discovery of free cartoons and movies on YouTube. Between the two of them,  passive viewing time has been increasing exponentially since. The Arctic blast last week helped not one bit, and I am afraid television viewing has claimed a solid footing on the household’s beachhead once again.

It’s not that the viewing of anything is intrinsically evil. We are primarily audio/visual creatures. It’s the preferred method for taking in new information. The trouble stems from the dearth of decent material that passes for tv and movies. With so much content available, you’d think that the bulk would err on the side of quality, but that’s simply not the case.

So what’s playing at our house?

Tom and Jerry. Vintage Smurfs and episodes of She-Ra.

Image representing YouTube as depicted in Crun...

Image via CrunchBase

At first Dee was a bit annoyed to find that some of the videos were home-made splice jobs or of questionable visual quality. She thought YouTube was a television. After I explained it, she quickly figured out how to search and choose watchable offerings. It’s a bit funny really because as a little girl, she couldn’t barely work a television remote. I kept her deliberately ignorant of dvd players before we moved up to Alberta. While so many parents were proud of their children’s technology skills, I wasn’t in any hurry for Dee to be able to work something on her own. I lost too much in parental controls that way. So it’s amazing to watch her “work it” now.

Netflix has laid bare the world of Trailer Park Boys.  Rob actively shunned the show when it originally aired on Showcase back in the early part of the last decade. We are both too familiar with that social strata to find it humorous, but on a whim, he gave it a peek and now three seasons later, he is hooked.

Admittedly, it’s a dead on parody of some of the more perplexing aspects of that world and it nails the stereotype. The show also ramps it up just enough to allow a viewer to laugh without feeling guilty about it. I haven’t watched more than a handful of episodes all the way through, but I don’t have to because Rob details each one as vividly as Dee regaled me with an accounting of the Smurfs (“I have no idea where Baby Smurf came from. They just don’t have any moms there.”)

I do have one favorite episode though:

Reminded me a bit of Soap.

Before he left for work this morning, Rob mentioned that he checked our internet usage for the month. At Christmas we went over our allotment and got throttled by the provider for a week until we could upgrade our package. Between downloading books, Netflix and loading the new iPod, we’d “over-spent”.

“We’re at nearly 50% of our monthly allotment which is twice what we were using before but not close to using up what we are allowed.”

I will choose to view this as a half-full and call it a win.

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Today is Five Years


rob and i the night before our wedding

Five years ago today I was home from work with yet another sinus infection, checking my work email and taking care of a bit of business virtually when I received an email from Rob proposing that we take our friendship in another direction, a romantic one.

He confessed that the thing uppermost on his mind anymore was me, and though it took him by surprise, and couldn’t have been less timely, he saw no reason to let a good opportunity pass him by. Oh, and by the way, did I feel the same? He kind of thought I did, but if I didn’t, please don’t be creeped out.

In typical Virgo fashion, he went on to outline a plan for us to virtually date and eventually meet up over my Spring Break to take a trip together to the West Coast. What did I think?

I was stunned. I had to call my BFF, who simply said, “I told you so.”

She had been convinced weeks earlier that Rob saw me as more than a friend. In fact, she’d spent a good deal of our lunch date the day before extolling his virtues and trying to convince me to overcome my hesitancy and simply pursue him, which was something I wouldn’t do because Rob was quite vocal about wanting to wait until after the first anniversary of Shelley’s death before dating again. He also frowned vigorously at the behind (and not so behind) the scenes meat market on Ye Olde Widda board. Some of his disgust was just the hypocrisy. Dating was routinely trashed and daters harshly hung up for public flaming, but the reality is that it was more common than the board matrons cared to acknowledge. And partly, it was due to the fact that he’d been a victim of widda stalking and he shied away from being seen in that light himself.

His closing line included a bit about not been able to breathe properly until he’d received my reply, so I wrote “breathe” and “yes”.

And that’s not quite all there was to that but it was the beginning of what is now.

Hollywood marriages are measured in dog years, so at five together ourselves, Rob and I are particularly old married folk. Sometimes it seems as though I have known Rob forever and in a spiritual sense, I think that is true, but it catches me by surprise a bit remembering that I have not known him always.

He’s had his desktop screen saver off for some time but switched it on again this past weekend, and all these old photos popped up. Pictures of Mick and Edie when they were small. Family pictures of long ago. One picture of Shelley came up from their time in San Diego. It was an impromptu goofy shot with her in her pajamas and Rob blushed to his toes, looked sheepish and said, “I didn’t know that was on there.”

All roads lead to where you are standing right now, don’t they? A good thing to remember.

Happier anniversaries are a better place to put one’s energy. Today is certainly in my top five and probably the most fortunate day of this life of mine.

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