Every Day Is Game Day
“There’s a hair on your hand,” my wife told me as we played cards one morning at the dining room table.
Loose hairs annoy her and she is always on the look-out for them all over the house and on our persons, as though they are scheming little dead zombie hairs with only one thing on their weak little minds: total re-subjugation of the human head whose ever it is. Transient hairs are filthy creatures that can swiftly change her smile to a scowl if she has to pick them up and dispose of them in a dining room wastebasket or under-sink kitchen trash can.
I have to wonder how swift their transition is from being clean brushed hair from atop our heads to despicable protein filaments associated with parasitic vermin.
“Just as well it’s there,” I said, knowing she was just trying to affect my card game concentration. “I don’t have much hair on my head anymore or any on my legs.”
You see, my wife notices things like hair on clothes and furniture because, for two old folks, we generate a lot of it. She has long, over the shoulder, salt ‘n pepper gray hair. I have long, over the shoulder, graying brown hair, gray-white mustache and beard.
She can spot a hair of any dimension and color, or absence of it, from across the room, on any surface. It’s not that her hair-spotting skill is exemplary, but that she’s keenly observant of anything around her, especially me, for not so long ago she said, in her usual endearing manner,
“Geesus man, your legs are gettin’ skinnier. They’re like pencils, like toothpicks even. Yer butt’s like an old jackrabbit’s.”
“Hey, quit pickin’ on me legs, you tosser!” I had probably answered, hearing about that anomaly at least as many years as we’ve been married and dozens of more times when the balance of a game hangs on my next play.
“They’ve gotten me around just fine, well-muscled or not! Just because my calves ain’t NFL-sized like yourn, from standing on stages in high heels, and singin’ your heart out for forty years, they musta been big enough.”
I was referring to her career as a professional singer during her younger days, working and raising four kids without their father’s support. She was always one to keep physically fit by doing yoga and lifting weights, eating all the right things in proper proportions, and refrained from alcohol, drugs, and cigarettes although, in hindsight, singing in bars before the smoking ban didn’t do her any good.
Apparently, the other men in her life had exceptionally wonderful leg muscles and butts that were to die for, but mine, although regulation issue for a guy with asthma, from Iowa, she and another one of my wives thought them to be second rate; not that this criticism personally demeans me in any way, for I’ve learned after two divorces that men, in general, are at minimum, only good for two things anyway: reproduction and comedic relief.
The former I fulfilled, if but once and beautifully, as my daughter is a home run with the bases loaded type of kid; and the latter of which, I excel in spades all the time if but at my own expense, is my genetic possession of apparently, non-typical man legs that even if all attempts at comedy fail, these appendages put a smile on their faces, if not a loud guffaw.
Besides, I knew they were only teasing me; I’m thick-skinned. What are huge calves, thigh, and butt muscles good for anyway, other than propelling a 285-pound body down a football field, succeeding in a game of tug rope, or lifting 500-pound barbells? No, the whimsical 15-inch circumference calf muscles I have, versus my present wife’s rather majestic 22-inch circumference calves, on are what used to be remotely called a swimmer’s body back in the day, and is now called an old guy’s roly-poly body.
I worked with a guy, from Roseau, who was in a snowmobile accident back in 1980-something. His leg was broken in the accident; the bone pushed out through his skin. Some friends and I visited him in the hospital, and I remember him telling us what the doctors had to do to set it, saying that he was so muscular in his legs and lower body that they had to put weights on his ankles to pull the leg back straight against the muscular tension so to re-adjoin the bones.
Was I ever glad I had skinny legs with no real muscle! Hell, I’m thinking a doctor of any stripe, could probably grip both of my leg bones, one in each hand, and push them back together with no more effort than somebody plugging two extension cords together, wrap the connection with duct tape, and send me on down the road in an hour. My co-worker was laid up for several weeks; I obviously had the advantage.
What my three wives saw in me varied. One of them wanted to dress me up as a woman. “YOU WANNA DO WHAT?” I recall saying in my best deep tenor-sounding voice, suddenly unsure of her renewed effort to re-ignite our love life after a few years of marriage. “I ain’t doing that.”
It was bad enough when I was a toddler, that my two of my three sisters, both old enough to be my mother, used to dress me up in garish outfits including sunglasses, straw hats and shorts; talk about childhood trauma; I know what pets go through.
“You have such nice hairless legs,” that wife said, this coming from the same woman who used to adoringly call my little stomach roll, ‘flabbage.’ “I think those two’d look good in pantyhose.”
“THERE’S NO WAY THAT’S GOIN’ TO HAPPEN!” I said adamantly, recalling I wisely thought her choke-hold, handcuffs and personal taser idea flawed too.
I began making my own meals, securing my own beverages and sleeping in my car to insure I wouldn’t be drugged, lest I wake up in something from Victoria’s Secret in a video that had gone viral.
Gone were the days when the worst that would happen was to wake up in a dorm room with your eyebrows shaved, your cheeks reddened with makeup, your lips smeared with lipstick and your photo stuck on every bulletin board on campus.
Thank god for baggy carpenter pants.
“Still don’t have a butt, you doofus.”
I love you too, dear. Just deal.
“There’s a hair on your hand,” my wife told me as we played cards one morning at the dining room table.
Loose hairs annoy her and she is always on the look-out for them all over the house and on our persons, as though they are scheming little dead zombie hairs with only one thing on their weak little minds: total re-subjugation of the human head whose ever it is. Transient hairs are filthy creatures that can swiftly change her smile to a scowl if she has to pick them up and dispose of them in a dining room wastebasket or under-sink kitchen trash can.
I have to wonder how swift their transition is from being clean brushed hair from atop our heads to despicable protein filaments associated with parasitic vermin.
“Just as well it’s there,” I said, knowing she was just trying to affect my card game concentration. “I don’t have much hair on my head anymore or any on my legs.”
You see, my wife notices things like hair on clothes and furniture because, for two old folks, we generate a lot of it. She has long, over the shoulder, salt ‘n pepper gray hair. I have long, over the shoulder, graying brown hair, gray-white mustache and beard.
She can spot a hair of any dimension and color, or absence of it, from across the room, on any surface. It’s not that her hair-spotting skill is exemplary, but that she’s keenly observant of anything around her, especially me, for not so long ago she said, in her usual endearing manner,
“Geesus man, your legs are gettin’ skinnier. They’re like pencils, like toothpicks even. Yer butt’s like an old jackrabbit’s.”
“Hey, quit pickin’ on me legs, you tosser!” I had probably answered, hearing about that anomaly at least as many years as we’ve been married and dozens of more times when the balance of a game hangs on my next play.
“They’ve gotten me around just fine, well-muscled or not! Just because my calves ain’t NFL-sized like yourn, from standing on stages in high heels, and singin’ your heart out for forty years, they musta been big enough.”
I was referring to her career as a professional singer during her younger days, working and raising four kids without their father’s support. She was always one to keep physically fit by doing yoga and lifting weights, eating all the right things in proper proportions, and refrained from alcohol, drugs, and cigarettes although, in hindsight, singing in bars before the smoking ban didn’t do her any good.
Apparently, the other men in her life had exceptionally wonderful leg muscles and butts that were to die for, but mine, although regulation issue for a guy with asthma, from Iowa, she and another one of my wives thought them to be second rate; not that this criticism personally demeans me in any way, for I’ve learned after two divorces that men, in general, are at minimum, only good for two things anyway: reproduction and comedic relief.
The former I fulfilled, if but once and beautifully, as my daughter is a home run with the bases loaded type of kid; and the latter of which, I excel in spades all the time if but at my own expense, is my genetic possession of apparently, non-typical man legs that even if all attempts at comedy fail, these appendages put a smile on their faces, if not a loud guffaw.
Besides, I knew they were only teasing me; I’m thick-skinned. What are huge calves, thigh, and butt muscles good for anyway, other than propelling a 285-pound body down a football field, succeeding in a game of tug rope, or lifting 500-pound barbells? No, the whimsical 15-inch circumference calf muscles I have, versus my present wife’s rather majestic 22-inch circumference calves, on are what used to be remotely called a swimmer’s body back in the day, and is now called an old guy’s roly-poly body.
I worked with a guy, from Roseau, who was in a snowmobile accident back in 1980-something. His leg was broken in the accident; the bone pushed out through his skin. Some friends and I visited him in the hospital, and I remember him telling us what the doctors had to do to set it, saying that he was so muscular in his legs and lower body that they had to put weights on his ankles to pull the leg back straight against the muscular tension so to re-adjoin the bones.
Was I ever glad I had skinny legs with no real muscle! Hell, I’m thinking a doctor of any stripe, could probably grip both of my leg bones, one in each hand, and push them back together with no more effort than somebody plugging two extension cords together, wrap the connection with duct tape, and send me on down the road in an hour. My co-worker was laid up for several weeks; I obviously had the advantage.
What my three wives saw in me varied. One of them wanted to dress me up as a woman. “YOU WANNA DO WHAT?” I recall saying in my best deep tenor-sounding voice, suddenly unsure of her renewed effort to re-ignite our love life after a few years of marriage. “I ain’t doing that.”
“THERE’S NO WAY THAT’S GOIN’ TO HAPPEN!” I said adamantly, recalling I wisely thought her choke-hold, handcuffs and personal taser idea flawed too.
I began making my own meals, securing my own beverages and sleeping in my car to insure I wouldn’t be drugged, lest I wake up in something from Victoria’s Secret in a video that had gone viral.
Gone were the days when the worst that would happen was to wake up in a dorm room with your eyebrows shaved, your cheeks reddened with makeup, your lips smeared with lipstick and your photo stuck on every bulletin board on campus.
Thank god for baggy carpenter pants.
“Still don’t have a butt, you doofus.”
I love you too, dear. Just deal.
ReplyDeleteYou won that hand for sure.
So, the subject is hair hygiene. I get it. My focus is different. As I age, I have less and less of it. The length I keep it at doesn't help. That means I'm counting the filled follicles vs. the empty spaces. This too shall pass? No. My little hairs are passing down the shower drain.
ReplyDeleteAs for personal body measurements - too much information.
Finally, your "asthma is from Iowa?" Can that be? Watch those dangling participles! Only that tiny comma saved you from this one. So, you get a pass.
Great post. Did you know I save almost all of yours? I'm a fan. JP Savage