To have and to hold (if I don’t drive her crazy first)

After 34 years of marriage, my beloved wife has finally reached the conclusion that there are some things about me that are never going to change.

Too, if you listened to my now grown offspring, you’d think that I was the only one in the family carrying baggage that needs to be discarded.

I’m not having any of it, though. Even when they’re visiting and I hear stuff like:

“Mom, Dad’s lost it again. He’s wandering around, picking up stuff and grumbling about neatness.”

This from a group who, as near as I can tell, regard organization and order as personal affronts to their psyches.

“Larry, would you just relax, settle down and leave things alone. The house is fine. We’ll pick it all up later.”

“Later,” by their definition, is a time somewhere in the far-distant future that probably coincides with the sun extinguishing itself.

In my defense, I spent a year in a Benedictine monastery. There, we didn’t have much that could be left out. Still, when we did, Abbot Melancon would sternly warn us about “clutter” and threaten us with eternity in hell. Guilt – it’s a Catholic thing.

Shortly thereafter, I left the monastery and ended up at John Paul Jones’ Home for Wayward Boys a.k.a. Annapolis. There, upperclassmen literally prayed that you’d leave things out so that they could torture us. “Things” at that monastery (there were no women back then) included stuff like a dust mote under the bed or a toothpaste bubble in the sink. Heaven forbid that you ever left something like a pencil on your desk. Floggings were meted out for lesser reasons.

Then I went to sea. There, whatever is left out tends to roll, slide or bang about until it breaks, is lost overboard, or the guy in the next stateroom comes over and strangles you.

As you might surmise, I now have a perfectly understandable tendency to ask that reasonable order prevail in our household. The rest of the family, however, considers me absolutely bonkers – especially when I catch a shoe someone is kicking off, put it away where it belongs, and can still get back to catch the other one before it hits the floor.

On the topic of warmth and cold:

My wife likes being warm at night.

She becomes annoyed whenever I turn our room fan on “High” and then point it directly at the bed. On more occasions than I can count, she’s wondered aloud how I can sleep “with a gale blowing across the bed.”

I calmly remind her that moving air cools the body and allows for more comfortable sleep. She retorts that if the air were moving any faster, the sheets could be used as a sail.

She also has a habit of setting thermostats to “Normal” on cold nights. I continually remind her that this is just a waste of electricity and that other settings – especially the one marked “Off” – were put there specifically to save energy and reduce our nation’s use of fossil fuels.

Which brings us to windows. Specifically, she gets testy when I ask if I can open them a little bit – especially during the winter – to allow some fresh air into the bedroom.

I define a “little bit” as the limit of travel on the sliding portion. My reasoning is that the window is still half closed. My roommate in college was Jim Toomey. He and and I got along famously. We were both proud as hell one morning when we awoke to find frost on the mirrors in our room. Slept like babies, though.

When I told her that story, she hit me with, “Well, maybe you should have just married him.”

Her more usual response, though, is to ask, “If you’re going to open the windows that wide, why don’t you just strip down to your underwear and sleep outside?” This, as she burrows under the covers never to be seen again until morning.

“I would but, as soon as I left, you’d probably turn the heaters back on to waste electricity.”

One final thing.

They all say I snore, but I don’t believe a word of it.

I think it’s just their way of trying to make me feel guilty for pointing out their all too obvious shortcomings.

Larry Simoneaux lives in Edmonds. Comments can be sent to larrysim@att.net.