That Awkward Age

The way to an engineer's heart is through his electronics

 There’s nothing more pathetic than watching a Parkinsonian man and a geezerettish woman with a bad back trying to finesse a clunky 75-pound computer down a flight of stairs without landing in a crumpled pile.

Unless it’s watching an engineer grieve over having to throw out a “perfectly good” 25-year-old computer.

This computer, mind you, is one of those old desktops with the monitor and processor all in one big honking unit. Green screen, blipping little white cursor, black-and-white monitor, six-inch floppy disk drive. This was way, way before Al Gore invented the internet, so there was nothing really to do on a computer but work or play really lame games.

But still, Bob was so captivated by this machine back in the early ‘80s that I once took off my clothes, walked through the computer room stark naked, and he didn’t look up once. And my own disk drives weren’t nearly as floppy back then.

So last week Bob saw an ad in the paper that our municipal public works department would be setting up a special collection site on Saturday for all sorts of things you’re not supposed to throw in the thrash, such as paint, chemicals and electronics. He asked me to help him load up all of the grungy half-empty paint cans Friday afternoon so that we would be ready to schlep them off the next day.

When I reminded him of all the old computers that needed to go, he was startled. “What old computers?”

We must have close to a dozen computers of varying age, type and uselessness in the house. Laptops, desktops, color, black-and-white, working, not working … we’re a virtual computer junkyard. Don’t need a computer part? How about an old radio tube? We’ve got boxes of those in the attic, too.

When I pointed out the two computers in the attic closet, Bob began protesting, sweating profusely and hyperventilating. “But they’re perfectly fine … The kids might want them…or the grandkids (we only have one so far) …They’re too heavy to move …We’ll never get them out of there by ourselves …You’ll hurt your back … I’m too weak and shaky …. Let’s wait until next time …”

You would have thought the man was giving up crack.

I finally negotiated one computer and one old stereo amplifier that Bob built back in the ‘70s. The matching reel-to-reel and the next-to-oldest computer went back into the closet until some distant recycling event in the future. Probably sometime after at least one death in the distant future.

We tried to carry the monster in our arms, but there was no place to grab hold. First I was on the downhill side, but it was too heavy for me to keep it high enough so that Bob could reach it without standing on his head. Then I was on the uphill side, but I couldn’t reach it without straining my back. How can something full of something called “microchips” weigh so much?

“Let’s put it back in the closet,” Bob said.

“Let’s call a young neighbor,” I said. “How about Jim?”

“No, we called him during the blackout.” Jim helped us get the generator going during the last nor’easter.

“OK, let’s call one of the boys.”

“They're at work.”

“Abram will probably be picking up Cheyenne, so he can swing by here.”

As it turned out, he had to work late and wouldn’t be picking up his daughter.

So, we did what decrepit old people do that strong young people don’t have to do. We used our brains.

When we dug out the computers, we had stumbled upon a plastic bag of quilts that my mother had made for the boys at some point. We used one to wrap around the computer into a sort of hammock thing, then bumped the bundle down the stairs one at a time, dragged it through the kitchen and through the back door to the car.

Then we lugged the old amplifier down.

“Did I tell you I built that amplifier?” Bob asked, looking wistfully into the hatchback.

“Several times.”

The next morning I decided to ride along to the recycling event to see what it’s like. There’s nothing more pathetic than two old geezers with nothing more exciting to do on a Saturday morning ….

 Photo: http://www.flickr.com/photos/hanan_cohen/ / CC BY-SA 2.0

 

 

How We Lost the Honemoon But Won the Marriage (Part 5)

We were home only a day or two when Abram began throwing up. Then we all starting dropping like turkeys from the WKRP helicopter. Within hours, we were all geysers, spewing effluent from every orifice.

We were laid up for days. I dragged myself out of bed to take care of Abram when he needed me; otherwise we were all flat. Hilda was still on the sofa (my NEW sofa!) with her throw-up bucket beside her, moaning with every exhaled breath.

“Oh Lord, come get me,” she would repeat. “I can’t take it another minute.”

I wanted to scream.

Since he got it first, Abram recovered first. That meant he was bored and pinging off the walls while the rest of us could barely lift our heads. Finally on the following Friday, I started feeling human again. Bob was still sick and nursing his collarbone, and Hilda was still moaning. When she wasn’t moaning, she was smoking.

I got out of bed, pulled on my jeans and grabbed my purse.

“Where are you going?” Bob asked.

“Home.”

“You ARE home.”

“No, I’m going to MY home,” I said. “I’m going to 42 Dwight Road. I’m going to sleep in my bed, sit on my john and watch my TV.”

“When are you coming back?” He rose up on an elbow and looked worried.

“I don’t know. I may stay tonight. I may stay all weekend. I may not come back at all. I’ve had it.”

“But Gail …”

I took Abram with me. When I opened the door to my little house, relief flooded over me. I identified with the Iranian hostages who kissed the ground when they got back on American soil.

After turning on the heat, I found something for Abram to watch on TV and I fell onto my bed and took a long nap. When I woke up, it was getting dark. I contemplated ordering delivery pizza and staying overnight, but I was too guilty. Good wives don’t desert their husbands – especially after two weeks of marriage.

So I went back.

A month later, Hilda was still moaning, complaining and smoking. Bob refused to buy cigarettes for her, so she would get the next-door neighbor, also a smoker, to buy them for her when she went out. The house smelled like a combination of old sneakers and wet dog.

One evening as we sat down at the dinner table, Hilda dramatically grabbed her side and cried, “Oh, my spleen!”

Bob and I simultaneously burst out laughing.

“What’s so funny?” Hilda asked, insulted.

“It’s just that you complain ALL the time about something,” Bob said. “You don’t even know where your spleen is.”

“I do not complain much, do I Gail?” This was a typical Hilda move. Divide and conquer. It was a question with no right answer.

“Well, actually you do, Hilda. You complain A LOT.” There. I said it.

That was the end of any remaining honeymoon between Hilda and me. From that day forward, I was known as “her” – as in, “Are you bringing HER when you come to visit?” or “Are you going to let HER talk to me that way?”

Once in a while, I was also know as “she” – as in, “Honey, you’re looking too thin. Ain’t SHE feeding you?”

And sometimes, no pronoun was even needed in the sentence; it was understood. As in – “Honey, what’s wrong. You don’t smile any more like you used to.”

Shortly after Hilda’s spleen pain, I reminded Bob that all of my stuff was still in my house (we couldn’t move it because of Bob’s collarbone injury), and that it would be no trouble at all to go back. It was me or Hilda – either he could take her back to Southwest Virginia, or I would go back to my house across town. Which would it be?

He picked me. Hilda went home, and she never visited again. We had our moments. She was conniving and manipulative, but she also was spunky and mischievous, and could be a lot of fun. For about 30 minutes; it was downhill after that.

So here we are, still crazy after all these years. After the disastrous honeymoon, the marriage had no place to go but up. The first 25 years were the hardest.

Now that the kids are grown, we’re living by ourselves for the first time since we married, and we’re getting to know each other in new and interesting ways. Even though Bob has Parkinson’s and we can’t do all the things we planned for this part of our lives, we are finding that marriage – and life – are sweet.

Happiness is something that eludes you when you chase it, but pounces like a big fuzzy tabby cat when you busy yourself with other things.

The secret? Just watch out for the falling turkeys.

How We Lost the Honeymoon But Won the Marriage (Part 4)

(Continued)

We made it to Denver just in time, and wonder of wonders, the flight wasn’t canceled the next day. At the baggage terminal in the Norfolk airport, Bob held my purse and pointed out our luggage and ski gear as it plopped onto the carousel, piece by piece, and I scrambled to grab them.

“There’s another one, Honey . . . That looks like my ski poles . . . I think that tan suitcase is ours, too . . .”

One of the suitcases weighed about 50 pounds because it was full of Coors beer. Way back in ‘80s, Coors wasn’t available east of the Mississippi, so Bob had taken an extra suitcase to fill up with beer to bring home. That shopping was done before the collarbone broke, so not only was I saddled with all the regular luggage and ski equipment for two, but also a mini brewery. Why I hadn’t thrown it out of the car, along with my new husband, I can’t tell you.

We were quite the spectacle to the four uniformed sailors who snickered and pointed as I tried to grab and single-handedly load all of our paraphernalia onto a cart and steer it out the door. The load was so high that I couldn’t see or around it, so it wasn’t until I rammed into the door jam because the skis were crosswise that I realized I would have to unload the cart and re-stack it to get out of the building. After a second try, we breezed through the door, and Bob turned to the sailors and said, “Got her trained right, don’t I?”

Now, one might think that to be the low point of the honeymoon, but no. The low point of the honeymoon, if you consider “the honeymoon phase” to be part of the honeymoon, was yet to come. The low point had a name, and its name was Hilda. Hilda, my mother-in-law, who awaited us back at my new home. The woman whose son I had stolen, even though he was 39 (soon to be 40), and who had already been married once before. The woman who would later bring out the wedding pictures from Bob’s first marriage so that she could show me how cute his first wife was and to tell me how much she liked her, which was news to Bob. The woman who, after I had just given birth to her grandson, would tell Bob that I was too fat and that he needed to get me out and “run me around the block.” The woman who, when she died, would leave the silver to us, but also include a note that said, “To remain in the Kent family in case of divorce.”

Yes, that would be the low point. And I was clueless.

(Stay tuned for the final installment tomorrow....)

Photo: http://www.flickr.com/photos/naelyn/ / CC BY-SA 2.0

How We Lost the Honeymoon But Won the Marriage (Part 3)

(Continued)

The next day was what was to be the first of two days at Aspen, only Bob took a tumble on the last run down the mountain. Ironically, Bob was the expert skier and I was the novice, and I had only learned to ski because it was such a big deal to him. By the time the ski patrol found us, it was already getting dark. They wasted no time in putting Bob onto the sled and leaving me at the top of the hill with all the skis, poles and boots. By the time I got to the bottom with all the stuff -- still a wobbly skier and made even more spooked by Bob's accident -- the ambulance had left.

I loaded up the car and asked directions to the hospital, where I found Bob in the ER getting taped up by the former surgeon for the U.S. Olympic Ski Team. You realize just how big the industry is there when you get to the ER and find ski racks with locks for stashing your gear while getting your wounds treated.

“So you don’t set collarbones?” Bob was asking the doc when I finally found him. He was wrapping his chest and shoulder tightly in what looked like a giant Ace bandage.

“Nope,” he said. “The bone will grow together on their own just fine. You’ll have a permanent bump there on your shoulder, but it shouldn’t be a problem unless you plan to wear low-cut evening dresses.” Fortunately Bob had given that up, so the unsightly bump was permanent.

After paying the bill with our credit card – a "first" back in the dark ages before people lived on plastic –- we found a drug store to get Bob’s prescription for pain pills filled. The pharmacist looked puzzled when Bob asked if he had to get the prescription in the quantity for which it was written.

“Sir, you can’t get more pills than the prescription calls for,” he said, eying Bob as if he were a junkie. Fully dressed, Bob looked perfectly fine. No sign of injury.

“Oh, no,” Bob said. “I only need three pills.”

The pharmacist shrugged. “That’s the first time I have ever had someone ask for fewer pain pills than the prescription was written for,” he said. “But if that’s what you want, sure.”

Of the three pills, Bob took one. FOR THE ENTIRE WEEK. He didn’t “believe in taking pills,” you see, but he did believe in grousing and making life miserable, even if it was our one and only honeymoon. Well, the way things were going, it might not have been MY only honeymoon, but it was definitely OUR only honeymoon.

The next day –- unbelievably –- we went back to Aspen because we had purchased two-day lift tickets, so I skied alone while Bob sat in the lodge by the fire. I rode the lift up in the “single” line, explaining to my co-riders that I wasn’t really single, I was married and on my honeymoon. What fun.

Back in the lodge, Bob was lolling around, drinking hot toddies by the fire, hoping to run into John Denver. That didn’t happen, but he did chat with a few people who thought it was just a scream that I was skiing alone while Bob nursed a broken collarbone on our honeymoon.

“Well, you can always tell people you were swinging from the chandelier,” one guy said.

The next day we were to head back to Denver to spend the night near the airport so that we could get out early the next day to fly home. But the Honeymoon From Hell wasn’t done with us yet. A blizzard was blowing through Colorado, and we raced to beat it to Denver as the interstate was being closed -- one exit at a time -- behind us, like falling dominoes.

(To be continued ...)

Photo: http://www.flickr.com/photos/_circa_// CC BY 2.0

How We Lost the Honeymoon But Won the Marriage (Part 2)

(Continued)

When I arrived at the salon to get my hair done the morning of the wedding, the locks were so frozen that the owner couldn’t get the key in the door. After trying everything, we finally found a neighboring shop open, ran some hot water in a bucket and threw it on the door to thaw it. Meanwhile, Bob was getting a call to the reception hall because the cantankerous manager wouldn’t let in our friends who were catering the reception. After explanations, cajoling and threats, the codger finally relented. Fortunately I didn’t know about this circus until after the reception.

Finally at the church for the noon wedding, Bob’s mother refused to take her coat off to walk down the aisle, even through we’d shopped three times for a dress that suited her, having to bring them to her since she didn’t feel well enough to go out.

Then as I started down the aisle, I saw tiers of what-were-guaranteed-to-be “dripless” candles in front sputtering like firecrackers and sending up black clouds of smoke with globs of hot wax puddling on the church’s new carpet. Rather than preparing to take solemn vows, all I could think about was what the sanctuary superintendent was going to say about the candles. “Ida is going to kill me,” I whispered to Jim, the printer.

Immediately after Bob and I said, “I do,” Hilda demanded to be taken home, and she wanted Bob to do it. Little did I know, this was only the beginning of the competition between us for her son’s attention. She reluctantly agreed to let someone else drive her.

When we joined our guests at the reception hall after the photo session, I was mortified to discover that the club’s owners had “decorated” for Valentine’s Day with construction paper hearts taped to the walls. Classy.

After the reception, we went by the house to check on Bob’s mom, drop off my son,  change clothes and greet the friend we were paying as a sitter to stay with the two of them. Ready to get the honeymoon underway, we threw our bags in the car and headed to Norfolk where we were staying on our wedding night so that we could be near the airport to take off the next day for our dream trip – skiing in Colorado. Only all flights had been cancelled due to the snow.

The next morning the maids walked in on us. Twice.

Around noon we headed to the airport, not knowing if our flight would make it out or not, but wonder of wonders, ours was the first flight out of Norfolk since the blizzard hit. Things were looking up! We spent the first two nights in Colorado Springs with an old college friend and her husband (thanks, Barb!), then skied Breckenridge the following day. At least, Bob skied Breckenridge. I stayed in the car with a migraine due to the change in altitude and “that time of the month.”

Yes, I had calculated very badly.

(To be continued)

How We Lost the Honeymoon but Won the Marriage

(Part 1)

Last week was the 27th anniversary of the shortest honeymoon in history.
 
Mine.

The honeymoon was really over before Bob broke his collarbone on the fourth day of our marriage and the third day of our ski trip to Aspen. After the trip to the ER, it was me behind the wheel maneuvering through 30 miles of potholes to our hotel in Glenwood Springs with Bob grabbing his shoulder, wincing in pain and yelling about my driving. We were staying there because it was much cheaper. But since that trip almost ended the marriage, that decision was questionable.

After deftly steering the rental car past the largest pothole, Bob snapped, “You missed one! Don’t you want to back up and get that one, too?” That’s when the waterworks started.

But the honeymoon was even before that.

In fact, it was over when his mother moved into his – soon to be my – house two months before the wedding to have someone to look after her following her operation for “female troubles.” She took up residence on my new sofa rather than the guest bedroom, declaring it hurt too much to climb six steps. That’s where Hilda lived for the next four months, chain-smoking her way through her recovery and my last nerve, and permanently imprinting the smell of Kent cigarettes into the upholstery. She smoked Kents because of her last name, and, like the Carly Simon song, she was so vain she probably thought they named them after her.
 
The honeymoon was over when my mom got upset that we were having a champagne toast at the reception and decided, after conferring with her minister, that she and my brother would drive seven hours from North Carolina to the wedding, then leave immediately afterward and before the reception so that she would not have to be a party to the imbibing of four ounces of champagne.

It was over when Bob’s cute but old West Highland Terrier, Duff, got sick the week before the wedding and had to be put down. Bob called early one morning to say that if I wanted to see Duff again to get over to his house quickly, because the dog had cried all night in pain and he was taking him to the vet. By the time I arrived, he had already left with the dog, and Hilda and I sat together and had a good cry. Then after he got out of school that day, I had to break the news to my 6-year-old son, who had already claimed Duff as his dog.

The honeymoon was over when the blizzard of 1983 hit the day before the Feb. 12 wedding, preventing one of the two officiating ministers, one of Bob’s groomsmen and my entire family from attending the wedding (which meant that the whole champagne discussion had been for naught). Since my brother couldn’t make it to walk me down the aisle, I called up my local printing rep the night before the wedding and asked him to pull out his dark suit and give me away. Can’t beat next-day service from your local printer!

(To be continued)

Photo:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/minnellium/ / CC BY 2.0