The one you want to annoy for the rest of your life
Sheba studied us as we hung up our coats in the church foyer. “Did you notice,” she said to my wife, “that guys hang their clothes facing right, but we hang ours facing left?”
Terry nodded. “Why is that? I can’t get Burt to hang things in the right direction.”
Randy, Sheba’s husband, nudged me. “I Googled it. We’re the ones doing it correctly.”
Is there a right or wrong direction to hang clothes? Like so many other perplexities of life, it depends on to whom you are married.
Spouses love each other dearly and will stand up for each other against legions. A husband might even slap another guy on live TV to defend his wife’s honor.
But inside the four walls of our own homes, the most common thing spouses say to each other is, “Why did you do it that way?”
The great Twitter philosopher Henpecked Hal summed it up: “Welcome to marriage. Here’s the new way you fold towels.”
Does it really matter how the towels are folded? Of course it does, Terry assures me. They don’t shelve right when I fold them my way.
I can adjust to the towels. What I will never figure out is her way of storing used plastic grocery sacks. Terry pinches the bags by the seams, smooths them flat, folds the bags in half lengthwise, twice, pressing the air out after each fold, then knots them in the middle before placing them in the bag holder.
There’s a very good reason why she does this. It’s to annoy me because it takes me five minutes to unknot the stupid things.
No, the real reason is, uh, well… I have no clue — even after she explained it to me. Something about saving space, which makes no sense to me, because she just tied a big, annoying knot in the middle of each bag!
But we love each other, so I knot her bags and she leaves me my own pile of unbound, easy-to-access sacks.
“If we were just the same, one of us would be redundant,” Terry says. But doing it that way sure can get annoying.
Deadman Walking, another great Twitter philosopher, observed, “There are two kinds of people, the ones who pack six days before a trip and the ones who wake up day-of and realize they need to do a load of laundry. And they marry each other.”
As the great philosopher Rita Rudner said, “It’s so great to find that one special person you want to annoy for the rest of your life.”
This kind of special love lasts for decades. The other day, I received this handwritten letter from a Warren husband named Lloyd:
My wife and I are in our 90s and our mornings sound like a comedy routine.
Wife: Are you awake?
Me: No!
Wife: Are you going to get up?
Me: No!
Wife: Are you going to make coffee?
Me: No!
Wife: How do you feel?
Me: Like a teenager.
Wife: A TEENAGER?
Me: Yes — 113. How about you? How are you?
Wife: I’d have to get better to die.
Me: Well, guess I will let the dog out.
Wife: Mitzie died three weeks ago.
Me: Oh. Maybe I will take a little nap then.
Wife: Me, too.
Love is finding that one special person who will put up with your annoyances for the rest of her life. Just be careful which direction you hang up your shirts.
Annoy Cole at burtseyeview@tribtoday.com, the Burton W. Cole page on Facebook or at www.burtonwcole.com.