I realized the other day that I’m nuts. This revelation hit me just after I pulled the fifth dead pen from the cup on my desk, scratched futilely at the page with it, and then returned it to the cup. Did I expect it to heal? Was the passing of this ballpoint so traumatic that I have to go into denial? Was I so phenomenally lazy that I couldn’t even get up to toss the thing into the trash?
Lazy or crazy? Given the options, I’ll plead insanity.
Besides, not all of my irrational behaviors are labor saving. For example, I carefully box up leftovers at dinner and put them in the refrigerator knowing that I’ll never see them again until they’ve been abandoned so long that they hover on the brink of becoming a new life form. So why am I putting them in the fridge? My best guess is that it’s some kind of offering to the Frigidaire spirit, perhaps appeasement to ensure that the ice-maker keeps working.
When that mechanism jams, I hold my glass expectantly at the bottom of the chute, press the button and … nothing. Gears whir, a motor grinds and my cup runneth not over. The logical approach would be to open the door and inspect the mechanism. Instead, I push the button again.
Do I think that the ice elves didn’t hear the bell the first time I pushed? Maybe I’m thinking that if I press the button hard enough the ice machine will work harder. Or (and here we come back to where we started) perhaps I’m too lazy to try to figure it out.
Not that I’m good with machines. When the car breaks down I open the hood even though I know that I know nothing about auto repair. It’s as if I believe that my brain sneaked out and took a night school mechanics course without telling me. Or maybe I expect to find a flashing neon sign which says, “REPLACE THIS PART”. No such arrow has ever appeared and yet I inspect the engine every time something goes wrong.
And sometimes when I look at the engine, I talk to it.
“Come on,’ I say encouragingly, “we can figure this out. I know you want to run, right?”
If ever the engine answers back, I’ll know that the little boat of my sanity has drifted away from the dock of reason and onto the vast ocean of lunacy.
At least I won’t be alone. My wife does irrational things, too.
She talks to the cat. Not in a crazy-old-cat-lady way. Not that at all. She talks to him like he’s a human being. A short, furry, four-legged, human being with a tail and whiskers.
“What do you think, Clarence,” she’ll ask him.
What does he think? This is a creature who is terrified of the vacuum cleaner. Given the chance he’ll chase the spot from a flashlight around the floor. On more than one occasion he has collided with a window trying to jump at the birds outside. His intellectual gifts are on a par with Simon Cowell’s diplomatic skills and Michael Jackson’s babysitting abilities.
Yet she still talks to him.
She also talks to inanimate objects. (Although, given that the cat sleeps approximately eighteen hours a day it’s hard to consider him fully animate.)
Last week I caught her talking out loud while she stacked firewood.
“Okay,” she said, “Let’s put the square pieces on the end of the stack so they don’t roll away. That’ll make the whole structure stronger.”
It sound like she was giving a wood-stacking lecture to an invisible class. Or maybe the instructions were being beamed straight into her brain by the mothership and they just accidentally leaked out of her mouth along the way.
The simplest explanation is that she’s lost her mind…just like me.
I noticed things starting to slip just after our first child was born. Or maybe even a little before.
According to highly accurate figures I found on the web doing a two-minute search, you can expect to pay approximately a quarter-million dollars to raise a child. Really. We could have had a Lamborghini or a baby and we chose the baby.
A Lamborghini wouldn’t leave its socks and shoes in a jumble by the front door, lose its backpack with two-hundred dollars worth of textbooks inside, or grow up and move away. Nope, a Lamborghini would just collect the occasional speeding ticket, but mostly sit in the driveway and look good.
And yet we went ahead and had kids anyway.
The irrational behavior got worse when they were babies. I’m not saying we were intellectual giants before, but at least we never spoke in baby-talk. Once we reproduced we sounded more like cartoon characters than human adults.
“Is ums hungry? Did ums little tummy go rumble-rumble?”
If ums could talk he probably would have begged us to tell him that he was adopted and didn’t share our DNA.
We dropped the baby talk when they got older and substituted irrational questions instead.
“Would you like to take a nap now?” we’d ask as if we actually expected our children to answer, “Why yes, that sounds delightful.”
Over the years the subject of the question has changed, but the question itself remains in various forms.
“Are you ready to practice the piano?”
“Did you have fun at school today?”
“Would you like to tell me where you were until two in the morning?”
“Can you explain that new tattoo?”
Every time we ask something like that, our sons look at us with a mix of sorrow and amusement. I know they pity us, but I take comfort in the fact that their turn is coming. Sooner or later they’ll decide to have kids and one day they’ll hear themselves asking, “Why did you put a PB&J in the fish tank?”
