She Knows All

I always believed in long engagements.  Until I had an actual, living, breathing fiancé of my own.  At that point if it had been possible, the wedding would have taken place before the actual proposal.  I wanted to seal the deal before she discovered my failings and inadequacies.

You guys know exactly which deficiency I’m talking about.  That’s right, I can’t keep track of anything.

Our first apartment as newlyweds was so small our phone number only had five digits.  We had to buy our furniture from the Mattel Barbie Dreamhouse ™ collection.  The oven (a masterpiece of industrial miniaturization) couldn’t actually accommodate a regular sized cookie sheet or cake pan.  All of our desserts looked like petit-fours and we had Cornish Game Hens instead of roast chicken.

Understand that we inhabited something with less actual living space than most recreational vehicles.  It should have been impossible for me to lose track of anything, let alone an actual pair of pants.

In an effort to be helpful to my new bride, I took one load of clothes to the laundromat.  I washed them, dried them, and never-ever left site of the machines and returned home short one pair of slacks.  Returning to the scene of the crime did no good.  The pants were lost forever … until they turned up neatly folded (and still dirty) in my drawer a week later.

I floated various explanations — including extra-terrestrials and government conspiracies — but my beloved wasn’t buying any of them.  The mixture of pity and sorrow in her eyes told me that knew she’d said, “I do” to a defective husband.

She’s adapted well over the years, though.  At the exact moment the pants turned up, she clearly realized she was going to have to be the memory for the family.  This meant she’d have to know all of the important birthdays, anniversaries, and holidays.  My brain retained that kind of information the same way a strawberry carton retains water.

To aid me (and give me a fighting chance to remember her birthday and our anniversary) she purchased a wall calendar and meticulously filled in dates with notations about all of the important dates in our family.  I’m sure it would have been a great help had I ever actually remembered to look at it.

Even so, in twenty-one years I’ve never forgotten our Anniversary.  This might be because about two weeks before the actual date she asks, “What would you like to do for our anniversary this year?”

“Um….it’s our fifteenth, right?” I’ll ask just to annoy her.  I know that it’s really more than that.  Eighteenth or nineteenth at least.  She finds that less knee-slappingly funny than I do.  On the other hand, she doesn’t find it face-slappingly annoying so I’ll take what I can get.

  At least once a month somebody in one of our families is celebrating something.  With machine-like efficiency my wife creates an individualized card and puts it in front of me to sign.
“Who is this for?” I’ll ask.

“Our niece,” my wife says. “She’s turning eight.”

“Ah…” Once I know that, the clues are obvious in hindsight.  The card said Happy Eighth Birthday to our favorite niece.

My wife’s memory comes in handy for things other than dates.  At any given moment she knows the stock levels for everything we have in the house.

Let’s say I’m standing in the kitchen looking forlornly into the coffee cannister, wondering how I’ll manage to get a decent morning jolt from the pathetic quarter-teaspoon of grounds left in the bottom.  I could go to the basement larder to see if I can find another brick of coffee, but that would be inefficient.  It’s much easier to holler out, “Honey, do we have any more coffee?”

“Yes.  Two bricks.”

“I can’t find any.”  I can say this confidently without looking because I can never find any.  If I took my wife at her word and went downstairs, the coffee spot on the shelf would be empty.  A heavy layer of dust would indicate that not only was there no coffee now, there hadn’t been any coffee in years; not since before we actually bought the house.
The coffee only appears when my wife names its location.

“Eye level to the right of the door,” she says.  And then the coffee appears.  Right where she told it to.  My suspicion is that she never shops, she simply calls things into existence when we need them.  Except milk.  For some reason I have to go to the store for that.

She performs the same trick with shoes, coats, telephone books, and clean underwear.  In fact, she’s so good that she can do it by remote control.
She’ll be at work, busy helping save lives in the hospital lab and I’ll be trying to locate my favorite argyle sweater, the one she gave me for Christmas.  Thinking she has nothing else to worry about, I’ll call her up.

“Did you look in the middle shelf of the closet?” she’ll ask.

Of course I looked in the middle of the closet, I’ll think.  All I say is, “Yes.”  Any use of sarcasm might interfere with the magic and, besides, sometimes she does the making-it-appear trick and then I just look stupid.

“Try under your beige turtleneck.  The one you never wear even though it looks so good on you.”

I have a beige turtleneck?  If I never wear it, why is it on top of the argyle.  Clearly the whole notion is ridiculous.  Only, when I check, she’s right.

She’s never a know-it-all, but her gift is sometimes annoying.  If she has to be psychic, why can’t it be something useful like knowing the winning lottery numbers or cool like talking to animals?  Still, in truth I’m glad that she has that gift and that I have her.  On my own, I’d be lost.