I gave my adult students the assignment to write about a pet peeve. I find that I have a whole menagerie of peeves and find it interesting that so many of them are traits or habits possessed by my husband.
Why did I choose to marry someone who would constantly get my hackles up? The simple answer is I was lonely, horny and tired of being single, so when I met a nice-looking, employed man, my age, with a clean car, I was drawn to him like a meat bee to a picnic.
So you won’t think I’m totally heartless, the deal was clinched when I met the rescued cat he brought from Texas
However, if we hadn’t gotten married after only knowing each other four months I wonder if we would have gone through with it. At first I found it so charming that we had different tastes in food, I took a picture: his whiskey, my tequila; his steak, my tofu; his mayonnaise, my hoisin sauce; his potato chips, my dried seaweed. I was forty-one years old but as excited as a seventeen-year-old thinking how marvelous it would be to change his diet, in effect, change him.
Of course it never happened. Twenty-years later one cabinet holds his nuts, crackers, chips and coffee creamer while across the kitchen another cabinet is my Asian pantry. The refrigerator crispers hold green, orange and red vegetables he never eats. And yet, I continue to let myself be irritated by his diet and worry about his health. When he dips a fork into the mayonnaise jar and spreads it on a saltine, then tops it with a slice of summer sausage my whole body trembles.
Then there’s the dishwasher. I have this “thing” about order. I love to open drawers and see everything placed like a puzzle, in individual compartments I’ve devised from various sized boxes. This is the case in my desk, my dresser, and all the drawers in the kitchen. Every item from a roll of tape to a shoelace has a place and everything sleeps peacefully until I need it.
So, it follows that when I put dishes in the dishwasher, I place like with like, dishes with dishes, glasses with glasses, forks with forks, etc. This not only presents a pleasing picture when I revisit it, but makes putting away more efficient. Perhaps I over anthropomorphize – but how can I not? When I hold the cup Katherine and I purchased together on Montana Avenue twenty-five years ago, I remember that day. Everything I own has a story behind it. I didn’t create the story. I’m not that crazy!
Now, before I tell you this, I want you to be sitting down and preferably holding on to something: when I open the dishwasher after John’s cleaned up the kitchen here is what I see: chaos, the aftermath of a tornado, or what would happen if a super hero tossed everything in the air and let it land willy-nilly. Sometimes small glasses are actually upside down. He prefers the top rack, so he doesn’t have to bed over. This means it’s overcrowded with plates, cups, spatulas, knives, all going in different directions, some diagonal.
He does use the basket for flatware, but flings them face down so that fork tines are inevitably wedged in the basket and have to be forcefully yanked out. Plus, I never know which is a fork or spoon because upside down they all look the same.
I’ve made it a habit to clear the dishwasher when he’s not within ear shot, so I can apologize as I take all the items out and position them back in drawers and cupboards. I imagine how happy they must feel being reunited. The stack of salad plates, a nest of bowls, that lone hand painted Chinese bowl with the adorable children in their little caps!
John is not going to change. Neither am I. If I want something done my way it’s up to me to do it. If he does it his way I live with the results. As he says, “the dishes got clean, didn’t they?”
I nod in agreement as he walks back into his off-limits office and closes the door. When I do the laundry I’ll deposit his clean socks on the stack of banker boxes that line the hall, the stack he was going to take to storage three weeks ago. But that’s another issue. . .
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