We’ve pretty much all had this experience: You have a disagreeable encounter with someone who raises your hackles, and frustrated with your own lack of eloquence to explain your point, you turn on your heel in an impotent fury, leave, and on the way home in your car, smack the steering wheel with the sudden realization of what you should have sa
I’ve never been more grateful to have been tucked up in my own bed (despite becoming rapidly untucked every 15 minutes owing to the norovirus) this past snow day throughout the Carolinas.
I had one of those moments last week where a conservative, suburban mom popped right out of my mouth.
It was astonishing. And most disconcerting.
It was during our Saturday night tradition of watching our favorite recorded “Brit-coms” with a generous gin and tonic each that my phone rang and I made the motion to answer it.
“Why don’t you turn off the ringer?” Paul asked, slightly annoyed as he put ‘Doc Martin’ on pause.
Never before in all my born days have I been more grateful to be a middle-aged broad than this past week.
It was only a few summers (three?) ago that I ruined Paul’s well-deserved afternoon off by hauling him from the couch and requesting both his emotional and physical support in a spot of goose wrangling.
‘I wonder,” I thought, pulling myself out of the slop in front of the manure pile beautifully cloaked in the snow of a recent winter storm, “how long it would take for Paul to come looking for me if I had really hurt myself just then.”
Having finally put up the tree with Bing Crosby serenading me from the stereo and feeling all cozily tucked up on the couch with a cup of tea, I wanted to write you a nice, cuddly, Christmas column. I really did.
But somebody just fell through the floor of a trailer in Anderson and found a mummified body covered in cat litter, y’all.
Paul has given me an ultimatum, and I don’t like it. “Look,” he began last Saturday evening while I was kvetching (not bad for an Episcopal gal) over the lack of anything decent to watch on television, “If you would let me buy a flat screen, we could get Netflix On Demand.
Holy cow! What was that? Oh, that’s right: Thanksgiving. I nearly missed it drowned out by the Christmas music playing since Halloween and the bombardment of holiday commercials on television.
