To any younger men who read this blog who might be
wondering what it’s like to be married, I have an informative anecdote to
share. It happened last night and in many ways perfectly illustrates what it
means to be married.
My wife and I have a standing date with the Fort
family on Sunday nights at 9 o’clock. They come over around 8:45. Sometimes it’s
just Leigh Ann, sometimes Katy shows up and on occasion Gordon makes an
appearance. Pam makes a huge bowl of parmesan cheese popcorn. We stand around chatting
for a few minutes until the clock strikes 9, then hunker down to watch….Downton
Abbey. For years it was “24” but that show ended and we needed another excuse
to consume large quantities of popcorn slathered in butter and cheese, so thank
God for Downton Abbey.
Well, last night presented something of a problem, a
conundrum, a sticky wicket as it were. The San Francisco v. Seattle game was only
in the late stages of the third quarter, with local kid Russell Wilson and the
boys down 17-13 and about to stage an epic comeback about the time when the
curtain went up on Downton. What to do?
Being married, one of the options of “what to do” was
not telling the ladies that the travails
of Anna and Mr. Bates would have to wait. That would have been about as popular
as a story line featuring a gay love scene between Tom Barrow and Mr. Carson.
No, instead of incurring the wrath of three women, I simply dialed up the ESPN
app on the old smart phone and tried to keep up with two of the most incongruent
simultaneous story lines imaginable. One minute I’m wondering why if Julian
Fellows wanted to introduce a black jazz singer into the show why he didn’t
cast one who could actually sing, and the next minute Marshawn Lynch was
running over his own teammates on the way to a 40 yard touchdown. Five minutes
later I’m about to start crying over poor Anna’s post rape torment at precisely
the instant when Russell Wilson hits Jermaine Kearse with a 35 yard scoring strike.
Talk about your cognitive dissonance? You
try fighting the urge to fist pump a winning score while Anna is asking Miss
Hughes if she can move back into the big house? And poor Bates is left totally
confused because he has no clue why his sainted Anna suddenly doesn’t want
anything to do with him. How, pray tell am I supposed to celebrate the Seahawk
victory with this sort of personal tragedy unfolding on the screen?
So, my young, single
guy friends, this is just one of the many balancing acts you must learn to
perform if you want to be married. There is a time and place for everything,
and when it happens to be the same time,
only the seasoned professional husband can hope to succeed
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