Actually, Division of Labor IS Romantic!

Over the years people have often asked me to explain my successful marriage to them. What’s the secret to staying with someone happily for so long, they will ask. I’ve never been good at supplying an answer, partly because I don’t want to jinx the thing, but mostly because it’s not just one thing. There is no silver bullet, and if there were, I would have misplaced it along with my car keys years ago! The other thing is, I’m not even sure I completely understand why Pam and I have gotten along so well for these 34 years. Maybe it’s all just dumb, blind luck. But, I suppose if I had to come up with a working theory, I would have to say that the same thing that makes a prosperous economy work is exactly what makes us work...the equitable and efficient division of labor. I know what you’re thinking...how romantic!! Hold on, hear me out...

If you wished to construct a number 2 Pencil, as has been famously illustrated, you would need several laborers all doing specialized tasks. To ask one single person to construct a pencil would be next to impossible. In a marriage there are two laborers, (except during childbirth when there is only one person doing any laboring). I believe that in order to have a happy marriage, each couple has to discover who is good at what and divide the labor accordingly. In the early years this is very much a trial and error proposition, but after awhile individual strengths and weaknesses become more clear. After 34 years, for example, I would never make the mistake of asking Pam to muck about under the house to change the crawl space lightbulb. She, on the other hand, knows better than to ask me to plan an English Tea bridal shower for our future daughter-in-law. That’s just crazy talk. 

So, what follows is a break down of how the jobs are split up around here. Now, lest anyone get the wrong impression, this list of job assignments, while very reliable, is not fool-proof. Just because I’m supposed to be the one who takes out the trash doesn’t mean that I don’t sometimes forget. But, most of the time what follows is accurate. If it isn’t, I’m sure that Pam will vigorously object. If there is a dispute, the tie always goes to the wife...

My Jobs

In 34 years, Pam has never once mowed the lawn. Essentially, everything that happens outside the house involving living things is my domain. I mulch, cut the grass, trim the hedges, get up the leaves, de-poopify the yard when needed...which is all the time, organize and execute the wholesale murder of squirrels, and clean up after storms.

I plan vacations. I’m in charge of working out the details of all of our Maine trips, and also planning getaway weekends for just the two of us. It’s not that Pam wouldn’t be entirely capable of doing this, I just prefer to do it myself because I think it’s fun. Also, I think it’s my job to take the lead in planning adventures.

Generally speaking, I do most of the vacuuming. This isn’t an absolute, sometimes I catch her doing it, but I’m better at it and actually kinda enjoy vacuuming for some odd reason.

I clean up the dishes and load up the dishwasher after dinner. Again, this isn’t absolute either, but probably 90% of the time, I do it. True, often Pam will come behind me and rearrange dishes I have placed into the dishwasher incorrectly, but basically, I clean up the kitchen after dinner. 

I empty the dishwasher first thing every morning while waiting for my coffee to brew.

I clean the bathrooms. Sometimes, when all that is needed is a touch up, she will do it, but most of the time when a full elbow-grease fueled effort is required, I clean the bathrooms. 

I take care of all the car maintenance. I’m no car guy, but my wife wouldn’t know an alternator from a gas cap, so I’m in charge of seeing to it that the cars are properly inspected, the oil gets changed, they are full of gas, and are clean inside and out.

I make 95% of the money that gets made. The first five years of our marriage, Pam was a full time teacher in the Henrico County Schools and all of our benefits were provided by her employer. But once Patrick was born she became a full time, unpaid mother of two, leaving all economic support up to me. 

I pay all the bills.

Pam’s Jobs

Literally, everything else.

She plans the menus, buys the groceries and cooks all of our meals, with the exception of Wednesday night dinner when she may as well have cooked it herself, after laying out step by step instructions for me to follow...her cooking for dummies tutorials are epic!

She is responsible for all the interior decorating that gets done around here.

She makes herself available to both of our grown children at all hours for whatever thing they happen to need, whenever the heck they happen to need it.

She has done literally every single load of laundry that has ever been done in our home for 34 years. It is actually quite embarrassing for me to admit that I am a 60 year old human being who has never done his own laundry...never even once. Although, I should add that I do iron my own clothes.

Anything that needs meticulous planning and cunning persistence falls to Pam. Whether it be keeping up with doctor’s appointments, overseeing home improvement projects or planning family celebrations and dinners, without Pam’s eye for detail, this household would be adrift. She sweats all the details, especially the ones I’m not even aware of.

Pam does 90% of the Christmas shopping/planning. Ditto, birthdays, etc.

Ok, so there you have it. Keep in mind that this is just one theory of what makes for a good marriage. Obviously, there’s a lot more to it, like knowing when to keep your mouth shut, and when you do speak, using kind words. But, the division of labor is a big deal. If all or even most of the work falls on only one person, nothing good happens. 

34 Years

Watching the Royal Wedding with my wife. It’s nice enough. Sunny day. Pretty people. Thirty four years ago on this day, Pam and I got married. It was not royal. There were some pretty people, and it was also a sunny day. Of course, we didn’t have a gospel choir in the back of the church, or celebrities lining the aisles. Our getaway car wasn’t exactly a spotlessly buffed Ascot Landous carriage...more like a three year old 1981 VW Scirocco. But, there wasn’t a single gaudy hat in the entire crowd. 

Still, the single best decision I have ever made, marrying this woman.

Thank God For Spell Check

Hardly a day goes by when I’m not made aware of my limitations as a writer. I enjoy writing about as much as anything in this world. I do a lot of it, not only on this rather prolific blog, but also the occasional story that pops into my head. But no matter what it is that I’m writing, I bump up against my shortcomings.

In terms of this blog, it’s my poor punctuation and grammar skills. What punctuation and grammar problems, you ask? Well, the reason you don’t notice that many is because my wife corrects all of them for me. It usually goes like this...

Pam: On this morning’s blog...don’t use a comma here, a semi colon works better. And, this particular phrase sounds clunky. Oh...and this participle is dangling.

Me: (after corrections are made)...How’s this?

Pam: Better.

The problem goes back to high school and my abysmal academic record. Whenever it was time for my English teacher to cover grammar, I would zone out. My body might have been in class, but my mind was a million miles away, God knows where. The only subjects that could hold my attention in school were history and literature. Everything else was a blur. Pam thinks that grammar was particularly difficult for me because at my core I rebelled against the very concept... I hate rules and having to follow them. Whatever the reason, I obviously didn’t learn anything. 

When it comes to writing stories, my problems are more complicated. An idea for a story will pop into my head out of nowhere. I will sit down and start typing, almost continuously for an hour or two, sentences tumbling out fully formed, organizing themselves into paragraphs right before my eyes. This will go on for days and takes very little effort or organization on my part. It just happens. Before I know it, there are 10,000 words and five or six chapters in the document, a precise, discernible and consistent plot containing a half dozen characters. Then, I think..where did that come from?? But then, suddenly, everything stops. Whatever river of imagination that produced this universe of characters and plots dries up, and they sit there flat on the page, waiting for me to tell them what to do. It’s like the literary version of suspended animation. Days go by, then weeks...nothing. Sometimes I will re-read the thing from the beginning hoping to find the spark. Nothing. Then, I’ll be in the middle of cutting the grass or a set of sit-ups at the gym when the flash of an idea will come...and it all starts up again. This ridiculous writing style has produced one complete novel, two half baked ones and a trove of short stories along with a couple dozen aborted attempts. It is also the reason I don’t write for a living. 

So, I’ll publish this blog and wait for Pam to alert me to some grammatical infraction or another, and thank my lucky stars for spell check.

Complaining About The Weather?

It is 6am in the city of my birth and the humidity sits at 98%. My handy WWBT weather app informs me that for the next three days I can expect a 90% chance of thunder storms with locally heavy downpours. The first sunshine emoji I see in the ten day forecast is next Wednesday, and even that one is half covered with emoji clouds. It would be quite easy to fall into despair at such a prediction. The prospect of unrelenting rain and thick humidity isn’t the sort of thing that puts a bounce in your step. However, upon further reflection...things could be a lot worse.

Suppose the forecast for the next ten days called for blistering sunshine and highs in the upper 90’s? How about if the temperatures were forecasted to be in the upper 50’s, a record breaking cold snap for the month of May? We could be mired in a ten day tornado watch, or bracing for the earliest hurricane to ever threaten landfall on the Mid-Atlantic States.

The thing about weather is that it always is pissing somebody off. As much as I hate the current forecast, people with gardens love it. As much as I hate upper 90’s, there’s some heat worshipper out there who is thrilled to death. 

The cool thing about Virginia though...we get it all. Every kind of forecast you can imagine eventually becomes operational. Blistering heat? We got that. Stifling humidity? Check. Sub-zero freezing cold? We’ll have a few of those this winter. You want snow? Wait for January and February. Want delightful cool temperatures and fall colors? Yep. Want a few weeks of verdant green, soft breezes and pastel colored sunsets? That would be April. 

You people out in San Diego have year round delightfulness and all, but after a while don’t you just get tired of the monotonous sunny skies? You guys in the Arizona desert, does fall even happen to you? And my poor Maine brothers and sisters, what must it be like to endure six months of winter, then three months of Garden of Eden perfection separated by three months of...mud?

So, no...I will not be complaining about my weather forecast. This is Virginia, the land of free range weather, and the blessing of endless variety. That’s worth celebrating if you ask me.

Chapter 9

DeeRay Deloplane had spent the better part of the last twenty years repairing his life from a series of unforced errors that had come close to killing him. The primary means of this rehabilitation had been putting as much distance between himself and his troublesome past as possible. Since his rebirth had involved abandoning a wife and three kids, some might have suggested that his reinvention was built on a shaky moral foundation, but DeeRay had long ago made peace with his past, and had learned to live with very few regrets. He had a reasonably profitable car mechanic’s business that he ran out of what used to be a 7/11 store, on the outskirts of Worcester, Massachusetts, which was as far as his bus fare would take him two decades earlier when he had fled his wife, Starla, in the dead of night after a particularly ferocious fight that had left each of them exhausted and bleeding profusely. The fight had been about money, most fights with Starla were, primarily the fact that DeeRay wasn’t making enough of it fast enough to please her. With three young mouths to feed and her insistence on being a stay at home Mom, she often had a point in their frequent money fights, especially considering DeeRay’s fondness for beer and vintage Corvettes, neither of which he could afford. It had always been DeeRay’s contention that he and Starla might have been ok if they had only had one kid. They might have been able to survive with twins even…but having triplets had been a bridge too far for two people who were both basically kids themselves. 

If DeeRay had been a more religious man, or religious at all, maybe he would have carried around a more respectable level of guilt for abandoning three kids before they were even five years old. But, he had to admit that he hardly ever gave them much thought. Truth be told, the only time they ever entered his mind was whenever he was forced to write a support check to Starla. Just like death and taxes, Starla Deloplane, who had a nose for money like a coon dog has a nose for escaped convicts, eventually tracked him down with the help of a relentless Richmond lawyer.  After six months of threats and counter threats, the lawyer was able to extract a series of monthly checks out of DeeRay,  written on Deloplane Auto-Repair’s extra wide and fancy looking checks, most of them written in the dainty handwriting of his bookkeeper and wife number two, Priscilla, who never complained about money, since her Daddy had boatloads of it and showered his only daughter with all of her heart’s desires. DeeRay would sometimes stare across the table during Sunday dinner at his father-in-law and think that since leaving Virginia he had become the luckiest man in the world. Instead of being burdened with three unruly children and an argumentative, money-grubbing wife, he had managed to meet and marry a woman who not only woke up every morning of her life, horny, but also had a filthy rich old man who could be talked into loaning his new son-in-law money to buy the old 7/11 and turn it into a garage.

Eventually the monthly support checks ended, and the Deloplane’s of Massachusetts were in high cotton. DeeRay’s communications with Starla had dwindled to the rare phone call to inform him of Robert’s latest run-in with the law. Of the three, Robert was always the one getting in the most serious trouble, and it had been this way since the day all three of them had been born. DeeRay’s communications with his kids had been largely limited to the even more rare phone call…usually every other Christmas and the occasional birthday. The last time he had laid eyes on any of them had been on the day of their high school graduation, which the triplets were grudgingly allowed to participate in only with assurances from all parties that each Deloplane would complete two summer school classes still required to actually receive their diploma. To assuage the rare rumblings of guilt, DeeRay would fold a fifty dollar bill into an envelope from the garage and send it to each kid with a perfunctory note: 

Don’t spend it all in one place,

Dad Deloplane 

But, DeeRay Deloplane had always known that eventually he would pay the price for abandoning his children. Although, it would have appeared to most observers that he had gotten away with it, his gutless flight from responsibility, every passing year brought with it a strange and disturbing feeling that his comeuppance was closer at hand. Along with this gnawing fear, there was also a longing, the haunting thought that his choices had robbed him of something. After the triplets, there would be no more children. For a women so enamored with sexual intercourse, Priscilla had let it be known early and often that she had no interest in motherhood, which was fine, except when the holidays rolled around, or their birthdays. That’s when the longings would come, heavier each year.

Then he had gotten the call back in September from Starla, informing him that his son had died a murderer. The details horrified DeeRay, and immediately the guilt became unbearable. Priscilla, who possessed all the empathy of a Teamster foreman, scolded her husband for blaming himself and threatened to leave him if he agreed to travel to Virginia for the small funeral service that Starla had arranged for her unmourned son at the local Baptist Church the family seldom attended. DeeRay made the drive anyway, standing off by himself at the graveside, afraid of how his remaining two children would react upon seeing their father for the first time in seven years. The small crowd paying their respects all looked like thugs to DeeRay, with their shaggy hair, tattoos and ripped jeans, dressed more for fighting than mourning, DeeRay thought. These were the sort of friends a boy without a proper Dad falls in with, DeeRay thought. The tears that came weren’t for his son, they were an admission of the hash he had made of his life. He was reaping what he had sown, skipping out on his family like a whimpering coward.

Starla had been cold towards him when he had shown up at the funeral home the previous day. She had recognized him standing beside his Corvette in the parking lot, too afraid to come inside. As she approached him, she noticed that he looked much better than she would have thought after so much time. His hands were rough and red from a mechanic’s abuse, but the rest of him hadn’t aged as much as she had. This was one more thing she had to resent about him.

I suppose I should thank you for coming, was all she felt was appropriate to say, although at any other location and occasion, she could have come up with a hundred things to yell at him. DeeRay could hardly look at her, the guilt and remorse practically oozing out of every pore. 

Finally he managed, How are you holding up? You need anything? How are Rich and Bertie dealing with everything?

Do I need anything? You mean like money? No, I’m good DeeRay. I had insurance on him, so we’re all good. Starla’s eyes filled with tears.

After the last rose had been thrown onto the casket, DeeRay’s kids turned to leave the graveside, seeing their father for the first time. To his profound horror, they both ran to him and held him tight, tears flowing, the air filled with cries of Oh, daddy…daddy…a greeting that DeeRay knew he didn’t deserve, and one that had him weeping at the spectacle of such a ghastly reunion, every Deloplane crying and hugging each other as if they had been separated by the ravages of war, or biblical famine or some other cosmic pestilence instead of his own petty selfishness. When Starla joined in on the ill-timed group hug, DeeRay found himself fighting a new urge to make a break for the Corvette and leave them all in the lurch for a second time. 

By the time they all settled in at the house for the covered dish supper, everyone seemed to have recovered from the awkward outpouring of emotion graveside, and had now moved on to sad indifference, a much more familiar playing field. Strangers kept interrupting attempts at conversation, passing along their condolences, and confusing DeeRay with Starla’s two more recent husbands, neither of whom, DeeRay noticed, were in attendance. The fact that he was the only former husband of Starla Deloplane to attend their son’s funeral provided DeeRay with the smallest fig leaf of comfort that could possibly have been hoped for under such circumstances. Truthfully, DeeRay had always been grateful to Starla for running off two other husbands over the years, since it provided him with the reassurance that maybe it wasn’t all his fault.

As he walked to his car to leave, Starla had followed him. They both leaned against the Corvette, searching for words that fit the moment. As usual, Starla went first.

Nice car. You always had a thing for Vette’s, didn’t you?

Yeah. This one was a mess when I bought it. I spent a year working on it at the shop. I could probably make some money if I sold it, but I don’t want to. 

Uncomfortable silence. A cigarette was lit. More silence.

I knew he was going to end up killing somebody, DeeRay. It wasn’t just the drugs, it was him…he had a dark heart. I used to blame it on you. I thought that if you hadn’t left like you did, maybe he would have turned out different…but the truth is, he was just a bad seed.

Well, if he was, it was my seed. You can blame me all you want. Actually, it would make me feel better if you did.

Why would that make you feel better?

Because that’s what I deserve.

What’s done is done, DeeRay. We can’t  go back and have a do-over. 

Another long silence fell over them as the sun slipped behind the Blue Ridge mountains in the distance.

You sure you don’t need anything? I’ve got plenty enough money to help you out with the funeral if you’re like.

Relax, DeeRay. I’m not broke anymore either. You know I’ve got the best divorce lawyer in Richmond on my Christmas card list. I’ve taken practically every nickel from the two after you, thanks to him. It’s been kind of like a cottage industry for me.

They both laughed together, at the same time, about the same joke for probably the first time in twenty five years. 

So, you heading back to Massachusetts in the morning?

Yeah. I need to be getting back. Priscilla swore she would leave me if I came down here, so I better get that patched up.

Starla put her arms around her first husband, the father of her children and gave him a long, tender hug, saying nothing. Thank you for coming DeeRay…I mean it. After he got in the car, he rolled the window down, searching for something to say. Starla, who could never let silence hang too long began talking to no one in particular, DeeRay thought later…

…the thing is, even though I knew Robert would end up killing someone, I always imagined it would be one of his drug buddies, or one of his dealers. Why couldn’t it have been one of them? Why did he have to kill that Rigsby woman? I mean, of all the people in the world, why did it have to be such a fine and  beautiful woman like her? You know, I’ve read up on her and her family. They were from Richmond. She had a couple of grown kids, and a rich, successful husband who owned a big business somewhere. They were driving an Escalade. I saw a picture of her on the Internet. Such a lovely woman. The funny thing is DeeRay, my son ended up killing exactly the kind of woman I always wanted to be.

It’s a terrible thing, Starla…but like a great woman I knew once said, what’s done is done. There’s nothing you can do to fix it. 

I suppose so.

Starla watched him back out of the driveway, then followed his tail lights until they disappeared.

Life Changer

Had a fascinating conversation with a younger friend of mine the other day. He’s in his mid-forties and on the cusp of a sizable promotion at work. He was trying to decide whether it would be worth it to uproot his family and move away in pursuit of this new position which offered both much more money and greater respect and prestige in his profession. The opportunity to build greater wealth had a lot of appeal for him, since it might allow him to retire earlier than he had thought possible. Still, the upheaval it would bring to his family dynamic and quality of life was a concern. 

As I listened to him it occurred to me that when I was in my mid-forties, something happened to me that forever changed my perspective on the entire money/prestige thing. Emergency open heart surgery will do that to a person, I suppose.

I never had some dramatic, Hollywood-style epiphany. In the weeks of recovery afterwards I was too busy trying to put one foot in front of the other to bother myself with deep existential thoughts about the universe and my place in it. But once I returned to work, something had changed. My business is an intensely competitive enterprise which runs on the twin engines of money and growth. One thing always suggests the other. You are either getting bigger and wealthier or you are shrinking and dying...or so says the conventional wisdom. However, I discovered that there is nothing quite so clarifying of thought than the prospect of eminent death. Suddenly, I started examining everything in business through the prism of, is this really as critical as I think it is? It didn’t take long for me to realize that when it came to the old paradigm of growth and more and more...my heart just wasn’t in it anymore. 

So, I started making changes. I replaced income goals with vacation goals. My primary driver would no longer be exponential growth, but sustainable, manageable growth. I would trade in an increasingly more complex future for a much slower pace. Each year on January 1, the question became, how much time off will I take this year? And since I work for myself and there is no such thing as vacation pay, that meant that I had to be willing to accept less money. In the fifteen years that have gone by since I lay in that cold room counting backwards for the nice Asian anesthesiologist, I suppose I have forfeited quite a bit of money. On the other hand, I’ve never missed a single moment that mattered with my family. I’ve had time to read a thousand books, write a million words...and I have taken some incredible vacations! 

Owning your own business makes all of this possible. I am grateful to be where I am. I’m aware that for people who work for someone else, these decisions can’t be made as easily. My work has placed me in the enviable position of having a measure of control over my schedule and my income. The freedom that comes from such ownership is the single greatest benefit of my life’s work. But, getting off the big, bigger, biggest treadmill was the best decision I ever made, which means that having open heart surgery at age 45 was one of the best things that ever happened to me. 

How weird is that?

Making The Trains Run On Time

Tomorrow is Mother’s Day. Ever since my Mom passed away, it’s been the occasion of many fond memories, but also a bit of sadness. I suppose that this is a natural thing and as it should be and will be for the remainder of my life. At present there are but two mothers in my life, my mother-in-law and my wife. My mother-in-law’s claim to fame will forever be bringing my wife into this world and raising her so well. My wife, on the other hand, has been and continues to be a legendary mother. A few examples...

To say that the two of us had different parenting styles would be a world class understatement. But, it’s one of the things I believe helped produce two pretty amazing kids. We had different jobs. While their mother was busy demonstrating the cardinal virtues in word and deed in front of our children, I was busy teaching them how to field grounders and break up a double play. While Pam labored to instill a love of books and reading in them, I was upstairs giving them their baths and teaching them how to execute a proper armpit fart. Pam spent countless hours cultivating an appreciation of the arts in our kids, teaching them about what it is to love and cherish fine things. I spent countless hours perfecting the tickle-monster bedtime routine, complete with ethnic diversity twists like the dreaded Chinese tickle-monster....don’t ask. But, it’s not like I taught them nothing of lasting value...the wrestling skills they retain to this day? All me!

But, in our house it was always Mom who made the trains run on time. She’s the one who packed their lunches every day for 12 years, never failing to include a hand written note of encouragement, or an occasional corny joke. It was Mom who always filled out the endless paperwork of childhood, the bureaucratic paper trail of American adolescence. It was Mom who made sure their teeth were straight, their clothes were clean and that everything matched. Mom was the one who scheduled their doctor’s appointments, made sure they showed up everywhere on time. It was Mom who always was there when they returned from school, with a snack, demanding a full report on the day’s adventures. It was Mom who would not tolerate a bad attitude or an uncharitable remark. It was Mom who taught them the crucial importance of manners, an old school term which essentially means...respect. And it was always Mom who did all the worrying. While I always reminded her that...the kids will be fine...she put in a lifetime of 18 hour days making sure they would be. 

Watching my wife with our kids all these years has convinced me that motherhood is more art than science. There is nothing accidental about it. Being a mother, it seems to me, is an eternal commitment to the hard details of life. It is a relentless pursuit, a tireless advocacy campaign, whereby anything or anyone who gets between your children and their best interests is in for an existential fight to the finish. If you were dumb enough to pose a threat to our kids, there would be hell to pay. But, having said all of this, what made Pam so incredible as a mother was the fact that she steadfastly resisted the urge to hover over them. She wasn’t one of those insufferable helicopter moms who think it their job to insure that junior never skins a knee. Pam made sure our kids were prepared for everything, but success or failure was their job. Pam was willing to allow them to fail. 

I had my moments as a dad. Even though I was responsible for financing my family’s adventures, I never became one of those guys who was always too busy making money to show up at the game or the concert. My kids always knew that Dad would be there..at everything. But it is not a case of false modesty to say that in our house there was always only one indispensable person...Mom. The kids knew it. I knew it. Even Mom knew it, and she never buckled under the weight of the job.

What a woman...