Giving Up Stuff

Every year, my resolution is to quit more things.

I gave up being a blonde. I started being a blonde as a result of a well water accident in 2001. We had poured bleach down our well to clean it and must have used too much bleach. After I took a shower,   the water stripped all the color out of my hair. I was between jobs at the time, so trying a radically different look as an experiment was not disruptive. I didn't have to endure a day of shocked looks or comments. I just became blonde after that. But this year I decided it was making me look tired, so I gradually went back to my brown hair.

I gave up the newspaper. First I cut back to just Sunday. Then I got rid of Sunday, too, because it was like homework to feel like I was getting my money's worth. Then I even stopped looking at the paper at work. I am inundated with what's happening in the world through the Internet and social media.

Without the Sunday paper, I had fewer coupons. Then no coupons. So I stopped cutting out coupons. Sure, I pay full price for toilet paper now, but I also don't buy new products I don't really need just because I have a coupon.

I am pretty close to giving up Christmas. I finally told my family that I was not buying any of them gifts. They have everything they need. I don't enjoy shopping, especially when everyone has to have a gift at the same time, during a season when the stores are crowded, the weather is cold, and it gets dark so early. Why isn't Christmas in April when Jesus was actually born? Also, we did absolutely no decorating this year. None. Not even the little window tree came out. Which is great because this weekend I don't have to pack up any decorations.

There might be other things I gave up for good this year, but these are the big ones. I am at that age now where I can say with all sincerity that,"I am too old for this crap," and not put up with annoying people, insane coworkers, pointless family traditions, and a host of other things that people do just to be polite. Unlike those gay cowboys in "Brokeback Mountain," I do know how to quit you.

The Christmas Ficus

I am not a plant person. To me, tending plants is like working in a nursing home. Your charges take a great deal of care and special attention, but will never get to the point where they can get along without you. And then they die.

One year for my birthday, a well-meaning relative gave me three very large house plants. I put the plants out on the sun porch where they took up all the space, and we had our first emergency immediately. One of my cats chewed up some of the leaves. She spent the evening throwing up. We went to the internet, researched plants that made cats sick, and sure enough, we had a cat-killing plant. It went outside. It was followed by the other two the next day.
 

I assumed they would whither and die over the summer, and that would be the end of it, but God watered them and they flourished.

Since my husband’s family had given us the plants, he took responsibility for keeping them alive, despite my ambivalence. He repotted the ficus and it grew twice as high over the summer. He bought more pots and potting soil for the other two, but lost interest in the project. So now I had thriving plants in the yard, and a sun porch cluttered with unused pots and potting soil.

I felt resentment toward pots and plants.

At the end of the summer, the plant-gifter came over to visit and we lied about how much we were enjoying the plants and how well they were doing outside. But, I confessed, with winter coming, they’d have to move back inside and one was a cat-killing plant. The plant-gifter volunteered to take that one home and return it in the spring. I prayed she would offer the same deal for the others, but she left with just the cat-killer. I prayed she would forget to return it in the spring, and that prayer was answered. I never asked about it.

Then my husband’s grandfather died, and his office sent over a plant to console us. We were back to three large plants again, the ficus, some leafy thing, and the dead grandfather plant.

The weather turned cold and the plants began to look endangered. Time to take them to the dump! Right?

No, my husband brought them all inside. His family had given us two of them, and the other was his comfort plant for losing a grandfather, he said. So they all sat on the dining room table, the only available space near a window, leaving no room for anything else, and still not getting enough sun since the dining room faced north. In the evening, we turned on desk lights to shine on the plants. They all perked up.

Will this ever end?

A cricket rode in on one of the plants, and periodically it chirped, getting the cats all excited. One evening when we were out, the cats went on a Cricket Mission from God and attacked the plants. We came home to dirt all over the dining room. Despite the attack, the plants thrived.

To make some room on the dining room table, we moved the ficus to in front of the fireplace. We did not have a fire in the fireplace that winter because it would ignite the ficus. We did not have a Christmas tree that year because the only place to put one was taken by the ficus. So we hung some tinsel on the ficus and made do.

It's the Rep You Get, Not the Rules

Persistence sometimes pays off.

Once I noticed my credit card had charged me a $39 late payment charge. My checkbook confirmed I had written a check and it had cleared, but a day after my payment due date, even though I had mailed it seven days before it was due to a Richmond address just two zip codes away.

This wasn't the first time the post office had failed me. Once, a freelance check took 16 days to travel across town. I checked the postmark. Another check took 33 days to travel from Los Alamos, New Mexico to me in Virginia. Pricewaterhouse Cooper once took a survey and rated my postal district "the worst place in the continental United States for mail service."

So I called my credit card, Capital One, which is in my town, and explained to the customer service rep that I felt I had done my part. I had mailed my payment at least five days in advance, as directed on the bill, and it wasn't my fault the post office took from Monday to the following Saturday to carry my payment across town.

She said it didn't matter what the postmark on my envelope was, or when I mailed the check. All that mattered was what day it got there, and it got there late, and not one day, but two days after it was due. I had no answer for that, and she wasn't cutting me any slack, so I hung up. But when I looked at my statement again, she was wrong about one thing. I had missed the due date by one day, not two.

This was still not a winning argument by her standards-late is late-but for some reason I decided to call back anyway and tell her she had that part wrong. I knew I wouldn't get the same woman, so it's a mystery why I called. I was just mad. I got a man this time, and before I could even go through the whole saga again, he offered to remove the late fee.

Well, how nice! Apparently the rule about late fees only apply to people who don't call repeatedly until they get a cooperative rep...or a man. I have theories about what kind of customer service reps are more likely to cut you some slack, but we won't go into that.

Back in the early 1990s, I used to work in the customer service department of Signet Bank, and it was within our power to overturn bounced check charges if we felt the customer had a justifiable complaint. Some reps, like me, felt most excuses were just that, excuses. I only overturned the charges for elderly women on fixed incomes who had gotten confused. Other representatives were more liberal. They believed in keeping the customers happy. They didn't want to argue. They wanted everyone to literally have a nice day. So they removed all bounced check charges all the time, for any reason. All you had to do was call and they made them go away.

So these customers got used to having their overdraft charges erased like magic, and didn't worry about bouncing more checks. There was no penalty. That is until they got a rep like me on the phone who wouldn't budge, especially when their history of massive check bouncing came up on my screen. Then they were furious. I frequently didn't have a nice day at that job. The angry customers only had to go one step over my head to a supervisor, who would then overturn the charges for them. One frequent bouncer finally managed to even get me fired for not overturning her charges. I never understood why the supervisors backed her after all our training about using the power to overturn charges sparingly. And it wasn't a nice firing either. It was one of those deals that while you're in the office being fired, a flunkie is packing up your desk in a cardboard box and then two big men escort you out of the building and hand you your box and tell you never to show up again.

Why did we even bother to charge for bounced checks then? The only ones paying the fees were people too timid to complain. The meek may inherit the earth, but until then, they're paying all the late charges.

So the lesson here, which I was reminded of when my late fee was miraculously erased, is to just keep calling until you get what you want, especially if right is on your side. Thank the rep, hang up, and call again. And again. And again. Even if you're in the wrong, you can be righteously indignant and eventually you'll get a customer service rep who will fix you up because they don't want to talk to problem customers or get fired, or it's their passive aggressive way of getting back at their company, or whatever. Of course it's not fair, but as Jimmy Carter once said, life is not fair.

Living with Alcoholism

“He died last November,” the little boy said through the storm door. He was home alone and didn’t want to say anything more to the strange woman who had knocked, asking if he knew where the man who lived next door went.

Every year when the new phone book came, I looked him up. One year there was no listing, so I drove over to the last known address and started knocking on doors. That’s how I learned my ex-husband of 17 years had died.

And I felt nothing. We had been separated for 10 years and there had been no contact for the last eight. They say you only remember the good things, but none of those memories came, just the bad ones. And when a tear finally came, it was a tear for me. Selfish to the end, he would have said.

My husband had a drinking problem. Even now I find it difficult to say he was an alcoholic. He so vehemently denied it. He did not hit me. He was not a violent drunk. He did not drink and drive. He did not embarrass himself in public. He did not miss work because of his drinking—much.

He just missed having a life. He was a secret drinker. When I first met him, he did not have a telephone even though he could afford one. Telephones enabled people to call him at home and catch him drunk. He did not drink in bars. He did not drink with friends. We didn’t have friends, because a secret drinker cannot start drinking until they leave.

I associate him with sounds, the click of the cigarette lighter as he lit up as soon as he woke up, the pop of a pull tab as the first beer was opened as soon as he came home. Then another beer, another cigarette, another beer. Pop, click, pop, click.

He did not drink for pleasure, but for purpose, as if there was some emotional pain he had to anesthetize. But his life was no more miserable than anyone else’s. His father died when he was young. There was a first failed marriage. He had given up music and the military, two vocations he claimed he liked, for a tedious job on the night shift, which gave him all day to recover from his drinking the night before. There was happiness to be found, but he didn’t look for it. It would have interfered with his drinking.

He bought the cheapest beer the 7-Eleven had, Milwaukee Best, a six-pack at a time. Sometimes that would be enough to get through the night. Sometimes a second trip was necessary. Sometimes tall cans were called for. He could not buy a case at a time because if he bought a case, he would drink a case at one sitting. We could not have a bottle of vodka or whiskey in the house for special occasions because it would not be there in the morning. It would be empty, and he’d still be in his recliner, too stunned to go to bed, his head hanging, his fly open because the mechanics of pulling up the zipper became too intricate.

But he could quit anytime, he said, so he didn’t have a problem. And he did quit, several times. And started again.

When I was very young and first married to him, I believed what he said. It wasn’t until after I left that I finally understood the disaster we had lived. He had me believe the drinking was my fault. I had come to our marriage with a child, placing the burden of having to pay for another man’s child on him. I did not make an adequate income. Even his failure to progress in his job was somehow my fault. His bosses didn’t like me.

When I accidentally put a dent in his new car, he called in sick and drank 18 tall beers in one sitting. I had destroyed all the joy he had in his new car, he said, and that joy could never be regained. He left the dent in the car as a rebuke to me.

He embraced any and every excuse to justify his drinking. The responsibility, the guilt, belonged to everyone but him. His mother liked his brother best. His first wife made him quit the military. A co-worker was promoted over him. His car was not the best and newest at the stoplight.

I was younger than he was, and he never took me seriously. When I became upset about the toll his drinking and smoking was taking on his health, it became a field of battle between us. I was the enemy, not the concerned wife.

And just as serious as the physical toll was the emotional price. There was no affection extended to my son or me since it was vital to the drinking scenario that we remain the root cause of it. We did little as a family. Days off were spent sleeping it off, and the waking hours spent in front of the television, putting the liquor back in.

It wasn’t until after it was over that I realized the psychological damage we had sustained from living such a dry existence in his wet world. I had no sense of confidence or worth. I gave my son a biological father who had run off and a stepfather who withheld love, praise and approval.

I kept a fill-in-the-blanks father’s day card my son wrote when he was 13. At the time we thought it was funny, but looking at it now is heart-breaking and tragic. “I think my dad knows how to sleep better than anyone in the whole world,” he filled in the blank. “I think he likes to spend his time worrying most of all.” The best thing they did together, he filled in was “watch TV.”

For what his dad does to make him feel better, he wrote, “Nothing. He never makes me feel better.” Under why he liked to hug him, he wrote, “I never hug him.” On another page, he honestly recorded that he didn’t want to grow up to be like his stepdad. This strange card ended, “Happy Father’s Day.”

Even after I finally left the marriage, I felt like I was at fault, that I owed him something for not hanging in until the end, and I continued to do his banking, pay his bills, buy his groceries and do his laundry. When he called me to ask if it was 8 a.m. or 8 p.m.— a disorientation he felt when he was on vacation and the drinking, sleeping, working patterns dissolved—I called an ambulance. They found more than 120 empty beer cans in his kitchen and a man who did not know who the current President of the United States was. It cost $14,000 in IV fluids to sober him up in the hospital, just in time to discover he was about to die of an abdominal aneurysm. He had masked the pain with beer.

As they loaded him into the ambulance that day, he yelled, “I’ll get you for this,” to me. I had brought strangers into his apartment and revealed his secret drinking. Never mind that I had saved his life. His work place found out, although I suspect they knew.

He was put into rehab and counseling after that, and his therapist must have told him he needed to get control of his own life, pay his own bills, do his own shopping, wash his own clothes. I did not hear from him again except through a lawyer who served me with divorce papers, and took my son and me out of his will. The lawyer talked to me like I was dirt.

Despite all this, you’d have a hard time finding anyone to say my husband was a bad guy. People he worked with liked him. He was easy going and quiet. As he often reminded me, he never hit me. He went to work and earned a living, supported his family. He provided us with a house, food, and clothes. Even now I feel like I am the bad one to say anything unkind. I am the traitor.

I thoroughly bought into the disease of alcoholism. If I had been a better wife, if I had been prettier, if I had made more money, or had a better personality, he would have stopped drinking for me. That’s what they want you to think. That he didn’t means I failed. I could not save him.

I know now none of that was true. I know I wasted many years of my own life living in the shadow of his drinking, and I sacrificed my only child to it by not looking for something better for both of us. But even that realization is accepting the blame. It always comes back to me. I am the guilty one.  And he would have drank to that.

             

           

Adam Lambert at The National

My story is on my other blog here.

Can I Get a Do Over?

I thought my husband was a content soul who was satisfied with his life…until I overheard him telling a focus group moderator that he wasn’t.

I asked him about this later. He said he realized now that he had made some serious mistakes when he was younger – not going to college, not getting into a less physical line of work. As his body starts to prematurely wear out, he realizes he could have had an easier time of it and made more money if he had chosen a career that used his still sharp brain more, something like engineering or computer technology.

Now I feel bad about all the times I took shots at him for wasting his intellect. Don't most of us make crucial life-impacting decisions between the ages of 16 and 24, when we are most likely to be swayed by the stupidest of motives?

When my 19-year-old son got a small tattoo on his leg, I cried. This is a mistake, I told him. He didn’t believe me. When he dropped out of college a year later to travel around the United States, I told him this was a mistake. He couldn’t fathom staying in his boring hometown anymore. About 12 years later, he came home, though, and finished college. His legs and arms are covered in tattoos, and for his chosen career, he diplomatically keeps them hidden.

He gets frustrated that his career isn’t as far along as others his age, but I have to remind him he got a late start. While he was roaming free and unencumbered by physical possessions, the whole computer age happened. When he checked back into school, he had to learn the basic skills that kids are almost born knowing now. Things are moving so fast technologically, it's hard to keep up even if you had stayed current.

There’s nothing I can say now to undo decisions my son or husband made when they were in their twenties. When he was in the critical 16-24 years, my husband put a higher priority on getting unshackled from the control of teachers and parents than in continuing his education. Even now, a mental fog about being a rock musician has been the deciding factor on how he spends his weekends and evenings and has crowded out any ideas of picking up his education where he left off. His four or more nights a week devoted to practice or playing has taken away from our marriage, as well. I wonder if a decade or two from now, he’ll look back at that decision and think, gee, what did I miss, and for what?

For several years now, I’ve been saying this is a bad idea. How much more time and money can we afford to invest in playing covers in bar bands? But he still enjoys it. He hasn’t made the connection yet that his second chance to accomplish a career change is being defeated by the time demands of his hobby. By the time he does, it will be too late…again.

By why should anyone listen to me when I didn’t listen to me? At age 15, I had three priorities: a) get a boyfriend or husband, b) leave home, and c) become a newspaper journalist. If I could visit my 15-year-old self, I would plead with her not to put the goals in that order.

Maintaining the boyfriend and/or husband would repeatedly derail the pursuit of my career over the years, and in the end, neither one of the men I made so many sacrifices for turned out to be worth it. Staying closer to family would have made so many things easier. I chose difficult, frustrating, expensive, damaging romantic entanglements in a town where I have no roots or mentors over parents who lived in career hotspot cities who would have let me live at home for free, and subsidized my education and career search indefinitely.

If I had just stayed home! In Richmond, there were very limited opportunities to become a newspaper journalist while my parents lived where there were multiple daily papers, as well as weeklies and specialty publications, and huge tourism industries in need of publicists and marketers. If I had not locked myself into a less than ideal marriage with a person who wouldn't relocate, I could have expanded my job search to Anywhere in the Entire United States. Somewhere, I just know, there would have been a newspaper or PR job to be had when I was in my twenties, and I could have launched my career 20 years sooner and had that much more experience by now.

Once that was in place, there would have been plenty of time for boyfriends or husbands and children, and probably better choices, too.

Looking back at my life, I can’t believe I didn’t choose that…and for what?! A mysterious temporary chemical reaction called love? That passes, you know. There is no one I was in love with back then that I still love or even miss. Love bubbles up anew at each turn in the road. Or maybe it's just because now that I am the same age my parents were when I left them, I can imagine myself getting along with them. Why couldn't I be the person I am now back then? Things sure look different looking back.

The Myth about Death Panels

The New Yorker, Aug. 2, 2010, "Letting Go," by Atul Gawande

Anyone concerned or inflamed about Obama's "death panels" or pulling the plug on grandma needs to read this article. The question is not about giving the medical profession and health insurers the right to pull the plug on grandma. The question is why do you want your grandma to die a long, suffering death, with, as Gawande writes, chemo in her veins, tubes in her throat, fresh sutures in her flesh, and swaddled in diapers?

Medicine can only go so far, and we as patients do not let our doctors be honest with us about science's ability to prolong our lives, or what the cost --physical, emotional, and financial -- will be to achieve a little more time -- or more often no actual quality time at all.

Studies have shown that there is no difference in survival time between hospice and hospital patients for the majority of fatal illnesses, and in fact, hospice care extends survival. Plus, you're more likely to be in less pain because hospice care involves comfort levels of drugs, less invasive interference, and all the comforts of being home.

In a program where terminally ill patients could choose hospice care in addition to invasive curative care, 70 percent chose the double coverage, and ultimately also chose to go to the emergency room half as much, and spent two-thirds less time in ICUs. Overall end-of-life invasive care for this group was reduced by 25 percent. Among the elderly in that test group, time spent in ICUs fell by 85 percent. Satisfaction scores from patients and their families skyrocketed. A large part of hospice care is a caregiver making the time to talk to the patients about death, help them plan for their death, discuss what is really important to them as far as comfort levels and quality of life, and explaining it to their families. And in the end, the very sick or very old really want to talk more than have stuff done to them.

The patients receiving this "discussion care" actually suffered less, stayed physically capable longer, and interacted with their loved ones longer, than those in hospitals still desperately hoping for a miracle cure. Family members were less likely to suffer major depressions after the loved one passed, or feel guilty about not having done enough, or putting their loved one through too much medical torture. That's because they had the assurance their loved one had made the decision themselves.

Healthcare reform can fund this added "discussion care," but those against health care reform characterized these covered discussion care sessions as the "death panels" we all heard so much about. The misconception was it was the insurance companies alone sitting on the death panels, not the doctors, the patient, and the patient's family. The funding was ultimately stripped out of the legislation.

Dr. Gawande's article gives an example of an oncologist who spent six hours in sessions with the patient, the patient's family, and then the patient's father who was in denial about his son's brain tumor, just to reconcile the entire group into accepting a plan for the inevitable death of the patient. The oncologist said it would have taken five minutes to sign off on another futile two rounds of chemotherapy she already knew would not help, but that six hour investment of discussion time resulted in a good, final month where the entire family focused on being together and the patient was kept comfortable and functioning in hospice care.

It is truly tragic that political firebrands, in order to advance themselves into positions of power, have inflamed the population against a rational consideration of how best to die. Medical science is keeping us alive longer, but if you're in a comatose state, full of wires and tubes, surrounded by strangers who are poking you with needles all day, sleeping under fluorescent hospital room lights with code-blues going on all night in the hallways -- is that really what you want for grandma, or for yourself?

It's a long article, and some of it is brutal information about what it is like to watch someone die, but it is well worth reading, for your own future death planning, if not for grandma's.

Bus Blues

I've been to Hanover County Board of Supervisors and city of Richmond City Council meetings as an employee or reporter numerous times. I am well familiar with the battles of public hearings, where a few vocal opponents rage a ground war of words to persuade a ruling body that has already made up its mind to change its mind.

Still, the first time I attended an Henrico County Board of Supervisors meeting to rail against a cut in GRTC bus service, I was startled by the finality of the decision, even though from experience I should have known it was inevitable.

Henrico livestreams its meetings over the Internet, which I assume is the reason it doesn't have a time limitation on how long a citizen can speak during public comment periods. Because Richmond televises its meetings live, they are practically forced to gong people off the mic. Even so, there's a cast of regulars who will line up to speak at any and all public hearings. They even know where in the auditorium to sit so the camera is on them most of the time.

So I was surprised to find some people in Henrico had brought typed essays to read like they had all the time in the world. No buzzer, no flashing lights to get the long-winded off? One person read from what was easily three pages of single-spaced text and told a long, rambling story of the lives of the Parham 26 riders and how their existence would be disrupted if there were fewer #26 trips. The reading of his speech so lulled the Board and audience into a stupor that there wasn't even a small twitter of a laugh at any of the carefully crafted jokes he had inserted into his oration.

It's better to speak from the heart without notes and be brief. Everyone pays more attention. And if you ad-lib a joke, it might actually get a laugh.

The bus routes marked for death were clearly underutilized. There were statistics to prove not more than 20 people would be inconvenienced by the discontinuation of those routes, but those were the people at the hearing. Even though they only used the bus occasionally, they wanted to know it was there. Even if they had alternate ways home, they wanted to have this option.

I spoke toward the end, and by that time I was aggravated by the selfishness of people who wanted an express route to the Parham park and ride, and if it stops at Glenside first, then it isn't an express route. It's a circulator, and what's so bad about that? I would rather have all circulator routes in the afternoon because it makes no sense to wait 20 minutes for the Glenside bus and watch three Parhams and a Gaskins go by, each with less than 5 people on them -- sometimes nobody! All these buses are getting on 64 West. Why can't they just pick up and drop off everyone who's going to west end park and rides? That's what the #25 does, twice during the day and once after 6 p.m., which is often my last chance to get out of downtown. But #25 is on the hit list.

It turned out many of the people at the hearing were dependent on #25 not for a daily ride but just to be there for emergencies. The two mid-day runs got people home early if they had appointments or had to pick up the kids after school. The late bus was the salvation of several workers like me who don't like to walk out in the middle of a project at work just because it's 5 p.m.

I thought my proposal was ingenious, to have fewer afternoon buses, but all of them circulators, and after 6 p.m., have the Pemberton route take side trips off Broad to stop at the park and rides. I don't know where the Gaskins lot is, but Parham and Glenside are less than six blocks off Broad. It wouldn't be that much of a deal, and the safety net would be there. The Board made no comment on my suggestions after the hearing, but burned up at least another 30 minutes of time asking GRTC why they couldn't use smaller buses on the underutilized routes as some people had suggested.

GRTC laboriously explained that smaller buses don't produce appreciative savings. The bus driver still makes the same money. The bus still covers the same number of miles, no matter what size it is. The fuel savings is marginal. But still we had to discuss it and discuss it. After the meeting, a man in the audience congratulated me on my proposed solution, so at least I knew I had spoken out loud. Between stage fright and aggravation at some of the ridiculous arguments presented, I felt I had made shrill, whistling noises instead of words.

The ridiculous arguments were centered around the needs of the few, and ever since "Star Trek: Wrath of Khan," we have known that the needs of the few have to bow in front of the needs of the many. The buses are there to make money, or at least not lose money, and although there is much to be said about taking care of the poor among us in Henrico, underutilized bus routes costing in excess of $700,000 a year to run -- the county would be ahead to underwrite taxi rides for the few and occasional riders who have no alternatives!

These are trying financial times. We are lucky to have a bus, considering how high gas prices get, especially in the summer, and especially now when most of the gas seems to be pouring into the Gulf of Mexico to kill pelicans. That's why I kept flipping out when speakers tried to blackmail the Board. "If you don't keep these buses running, then I'll just drive to work, adding to the traffic and polluting the air! Take that!" Oh, please. The reality is you will do no such thing because gas is expensive, a daily commute raises your auto insurance premium, and parking downtown is anywhere from $80 to $120 a month! You can buy a new computer every year for that. You can buy an Apple computer for that!! You will change your schedule to adjust to the new bus schedule, that's what you'll do.

That's why I thought my work-around was the ultimate problem solver and the audience and Board would fall out in gratification and wonderment at having a workable resolution presented to them, but I had not considered that the Henrico Department of Public Works had labored eight months to arrive at their route-cutting proposal, and that was the only proposal before the Board, and it was either thumbs up or thumbs down. No time or room for modification. There is no try, as Yoda says.

Why Men Cheat

Your husband could be one of those dogs who, no matter how good you look, how well things are going in your marriage, how much attention you give him, or how willing you are to meet his sexual fantasies, he will cheat on you. Your problem is you are you, and he wants something new. Doesn't even matter if she's not as good as you; she's different.

It's hard to compete with different. Or it could be the other woman is there, and you are not. It's hard to compete with there when you're not there.

Men are really no more complicated than that. Some may have morals or restraints or inhibitions that make them resistant to women who are a) willing, b) different from you by just not being you, and c) there when you are not. Many men do not have inner cops. They may be, for the most part, good husbands and fathers. They just have this impulse and no moral compass to keep them from acting on it.

Then there are the men that we push into the arms of other women who are a) willing, and b) different. They may be even very similar to us, like a younger version who happens to be around, even if we are also around.

How does that happen? We let it. Consciously or unconsciously.

Last night, my husband and I were discussing a friend we had not seen in awhile, and to my surprise, he told me this friend had left his wife. How could he leave his two children, I asked? I grew up in a time when couples stuck it out until the kids were grown or 'til death did them part. My parents did. His parents did. Both marriages were doomed from the get-go, but they put in 25 years before making their escapes through death or divorce. But my husband said he understood how you could leave your little kids behind.

How?

Well, if she's nagging you all the time, if things are never good enough for her, he said.

I was stunned. That's all it takes in his mind to break up a marriage with kids?

Which brings me to the marriage of Elizabeth and John Edwards and the mistress Rielle Hunter. If you were ranking this trio in terms of who is most at fault, you'd probably rank them 1. Rielle 2. John 3. Elizabeth. Or even 1. John 2. Rielle 3. Elizabeth. What bastard would put Elizabeth first? I would.

Elizabeth was once slim and lovely, and with such a family fortune, she could hire a trainer and a plastic surgeon and stay slim and lovely for a long time. But after the awful tragedy of their teenage son dying in an auto accident, she was determined to replace him. It took two tries to get another son and she was 52 by the time she accomplished it, after years of hormone treatments and rumored egg transplants.

You can imagine that in John's eyes, a replacement son probably wasn't that high a priority, especially if it turns his wife into a lab experiment and their sexual relationship into a breeding chore. Maybe he knew no new baby could ever replace the one that was lost, and the best thing to do would be hug each other a lot and move on. After the physical punishment of two pregnancies followed by menopause, Elizabeth ended up looking exhausted and shaped like a sack of potatoes.

Then they go through a second major disappointment of not being elected vice president of the United States, and then she gets cancer. (And you have to wonder if all the hormone treatments late in life to carry two more babies to term had anything to do with that.)

Right in the middle of all this, a dumb blonde waltzes into John's life, her video camera pointed at him all through the campaign, and tells him, and I quote, "You're so hot." That's all it takes. Really. That's all. Men are that easy.

Let's put that dynamic on a scale and weigh it against the cancer-ridden, shapeless, exhausted wife who tried to replace your beloved son with a couple of new babies that you have been too busy to bond with. Which way does the scale tip? "You're so hot" or "You failed to make me First Lady"?

Tiger Woods cheated because he could. He's away from home being fawned over by pancake waitresses. David Letterman's wife is frumpy looking for a woman married to a multi-millionaire. It can't be because she can't afford a pilates class and a great haircut. Meanwhile all these happy, ambitious, young interns are working with her husband, a man whose ego needs massaging because Leno is beating him in the ratings. Hillary Clinton is busy and bitchy. Monica is adoring, brings pizza, and isn't opposed to trying new things like thongs and cigars. Like Chris Rock says in one of his comedy routines, it was Hillary's job to give the president blow jobs. She wasn't doing her job. Angelina is beautiful, has lots of babies, and wants to save the world. Brad is beautiful, wants lots of babies, and wants to save the world. Jennifer wants to make another crappy romantic comedy and doesn't have time to save even one Third World baby. Who's trying and who's not?

It's a cautionary tale, and it crosses my mind whenever I am less than thrilled with my own husband's accomplishments, or I nag, or I take stock of how much weight I've gain since we met. I'm not really trying, am I? You may say I shouldn't have to keep qualifying for the job of wife that I already have…but that's in a perfect world. In the real world, we are married to men.

We Are What We've Been Traumatized By

Not long after finishing Wally Lamb's "She's Come Undone," which is a massive excuse for bad behavior caused by trauma, I started thinking about my own traumas and how much bad behavior I could attribute to them.

Then Sunday night I watched the episode of "Ruby" on the Style network where all the fat ladies went to a six-day intensive training retreat to free themselves of their food addictions. The exercises were nearly identical to the alcohol rehab sessions the drunk mommies on "20/20" had undergone a couple of nights before. First, we find out what events in our childhood traumatized us. Then we get our revenge by slamming an ottoman with a rubber bat. Then we cry. People hug us. We're cured of our addiction.

Most of the traumas included abusive daddies and people we are dependent on dying and leaving us adrift. Childhood sexual abuse didn't come up on TV, but I'm sure it's a big one. It's the centerpiece trauma of Lamb's book.

In the early '90's, I tried to get some psychological help, but since I couldn't afford it and had no health insurance, I had to go to almost equally crazy people affiliated with various charities and religious organizations. We tried hard to unearth a childhood memory of sexual abuse -- there were adequate outward signs -- but I never could find a memory or a culprit. They'd give me crayons and I would draw ducks.

I've been thinking about listing all my traumas here, but it's too hard to do it succinctly without each one becoming a long story to itself. But let's try.

My mother slaughtered my pet ducks. What I took away from that is the person you would think should have been most protective of me was devoid of any empathy for me.

My first dog was run over. That probably happens to a lot of children, but maybe because of the cold way my family handled the situation, I never attached myself to a dog again. To this day, I'm afraid of dogs -- not that they will hurt me, but that I will love them. The dog was buried outside my bedroom window and for the rest of the time we lived in that apartment, I never slept in my own room again. I slept on the floor of my sister's room. You would think that would give my parents a clue.

My first divorce. It was actually a relief that the relationship could now be declared over with a reason my family would accept -- infidelity -- and it's not like it came as a surprise. I had sacrificed everything that did mean something to me -- my future -- for a relationship that actually didn't mean much to me, ended up losing both, and having no idea why I didn't have the strength to get out of it before the damage was done. Being a single mother at 22 with no family support in town is a tough way to start a career in a demanding profession, especially prior to women's lib.

My second divorce. This time I had no good reason my family could accept, so I was ostracized. I was escaping from 17 years of a co-dependent relationship with an older alcoholic, and finally thought I had found a safe place to land if I jumped, but I was wrong. I quit the husband, the job, and sold the house to pursue a dream which fizzed out spectacularly with a huge helping of betrayal from people I trusted. I was knocked for a loop that lasted for two years. Then the person who picked me up and shook me off also left me, which knocked me for another loop, but out of those ashes, I finally found the strength to create for myself what I most wanted instead of waiting for someone else to give it to me.

Good things happened for awhile, and then I got to the point where I actually had something to lose again and couldn't take the risks anymore. With security comes the death of creativity. With security comes the fear of losing that security. And with fear comes inertia. Hmmmm. So gradually, I am becoming the fat lady, and although I am not quite in need of an intervention yet, I might be in another few years if I start waddling toward ridiculous poundage. What pain am I feeding? Which trauma on my self-image board is to blame here?

What should I be yelling while I slap the ottoman with my rubber bat?

She's Come Undone

There's already literally 2,000 reviews of this 1992 Wally Lamb novel blessed by Oprah on amazon.com so I'm not going to add to the clutter or go into detail, except to say this has got to be the least appealing heroine of a novel since Scarlett O'Hara, and at least that bitch saved her family during a war. Although Delores Price has some trauma in her life -- a stillborn baby brother, parents divorced, her mother going into a mental institute for awhile, her own rape by a tenant -- even so, I never felt like that was an excuse for her to be the nastiest person on earth to everyone she encountered. Cutting herself off from the people around her just made her situation worse.

I kept waiting for her to finally get her comeuppance, as if all that came before wasn't enough, and it wasn't, and yet she still has a somewhat happy ending.

It made me think about my own traumas. There has been spans of time where I let myself use them as an excuse, but no one should because you can get past it.

It also made me think about where the publishing industry is going. Pocket Books has this priced at $7.99, and I can assume they made their money on it when they sold it, but since then, it has been bought and resold on amazon.com several times over. I bought it from someone for $1.99 and I'm reselling it for $1.98, and Pocket gets none of that. The book industry should be embracing the electronic book platform because it eliminates all this aftermarket reselling which takes away from their sales.

Wrong Turn, Great View

Although I was told the Springfield Landfill in Western Henrico was hard to find, my Google Map driving directions couldn't have been more clear, and I went straight to it in the rain this morning, with one small carload of household cast-offs. Much to my surprise, I was asked for $3 to get in. I was used to getting into the great dump in Hanover County for free, so this was annoying. You would think the clerk would notice my tiny car couldn't possibly hold much junk.

I immediately got lost. I saw a holding pen for tires straight ahead, and a road off to the left. A truck had just taken the road, so I followed it. It was a long and circling dirt road that got progressively muddier and I was climbing a grassy mini-mountain. By the time I was making the last loop to where the top flattened off, I could see literally for miles across Henrico County. I was way, way up. What kind of dump was this? It was really muddy up at the top, and there were a couple of bulldozers, and some debris, like a clothes and shoes, but not the amount of garbage I was expecting.

"Where's the dump part?" I asked one of the bulldozer guys. He was startled to see me. "At the bottom, you should have made a right turn when you came in."

I turned my little car around and headed back down the mountain. It was then I noticed that this muddy road I was going down -- well, one side was a sheer cliff and there wasn't much between me and a very long roll down. I had to trust my little Mazda to hang onto the road.

Back at the bottom of the mountain, I saw the ramp that took me to a more traditional dumping place, a place where you just threw your trash into big trailers, and another area where you could put things that others might want. I was sad that it cost $3 to get to this junk display case. Some of my favorite lamps and furniture came from the shed of possibilities at the Hanover dump and it didn't cost me $3 to pick over it.

I had planned to make several dump runs that day, but between the rain and the $3, I gave up after one. I told my husband about my misadventure when he came home, after stopping to hose all the dump mud off my white car. "What if you had slid off the mountain?" he said, shocked that I had made such a colossal wrong turn.

"I thought about that," I said. But I didn't. And that was quite a view. Are there any other really high places you can go and see Henrico?

Craigslist Evil People

I put a camera for sale on Craigslist since there were 13 of them already on Amazon.com, and even at the lowest price, I had no buyers after two weeks. On Craigslist, I immediately got three responses, one from Sam asking for "shutter actuations," which I don't know what that is.

Then another from Mike with a Yahoo email account that has a peculiar, un-Mike like email address, alessandraazh. He wants to know if I still have the camera. Well, yes, I just posted it 5 minutes ago late on a Saturday night.

Then I get an email from "Mario" also asking me if I still have the camera. Mario has a gmail account which is also two names, johnandjacob. I say I do.

Within minutes, I get an email from John Powell, also from the johnandjacob email address.

Hi,
Thanks for the mail...i was introduced to this site by a friend at
work and i will like immediate purchase of this item for my Niece
'Bella' who is away of the state and been requesting for this item...i
will offer you $500 including the shipping charges to her.. there
because she is in need of it as a matter of urgency and due to my work
i don't have time to handle the shipping..i will want you to help me
handle the shipping very well to her..Get back to me with your
confirmed PayPal email address so that i can send the payment..
Get back to me asap...

That's pretty fractured English for someone with the very English name of John Powell. Mario, at the same email address, had a street address in Boyertown, PA on the bottom of his email and a telephone number. John has no location. I do a Google search on the telephone number and I get all hits about Nigerian scams. All the reports are about people trying to buy things on Craigslist giving this phone number. Some reports say the phone is located in Jupiter, Florida, others in Seattle, Washington. Not surprisingly, the middle three digits of 206-666-5748 are demonic.

(Area code 206 covers Seattle, so John and Mario of Boyertown, PA have a very, very long telephone cord.)

Also, I am amused that the niece's name is the same as a currently popular character in vampire novels and the offer is for more than I am asking for the camera, almost twice as much. Who pays more, plus shipping? Where does Bella live that she can't find this camera locally? There's 13 of them on amazon.com right now. Even so, I write back a reminder that the ad said cash only and I meant to sell it locally. If this person wants to pay for it electronically, they need to go to my listing on amazon.com and pay for it through that company.

John writes back immediately and now he is getting bossy.

I have already confirmed shipping cost to her which is not more than
$60 to her via usps..kindly get back with the confirmed paypal email
so i can send the fund..Kindly go to www.paypal.com and set up account
and get back to me with your paypal email so i can send the fund..my
husband have already sent the fund into my paypal account thats why i wanna pay via that..
John has a husband? His husband must be Mario. Who am I to question a gay marriage in Boyertown, PA? You can send money to people through Paypal if all you know is their email address, and John is corresponding with me, so he already knows how to send me money. Something else is going on here. They are either going to also ask for the password and think I will give it to them, or hope I will mail the camera before their payment has cleared because they are using stolen credit card numbers.

It's probably a mistake that I continue to talk to them out of my email address, but I remind them the ad said cash only. It is now 1 a.m. on a Saturday night, but John, who is too busy to send his niece a camera, but not too busy to be writing me in the middle of the night, gives it one more try. Never once have we discussed the condition of the camera.

but i dont mean to hurt human beign like me..is just that am a busy
person that work trice in a day..get back if you can help me out..
If John is working thrice in a day, he must be working inside a Dickens novel. Who works thrice? I have lost interest in helping out Bella.

Meanwhile, I have not heard back from Mike, but since his first email started the same way Mario's did and he also had a double-named, free email address, he was probably a Nigerian operative who went to bed early or found a deal to work that was actually going down. 

A Life Measured in Junk

Saturday I went to my first estate sale because I wanted the cement benches that were pictured on the estate sale website. I want cement benches, but I want them cheap. My husband said if I decided to buy the benches after I got there, to call him and he would come with the van. This is his passive aggressive way of not participating without flat out telling me he doesn't want to go and doesn't want the benches.

It was very likely that when I called, he wouldn't answer the phone under the guise of being asleep. He can conveniently go into a deep, coma-like sleep when he doesn't want to do something.

But first he tried a Jedi mind trick on me. Why buy someone else's used, dirty cement benches? By the time I spent 10 hours cleaning them up, I could have easily bought new ones.

Wait a minute. First, I would never spend 10 hours cleaning anything up. After 30 minutes, anything I'm cleaning is as clean as it's ever going to get. And if I did spend 10 hours cleaning my dirty, used benches, how is that losing money I could have used to buy new ones? Am I taking time away from doing something else that would have paid me money? Was someone going to pay me to clean their benches, but instead I used that time to clean my own? I don't get the math here.

My husband is clearly not an economist.

So, a little bitterly, I set off for the estate sale, was shocked at how many cars were already there, and by the time I found the benches, a woman was taking the tags off them and declaring them hers. I could have had two benches for $50 if I had spent less time arguing with my husband over his bizarro theory of economics.

So it wouldn't be a total loss, I wandered around the place looking at the remaining stuff, and I do mean stuff. What happened to these people that suddenly everything they own has a price tag on it, including the house? Their property was called a "farmette." It had six outbuildings, all in various states of decay. Two of the buildings once served as kennels for multiple dogs. There was an old speed boat in the yard. An equally old tanning bed was in one shed. One shed was full of neon signs advertising beer and barbecue. From these meager clues, I tried to imagine who these people were. And what happened to them?

The house itself didn't seem particularly large and had long ago ceased being modernized for paint and carpeting. The narrow dining room had a humongous and ornate dining room set in it that would look overpowering in a castle dining hall. The 10 huge chairs were fit for royalty. There was a triple china cabinet and not one but two matching sideboards. It was not possible to sit in four of the chairs and if the table was pulled out to the center of the room, it would not have been possible to sit in eight of them. What crazy day was it when the owners brought this dining room set into this house?

But what struck me the most was the number of glasses, glass vases, glass bowls, china sets, knick knacks and figurines in the house. Shelves and tabletops in every room were loaded with them. There were boxes of them out in the sheds. The going price was $1 or 50 cents a piece, and not many were being purchased, because, frankly, who needs more than six glasses, one vase, and one set of dishes ever? And you never need figurines. Nothing good comes of all this junk except eventually having them all in a dusty box at your estate sale, marked down to 25 cents a piece and still not selling.

How much money do we spend on this stuff? I suppose if we all took a vow to never buy another glass or vase or figurine again, it would destroy the knick knack economy and jobs would be lost, but truly, what is the point of household debris?

I try to limit the amount of junk I accumulate. Moving to smaller places has forced purges, but when you get settled in one place too long, even if you never buy this stuff, you get it as gifts. Like these two statuettes I have of life-sized kittens sitting on their hind legs, wearing glued on Santa Claus hats. Someone gave me those. And one day, it sits at an estate sale, languishing. Whatever meaning it had for you is long forgotten. In the year 2040, someone will be at my estate sale, looking at those cats in hats and thinking, what the heck?

Why are you doing this to me, MCV?

My husband suffered a slight injury on the job in the spring of 2008 at VCU and was sent to the campus clinic at MCV to check it out. I didn't even know about it until a year later when the Virginia taxation bureau sent me a letter saying my state refund check was being held because MCV had a claim on it.

I called MCV and found out about the 2008 incident. It was a workman's comp claim, but had been billed to my husband's personal insurance, which never paid it, never told us they hadn't paid it, and MCV never billed us. The lady at MCV's finance office found paperwork on file that everything I had told her was true and assured me she would take care of it.

I assumed all was well because the state released our piddling state refund check to us about a month later.

A year later I get a letter from Guitar Center saying my husband's credit line had been slashed by two-thirds because of "serious delinquencies" on his credit report. I was entitled to a free Equifax report as a result. I requested it online, looked at the delinquencies and there was MCV with a $350 "charge off" from that same workman's comp incident in 2008. "Charge off" is a bad word in the world of credit reports.

I called MCV again. Oh yeah, she says. I see all that. Well, workman's comp never paid it, so that's why it's listed as a charge-off. They requested your husband's medical records and I don't see that they were ever sent.

In other words, MCV never sent MCV the health records, so it's labeled as a "charge off" on my husband's social security number and reported to the credit bureau as a "serious delinquency." Now I have credit cards crashing all around my head. They need any excuse they can find to jack up rates to 33.33% on outstanding balances.

Well, it's not really MCV asking MCV for health records, she says. Workman's comp for VCU employees is handled by Managed Care Innovations, an outside contractor. They asked for his health records.

And MCV didn't send them? I asked.

Hmm, no, she says.

Do I need to call them? I ask. Who do I call? How do I fix this? Because I know you feel like the case is closed because you've charged it off, and Managed Care Innovations doesn't care because without medical records, they don't have to pay, so they feel like the case is closed, but this is destroying my credit. Plus, Equifax is blabbing this all over credit land, and they could care less about what screw-up is behind this charge off, and now Guitar Center feels the case is closed. They've branded us with the scarlet letter of Serious Delinquents, even though I have paid off many years of guitar strings, reverb pedals and road cases without ever being late once.

I'll handle it, she says.

Where have I heard that before?

JC Penneys and the Creepy Guy

Goodbye JC Penney catalog center in Midlothian. Channel 12 is reporting the office will close at the end of March, putting 256 people out of work. Penneys has apparently suffered a 78 percent drop in third-quarter earnings, which seems huge. I tried my best to help. Easily 90 percent of my clothes for the past six years or so came from the catalog. They have a size that fits me perfectly, so it's just easier to shop there. I hate trying things on in store dressing rooms.

But I don't call in to the catalog center. I order online. I am guessing most people do that now so the catalog center can't keep those 256 people busy.

I used to be one of them. Whenever I was in an unemployed situation, I'd apply to call centers for temporary jobs. It was an easy-in, easy-out situation, (although as many times as I applied and even interviewed, I could never get hired by Time-Life on Parham Road.)

In the early '80s, I did get hired for Christmas rush at JC Penneys on Alverser Drive, across from the Chesterfield Towne Center. Christmas rush lasts from September to January. You could not specify a day or night shift. You could not ask for the same days or weekends off. You had to have 24-hour, seven days a week availability, and every week your work schedule was different, depending on projected sales call volume. The number of hours you worked also varied. And you were paid just a little above minimum wage.

You had to punch into a time clock within 5 minutes either way of your shift starting time. If you punched in 6 minutes or more late, you were flagged. If you were flagged late three times in a six-week period, you were on probation, and if you were late again while on probation, you were fired. Panicky women would pull up to the entrance door, double-park with their motor running, run in and punch in, then run back out to park to avoid being flagged.

I forget how long training was, at least a week, maybe more. We tediously went through the manual of how to answer the phone, put callers on mute or hold, take an order, process a return, and upsell a customer if an item wasn't available. The computer would give you alternatives to offer. We learned the jargon of catalog numbers, sizes and color codes.

The computer terminals were tiny boxes with black screens and glowing green Courier looking type. The training only went as fast as the dumbest person in the room, and there was always someone who couldn't follow, who was totally lost. The instructor had to explain things over and over while the rest of the class snoozed. Nevertheless, eventually we were all set loose on the floor to take orders, in long rows of computer terminal semi-cubicles.

You never sat in the same cubicle, so there was no decorating your workspace. The bulletin board by the time clock assigned you a cube number for the day, and there you sat with your headphones on. Your headphones came in a disinfected bag, but you brought your own alcohol to clean your keyboard and phone set each day. Tissues? Check. Lozenges for scratchy throats? Check. Some women brought their own seat cushions. No food or drink in the cubes. At the end of the shift, everything went home with you. Only the full-time year-round employees had lockers.

By the time I made it to January, I was on probation for being late three times, but I managed to find a full-time job just in time to get out before I was fired. Christmas rush was over and I was going to be laid off anyway.

In many ways, I enjoyed the job. You stayed busy. The calls were constant. It was interesting to see the kind of things people were buying. It was interesting to see how some women seemed to have endless money and would order dozen of things regularly. And they'd return dozens of things, too. Some accounts were flagged, so if an item was out of stock, you didn't suggest another one. They were only going to bring it back anyway. For some reason, the early-early morning shift was always full of calls from women in New Jersey, ordering drapes and bedding. It was very curious.

Then there was the Creepy Guy. Creepy Guy usually turned up on the evening shifts. Sometimes Creepy Guy got right to the point and asked what was I wearing. Sometimes he pretended to be ordering women's underwear and would ask for descriptions of bras and panties on certain pages. What do you think of this bra? Would you like this one? How would it feel on you? What are you wearing under your clothes now? What color is it? Is it tight? Is it see-through? Does it have lace on it? He had a thing for lace.

Creepy Guy was relentless. I got a call from him at least once during every evening shift. I could hear from the chatter up and down my row that other call-center women were getting calls from him, too, so he was a nightly serial caller. He kept calling and calling. That's because every so often he would strike gold. Someone would be bored and actually tell him what she was wearing. It only encouraged him. Even I got enticed one evening and told him, and then he got creepier. What did I look like under my underwear? Okay, enough of you, Creepy Guy.

One evening, while Creepy Guy was trying to get me to describe a bra in the catalog, I could hear on his end of the line the sound of children's voices. He was startled -- apparently the arrival home of the wife and children was unexpected. Flustered, he said he had to go. Creepy Guy, I exclaimed, you have children? And you're making these calls? Shame on you, shame on you!

After that, when he called, I asked him about his kids, and he hung up on me.

After the catalog call center shuts down, what will Creepy Guy do?

The Silent Type Revisited

I was contacted recently by a reader who remembers this story from November 2003. I think it appeared only in one place, The Hook in Charlottesville, Va. She wanted to know if I was still married to this man because her strong, silent type was getting ready to retire from the military and she didn't think their marriage would survive now that he was home all the time not talking to her instead of overseas not talking to her. Well, I am still married to this one. Here's a reprint of the story:

The Silent Type

This is not a Hurricane Isabel story, although it starts like one. Two days after the hurricane, my entire county was still without electricity except for one small area, an intersection near the expressway with a fast food restaurant and gas station on each corner. Everyone in the county descended upon it.

McDonald's was under siege, and Burger King was only marginally better, so we went there. The line for the drive-through wrapped around the building twice. My husband directed our car to the end of the line, and I began squawking.

"Why are we getting in the drive-through? The line will be shorter inside. I even see empty tables!"

"I don't like to eat inside."

"Why? It has air conditioning. And lights. Things we don't have at home." That should have settled the argument right there, but he was still in the drive-through line. So I spelled out more reasons for eating in.

1. You get to eat the food while it's still warm.
2. If they make a mistake in the order, you can correct it on the spot.
3. After you eat, your garbage is their garbage.
4. And I can enjoy a meal with chicken without four cats breathing down my neck, purring, "Bird? Bird? Is that hot, dead bird? Give me bird!"

My husband passively listened to all this, then, with great reluctance, began circling for a parking space. I graciously offered him equal time.

"Why do you always want to take it home?"

"I can watch TV at home."

Ordinarily I might have given him a point or two on the Marriage Scoreboard for that, but on this particular day, the television he was so eager to get home to was a very small, black and white, battery-operated one that was picking up a single local channel. We had no electricity, remember.

Then it dawned on me it wasn't about the television at all. He wouldn't be expected to make conversation if we were eating in front of the television.

I suppose there are men who are both good conversationalists and heterosexual, but I've encountered very few in my life. I think they must all get jobs as talk show hosts, the skill is so rare and unique.

The last time I persuaded him to actually enter the Burger King, I spent the entire meal performing my favorite monologue, "My Very Stressful and Horrible Day at Work." He said nothing, no matter how hair-raising and incredible the events of My Very Stressful and Horrible Day at Work became. So I switched to a topic guaranteed to get a response, "My Last Boyfriend Was an Excellent Conversationalist, Unlike You."

"He was a great listener," I concluded.

"I was listening," my husband finally spoke.

"But you weren't responding. You didn't participate. You don't comment on my comments. It wasn't a ping-pong game of thoughts and ideas. It was hitting golf balls off a tee."

"I was listening," my husband said. And that was, if nothing else, an improvement over silence in front of a television, so I grudgingly awarded him a point on the Marriage Scoreboard.

But it got me to really think about that last boyfriend who was the excellent conversationalist because, in reality, he was only an excellent conversationalist on the phone. He called when I got home from work and we talked until 9:30 at night. I thought we were having the most incredible relationship of sharing, only to find out after it ended that the bands start playing in the clubs at 10 p.m., and he was only killing time with me until he could go out and rub elbows with some happening babes.

He was a master of the art of the ping-pong conversation, showing interest in a woman's comments, responding, contributing, encouraging, just to keep the phone call going until it had served his purpose of passing the duller part of the evening. When we did go out, it was always to a movie, which is like television only bigger and louder. You can't have a sparkling conversation during a movie. The people around you would club you with their super-size popcorn boxes.

And to my horror, I remembered that the ideal boyfriend and I never ate in fast food restaurants either. Even though the nearest Wendy's was 20 minutes from his apartment, he always ordered out. I'd finish my meal in the car while it was still hot. (When a relationship is in the fragile beginning stage, you can't really squawk about wanting to eat inside.)

He, however, patiently waited until he got home, unpacked everything, and rearranged it on his own plates before settling down in front of the television (not only creating garbage, but dirty dishes). And there I sat, with no food, since I had eaten it already, and no conversation, since we were now in television-mode. This was hardcore anti-conversation! I had been deceived.

Good conversation is such a precious commodity, sometimes even a man craves it. That would totally explain the mystery of why Wilbur spent all his time in the barn with Mr. Ed when he had a hot babe like Carol in the house. (Did you ever notice the body on Carol?) But Mr. Ed talked.

It's been a long, slow learning process. I'm reporting this discovery to womankind as a warning. If you hear of an impending hurricane, gas up the car, fill up the bathtub, pack a cooler with ice, stock plenty of batteries, and marry a man who talks.