Honesty, Thy Name is "Honey Bunch"

Someone once told me that if you want to know who's really in charge at your house, at bedtime tonight, when you get back up to go turn off the light, just before you flip the light switch, turn around really quick and look at the bed.  Whoever is in there - that's who's in charge!

I sang special music at church yesterday.  I was asked to.  I figured it I would do it just once, one of two things would happen.

1. It would kick off my musical career (unlikely).
2. They would never ask me to do that again (probable).

Don't know how it came out yet.  I got a couple of compliments I couldn't immediately identify as either serious or sarcastic, but that's all.  My daughter left church early for some previous engagement and wasn't around to give me the brutally honest opinion to which the women of my household feel I am entitled, but she said she'll watch the video next week and let me know.

I'm all a-quiver with anticipation.

I didn't really tell my Sweet Baboo I was performing. Her critiques of my rehearsals aren't terribly confidence building, so I practiced upstairs in the kitchen or out on the deck where the dog sat through it all, looking puzzled and vaguely dyspeptic.  She waited till I was through and then threw up on the deck.

When I got home from church yesterday, I casually mentioned that I had "done" special music for church that morning.  She asked what I sang.  I told her, "Sweet Hour of Prayer".

"I mostly played the instrumental part on the guitar and didn't sing but 2 verses," I assured her.

She shrugged, made a "Hmmmph" sound and went back to surfing her Facebook page on my laptop. She's recovering from a bout of pneumonia, so I didn't expect much of a reaction. In this I was not disappointed.

This is a totally different reception than the one my kids get when they play a special for church or some other public event.  Sheila will hunt them down and make them perform the piece in its entirety for her. I have to obtain any photos or video that is available for historical archiving.  She always tells them how beautiful their song was and what clever children they are to be able to perform so well.

They are 29 and 36 respectively, but their Mama never misses an opportunity to give them encouragement and emotional support.

I on the other hand am under sentence of brutal honesty in my household. All the females in my family understand this and support the execution of this judgment.  Even the dog, who generally likes me, refuses to lie to me for the sake of my ego. My ego, apparently needs no encouragement.

In many ways women stand in as the voice of almighty God in a man's world. A man may surround himself with sycophants, flatterers and toadies, but let him get himself a wife of any quality whatsoever and he soon finds himself in possession of a veritable mirror showing him his own character, talents and failings without mercy or shading of the truth.

In sea-faring times captains were god-like in their power aboard ship.  He could flog you, hang you or promote you at the slightest whim and no one would question his power to do so. But, sometimes captains put to sea with their wives on board.  Sailors called such ships "hen frigates" in reference to the alteration of the command structure onboard such vessels. It is a testament to the power of women that the mere presence of a wife could so undermine the authority of her captain husband who held what was undoubtedly the most omnipotent of military ranks while the ship was at sea operating independently.  It's why the practice was discontinued in naval vessels.  It's why James Kirk, Jean Luc Picard and Jonathan Archer were single throughout their Star Trek careers.

God gives a man a wife to prepare him for heaven. They are quite good at it. I suppose we should not be resentful.  Besides, if our egos need fluffing, we can always go visit our mothers.

(Our wives believe they spoil us most shamelessly.)

Just one man's opinion,

Tom King

Schrodinger's Lawn

"Wind"
An Acrostic by Tom King


Will I with courage face the closing of the day?
 In wrapping up my life will I be done?
 No, I expect to leave unfinished business here
 Don't grieve for I have fought my war and won.


My wife and I do not have the same set of values where yard work is concerned. I have been called "afraid of manual labor" because of that lawnological difference between us. I know better than to retort. Let her take her shot. She will go inside soon and leave me out here with the fresh cut grass and forever falling leaves.

The problem is, I think, one of basic gender values. Men tend to take the longer view; pursue more distant goals than do our women. We are, after all, the hunters in the hunter-gatherer partnership. In the poem, I express a very male idea. It's not accidental that women don't really get what I'm talking about here, but men do. Men seldom really finish our work. There's always more to do than we can get done in a day or in this lifetime for that matter.That's why we tinker and tweak cars, boats, sound systems, whatever! We plan on making them perfect eventually, but we never quite get there. Next time a guy shows you something he's proud of, see if doesn’t tell you not only how cool and powerful whatever it is, but he'll also tell you what's still wrong with it and what he plans to do to make it better.

Women on the other hand approach tasks as a series of nest buildings. They work very hard to pull everything into a nice nest-like enclosure and kill themselves trying to tie it all up in a bow. It's an exercise in futility though. There is always something undone left outside the bow and the basket. I think it's why so many women are unhappy. It's the way my wife does the lawn.

She'll kill herself to bring the lawn to the peak of perfection, not a leaf anywhere, the lines in the dirt perfectly parallel. Every blade of grass subdued; every flower standing erect. Then she stands on the porch, looks at it with satisfaction for a moment and then goes inside before the next autumn breeze can shower a ton of dead leaves down on her nice tidy lawn. She needs to see that moment of perfect in order to content herself that all is right with the lawn till next Sunday. Next Sunday, she'll start all over trying to subdue mother nature.

Me, I figure the grass is an on-going project. I know I'm not going to beat the leaves. I can be satisfied with the yard looking only generally better. While my Sweet Baboo is inside taking a bath and fixing her hair, I sit out on the porch, play the guitar and watch the wind swirl down the dry leaves and make them dance on the new mown lawn. I am content.

My wife is also content in the house where she doesn't have to watch the depredations of autumn leaves upon her perfect lawn. For her, it's like Schrodinger's cat, the physics exercise where you seal a cat in a box with cyanide and a radioactive trigger. The idea is that if you don’t open the box, the cat isn’t dead in there because you don’t really know till you open it. If Schrodinger wasn't a woman, he was certainly in touch with his feminine side.


So, for my wife, so long as she just doesn't look at the lawn, in her mind it's still perfect. 

Men don't much get that.......

© 2009 by Tom King