Tops, Drawers and Doors

My wife, Muri, likes things neat and clean. Older Eyes, not so much, which is why I have a private office with a door that remains mostly closed.  When Muri comes to my office to talk, I can tell, she tries not to look around to the debris of several days work … plus empty soda cans, coffee cups and miscellaneous papers … scattered around on my table and desk.  Sometimes the floor.  I try to do better in the rest of the house, but I admit, it never meets Muri’s goals for me.   When I’m busy … meaning I’m doing something I’m interested in, things with a lower priority slip past my attention.  I think to some degree it’s a guy thing, although I certainly know neatnik guys.  And guys much messier than I am.   Muri tells me, I don’t know anyone who leaves things open as much as you do.  What do I leave open?  Tops, Drawers and Doors, mainly.  When I think about it, she has lived with one man for most of her life, so how would she know anyone else?

OK, I do regularly leave the tops off of jars and bottles … or worse, in the eyes of my lovely wife … resting on the top of the containers with only the slightest twist of a screw top holding them in place.  Result?  The next person that tries to pick up the container by the top, provided it’s not me, ends up with a spill.  Even my son, who I regard as significantly farther down on the messiness scale, complains because several times, an entire jar of Planter’s peanuts has ended up scattered across the floor when all he wanted was a handful.  The way I see it, if you live with someone who leaves tops off, you shouldn’t pick containers by the top, but then I’ve been living with someone like that all my life.

Drawers and doors are another story.   The part of my brain that says Close drawers and doors when you are through getting what you need is either missing or defective.  It is not uncommon for the kitchen to look like a scene from Poltergeist or The Sixth Sense after I make dinner on Thursday and Sunday nights.  And in the evening, when I am watching TV and return from the kitchen with a snack, I am frequently called back by the beep-beep-beep of our refrigerator telling me I forgot to close its door.  A couple of times I was listening to music on my headphones, so I couldn’t hear the refrigerator’s pleas and things in the freezer thawed onto the kitchen floor.  The hardwood kitchen floor.   Not good.  On good days, I find it before Muri does … other times I get a well deserved Oh, Bud lecture.

It is hard to overcome missing or defective genes, or even gender-based differences, especially after 73 years on this planet.  I’m not sure if Muri believes I try to do better but I do.   You’ll have to ask her if I’m having any success at all.

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Tags: feeling older, humor, love and marriage, neatness

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