BRAINPAN LEAKAGE

Part 4 of 12

Continued from: Mahwage: Money I Don’t Have…

I am always fascinated by the Hallmark Channel™ movies, and even some of the bizarre shows on network TV, when some man spares no expense to have his marriage proposal scrawled across the blue by a skywriter in a biplane, or flashed up on the scoreboard at a major league baseball game, or plastered across a billboard along I-pick a number… Hell, I am even fascinated by the “froot loops” who “pop the question” in front of 137 1/2 people at a high society party with mom, dad, sister, brother, extended cousins, BFF’s, and old ex-boyfriends who aren’t yet over the breakup even though it happened 4 years ago, all in attendance. (I have no idea where that half-person came from… it’s just one of those things. Maybe it’s one of the ex-boyfriends who was emasculated by the Femme Fatale in question ala Dead Men blah blah Plaid… see previous blog or reference later in this entry.)

Every single time I see this depicted, whether in real life or in a fictional setting, I cringe. I mean, CRINGE. Portions of my anatomy actually retreat to safety just as they would in response to frigid water, if you get my meaning. The hairs on my neck prickle, my stomach churns,  butterflies race up and down my esophagus, and I just can’t even bring myself to look because I am so preemptively embarrassed for the idiot. The first coherent thing that goes through my mind is, “You friggin’ moron! What if she says no? Did you even bother to think this through before you opened your pie hole?”

In my way of thinking, it’s just like what Scout, the nine year old narrator of To Kill A Mockingbird, tells the reader with regard to her father, Addicus Finch’s dictum regarding the cross examination of a witness in court: Never ask a witness a question that you don’t already know how they will answer, because you are liable to get a response you don’t necessarily want. That isn’t a direct quote by any means, but it’s close enough. (BTW, if you’ve never read To Kill A Mockingbird by Harper Lee, I highly recommend that you do so, but, then, I am all about reading so…’nuff said, I suppose… Just be warned that the language is dated, regional, and is virtually guaranteed to be offensive if taken out of the context of the story and its time period…)

But, of course, I am diverging from the topic as I usually do. We were discussing this whole marriage proposal thing… So, anyway, I think I have established that I believe these “public proposers” are a half step the other side of being brain dead. Of course, that’s just my personal opinion, and we know the old adage that can be applied there.

Still, since that is my particular take on the subject, when those first few months together had gone by like a lazy stream beneath a bridge, well, to be honest there were a few rough patches of whitewater, but we managed to stay dry, and I decided to ask E K the “big question”, I was tickled to death with myself that I had elected to do so in our living room with no one in attendance save me, her, and three cats.

Why? Because she said, “No” of course.

You heard me. No music came up. No deep, passionate kiss. No I love you’s , (not that we didn’t pass those back and forth regularly, because we did.) There were no fireworks, no doves flying off into the sky,  no sparklies, no  gasps, no tears, no butterflies. Hell, there wasn’t even a housefly… Of course, it was the middle of Winter, so I guess I wasn’t all that surprised by the lack of houseflies… But, my point here is, she simply said, “No.”

Now, to be fair, I suppose I need to expand on this just a bit. While she said, “no”, it certainly wasn’t an unequivocal, resounding, “you gotta be freakin’ kiddin’ me… No way in hell you dipsh*t!” sort of no. She didn’t hit me, she didn’t run screaming from the room, she didn’t pack a bag and head for the state line. In fact, she didn’t even laugh at me, which was a good thing in my estimation. What she did was give me a “qualified no.”

By “qualified no” I mean it went something like, “No, not right now.”

Well, while it certainly wasn’t the happy-happy joy-joy moment I had been hoping for, at least it wasn’t the whole Dead Men Don’t Wear Plaid line about stiletto stomped roasted chopped man heart on toast… Not at all. In fact, it left the door open just a bit. Granted, it was just a crack, but as far as I was concerned, so long as the door wasn’t slammed and double bolted in my face, there was still a chance.

So, of course, trying to stay on honest, even ground with her, I told her of my intentions… “You know I’m going to ask again, correct?” I said.

“Yes,” was her simple response.

Now, I suppose I could have been a comedian and asked her again right then and there, but I already knew what the answer would be. And, more than that, I didn’t want to annoy her any more than I already was.

“Already was?” you ask…

Of course. We had only been living together for a few months, and dating for a few months before that, even though I had been head over heels  in love with her for better than a year. Truth be told, she was annoying me too. It’s all part of the game, and why I highly recommend… No, not another literary work, although there’s this Sellars guy who writes damn good paranormal thrillers if you are interested… No… What I recommend is living together a while before filing all that legal paperwork that causes courts and lawyers to get involved when it comes to divvying up stuff if things don’t work out.

What I am saying here is that, much to my chagrin, the love of my life had habits that got on my nerves. Nothing crazy and out there on a limb like giving hamsters Mohawks and leaving the hair laying about in the living room or  sleeping upside down in the bed with cottage cheese in her socks. No, nothing like that. Just little things. The normal everyday stuff.  The things a person does one way that another person does a different way… That sort of “thing”. And, I knew damn well I was doing the same to her. When you get two folks under the same roof there is a period of adjustment… It’s all part of life, love, and the pursuit of happiness. But,  as much as we were getting on one another’s nerves, we were also working through it and reaching a middle. Adjusting our patterns and coming to a relationship equilibrium. And, just so you know, that equilibrium is never fully reached… But, you do get closer with each passing year, and things just don’t bother you near as much any longer.

Hence, the reason I didn’t ask again just yet. I waited, bided my time, and about every thirty days when things were going well and happiness was in full bloom, I would “pop the question”. Now, don’t try to read anything into my timing. I wasn’t matching it up to her particular rhythm with the lunar cycle or anything like that. I didn’t base my selection of the day to ask on whether or not I saw a box of feminine hygiene products sitting on the counter in the bathroom… Go on, admit it, that’s what you were thinking, I would have. The reality is I simply figured once a month was frequent enough to keep it in her mind, but not so frequent as to be overly annoying. Just a little annoying.

At any rate, each time I asked I made sure it was in a private setting, and each time I asked I received the same answer – “No, not right now.”

“You know I’ll ask again, right?”

“Yes.”

And on we went… And as we went, I became complacent and jaded about the question. I would ask, but I always knew the answer before I even uttered the words.

Still, as the months rolled on I sucked it up and sallied forth each time. (no, not the comic strip)… As long as the answer contained, “not right now,” I figured I was still in the running, no matter how jaded I had become.

By now, we were looking at buying a house rather than continuing to waste money paying rent. Married or not, we were looking for an investment. Due to my credit situation at the time it was pretty much a matter of her buying a house, but with an eye toward jointly paying the mortgage and the plan of us both living there. We scrimped, saved, and I even borrowed a couple grand from my father, which I promptly repaid – well, promptly as in about two years later, but I added interest to the total, and I honestly believe he was tickled to receive the check. Even though he didn’t “need” it, nor had he even expected repayment, it proved to him that I was as good as my word, and to him, a man’s word was really all he had. But, as I’ve said before, that’s a different blog…

At any rate, we were sitting at work one Saturday… yeah, when you are building a company you tend to work long hours and have very few days off … and since no customers were going to be coming in one of the owners brought along a twelve pack of beer. I was configuring an old R L L (Run Length Limited) hard drive in a system – to put this in perspective, this was a large hard drive for it’s time…it was all of 30 Megabytes. Not Giga… Mega… So anyway, I was running an old debug command: g=c800:5, which is basically a call to a particular segment of ROM ,(read only memory), on the hard drive controller which would initiate a built in program that would allow the drive to be “low level formatted”… That being, setting up sectors before creating a partition and high level formatting to create the file allocation table (FAT) and such… But, you know, I am now digressing into ancient techie talk here so I am sure you are all glazing over…

Back to the story…

The point I’m trying to make is that I was plugging away at this system and E K was standing behind me, much like she did when we worked together at ComputerTrend. A bit close and a bit distracting… I honestly think she took great pleasure in being able to have that effect on me, even though she staunchly claims she never realized I was turning into Silly Putty at her very touch… Anyway, I took a swig of my beer and since no one else was in the tech center with us at the time, nonchalantly asked over my shoulder, “So, you wanna get married?”

I continued about my task on autopilot, (after all, I had formatted drives like this thousands of times before and could do it in my sleep), and was completely secure in my thoughts that I would hear, “No, not right now.”

But, no matter the answer, the calendar said I had to ask anyway. The prescribed number of days had passed and it was time to throw it out there to see who saluted, smoked, or otherwise kicked it around.

Imagine my utter surprise when Kathy leaned against me,  laid a hand on my shoulder, clucked her tongue, let out what might possibly have passed for a giggle, and  then said, “Yeah, okay… Sure… Why not…”

More to come…

Murv

… NEXT: Mahwage: Goin’ To The Chapel…

…Or, Erma Bombeck revisited. Take your pick…

“At Wit’s End” was the title of Ms. Bombeck’s column. Or, at least, one incarnation of it. When I first started reading it in syndication it was simply titled “Erma Bombeck”.

If you are unfamiliar with this woman and her legacy, she was a humorist and writer who, to my great sadness, left us back in 1996. However, I will spare you a recounting of all the details of her career, because you can get them simply by clicking on her name since I linked it to the ErmaMuseum, which is a site celebrating her life and prose.

So, why do I bring up a long dead humorist? Well, primarily because of all those dominos I’ve been going on about as of late. You see, their sharp edges keep generating more and more leaks in my brainpan. In a recent blog, “BBC – Bureau of Blog Content” (Sunday, Jan 18, 2009) Ms. Bombeck’s name came up in relation to my rambling.

Well, as it happens, I was an avid fan of her writing. (I still am, because I haven’t yet read it all). I could easily relate to her dry humor, her take on life, and her general perspective on all that was. In short, her columns, books, and prose spoke to me.

I never had the opportunity to meet the woman, nor did anyone in my family. At least not that I am aware. And, when they were each asked about it, the reply from all was that not a one had ever so much as contacted her, much less met her.

So, why would I ask such an odd question as that? Trust me, there’s a reason I interrogated my family about Ms. Bombeck.

It all started because of another little something in her column that made me a fan. Actually, it was something contained in a particular column, and I first saw it in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch back in 1976.

Yes, 1976. The bicentennial. Fancy quarters. Red, white, and blue. Biggest 4th of July celebration to date. Yes, that 1976…

The thing that stuck out about this column were the names – not ALL of them – but those of the two major players in the story. I will let you see for yourself. There are two jpg’s of the column below. One is in its original state, as I found it when going through my father’s personal effects after his death. The other is brightened, contrasted, and enhanced via my old pal Photoshop, in hopes that it will make it easier to read after all the years it spent tucked away in a wallet.

Original

Enhanced

Notes:

1. In the left hand column, the sentence below the one that ends “…four weeks to” reads: get it fixed. You just can’t get people to…
2. In the right hand column, the sentence below the one that ends “Is the ceiling a…” reads: composition? I’ve always suspected the

(I did the above as notes because I didn’t want to risk trying to flatten out the folds in this extremely brittle piece of paper)

Now, I certainly realize the humor is dry, acerbic, and even a bit morose in some respects. But, it is still funny. On top of that, I am also well aware that the humor is somewhat dated. When I showed it to EK, though she found it amusing, her initial comment was something to the effect of, “You can certainly tell it was from a different era. She’s having a drink before she takes him to the hospital.“

While that little tidbit is certainly part of the humor, it also speaks to an era where DUI’s weren’t feared as they are today (and rightly so)…

I suspect that by now you have all picked up on at least part of what struck me with this particular column. Of course, it is the surname of the two primary characters in this story, that being Sellars. Sellars with an A, not with an E. The lesser common spelling. Sellars just like M. R. Sellars.

Now, some of you may be well aware of my full name – Murvel Russell Sellars, Jr.  When I was a kid everyone called me Rusty. I’ve mentioned that in other blogs. And, my father was known as Russell. Just like, Russell in the column.

But, if that isn’t enough by itself, the real kicker is the “primary” primary character, his wife. Yes, Virginia, believe it or not, my mother’s name was Sonja.

Sonja with a J. Not with a Y, not with an I.

It was spelled with a J, just like the Sonja in the column.

I’m dead serious. I can prove it too, though I’m not going to post copies of birth and death certificates to this blog…

In any event, Sonja and Russell Sellars, my parents, were unwittingly the stars of an Erma Bombeck column.

For the record, my father never fell through the ceiling. I do seem to recall, however, that he put his foot through a rotten spot on the roof when it was being re-shingled.

I guess that was close enough for Erma, even if it was fiction that mirrored a tidbit of truth…

Oh, and BTW, today would have been my mother’s 67th birthday. Sadly, she left us in 1987, well before Erma. Still, I like to think they managed to hook up for a drink over there on the other side, and have a laugh about it all…

More to come…

Murv