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…

I need one of these BBC’s…

Well, not really. They’d probably just censor me left and right, and we can’t have that.  It would make for some blog posts that look like a government document released under the Freedom of Information Act. 27 conjunctions, 12 verbs, and 1 pronoun spread out across 53 pages and situated in between long, black marks blocking out everything else in the whole document.

Oh yeah… downright riveting…

No, I think what I need is a bureau full of content to put in my blogs. Yeah… That would be helpful. Provided it has some good stuff in there, not just underwear and socks…And, by bureaus in this case, obviously I am talking about a chest of drawers.

Speaking of bureaus filled with good stuff, sometimes the good stuff is sitting on top of them instead of in them… Or, so it seems.

I suppose it is all a matter of perspective. To adults, the top of a bureau can be a catch all. A place for combs, brushes, your wallet, your watch. Maybe a plant that you forget to water. 58 cents in change. A stick of chewing gum you’ve been carrying around for 2 years. A monkey… wait… not a monkey… Well, you get the idea.

To a married couple it’s a bit different. It becomes a no-man’s land…in my case anyway… And, by no-man’s land I mean there’s no room at all for me to put anything there because it is covered with my wife’s stuff…And, y’all know how EK is. You don’t mess with her stuff or she goes all redhead on you, and well… it ain’t pretty. She is… Pretty, I mean. In fact, she’s downright hot, even when she’s pissed off… but, she can be just plain evil, which is why we call her Satan in high heels… Hence why you don’t mess with her stuff. You following me on that one? Good.

But see, now you’ve gone and gotten me off track again. Shame on you…

Back to that matter of perspective thing. To children, the top of a bureau isn’t as much a no-man’s land, as it is a treasure trove of all things sparkly and out of reach. Probably because they are so short. (that last part is just a guess on my part.) The first part of the statement, however, I know to be fact… How? That’s easy, from experience.

You see, when I was but a wee author type person – 3 1/2 years old in fact – I stood before a four drawer bureau, staring up at the trinket covered summit, and in that moment it became my Mount Everest. My K2. My mountain to conquer.

Literally…

Yeah, I climbed the damn thing. And, to prove how tough I was, I scaled the face of this mountain by free-climbing. No pitons, carabiners, or ropes, and definitely without the benefit of Sherpas or even base camps. I’m telling you, I was a regular action hero…

…right up until the damn thing toppled over on top of me.

The edge of the top put a crease in my forehead, and who knows, I may have actually lost consciousness. Like most folks nearing the half century mark, for me most of those memories are a blur, and the blurs are surrounded by huge gaps of absolutely nothing. The remaining vivid recollections I have from that incident are few…in fact, really only two. One is the fact that my father was working the night shift at McDonnell Aircraft Corporation and we only had one car, so my mother and I waited for a cab to take us to the hospital. I remember that because we sat by the open door of our ground floor apartment, watching out the window for it to arrive. The other was the X-Ray technician wheeling me in to “take a picture of my head”…

Hmmm… A chest of drawers fell on my head, then they beamed radiation at it… Maybe that’s why I turned out all “whimsical in the brainpan.”

Anyhow, I was okay. No fracture, no major problems. Just a very minor concussion. Good thing little kids have elastic skulls. I heard stories for most of my life about how my father rushed home from work and fussed over me. I always heard that from my mother, because my father was a man of few words and it wasn’t like him to be overly forthcoming with his emotions. I suspect his reaction might have embarrassed him a bit, or maybe he was simply trying to be an example of a “man” so that I would know how to act when I grew up. (He was a bit old-school… I suppose I am too in many ways, as since his death in 2003, I find myself virtually channeling him on a regular basis…)

Anyhow, back to bureaus – doesn’t matter what kind really. You see, it seems my most popular blogs are the one’s where I tell stories about the ridiculous  – and sometimes humorous – things that happen in my life. So, my guess is this recent clacking of dominos in my head is just my subconscious telling me what should be leaking out of my brainpan, so to speak.

All good… I’m listening.

Now, this is not to say there won’t be other types of things popping up here. I’m sure there will. In fact, there are a few of us author types right in the middle of planning a “blog tour” whereby we guest post on one another’s blogs. They’ll probably kick me out of the tour after a couple of my posts… won’t THEIR readers be surprised, eh?

But, the long and short of it is this: The stories of silliness in my life will continue. Just like Dave Barry, the late Erma Bombeck, and a whole host of other writers… Who knows? Maybe someday I will get a column somewhere too… It’ll probably on the back of an envelope, written in pencil,  and discarded in the recycle bin, but hey… A column is a column.

Won’t my journalism teachers be so proud.

More to come…

Murv