Carol Archives - Ramblin' with Roger

My wife’s “summer off” – HA!

It’s her birthday!

My wife took the summer off from her job in a local tutoring program. You would not necessarily know it. When we were in Connecticut the last week of June, she received a call from a parent over an issue. This is not a singular event. When we were out at a concert at Albany’s Palace Theatre a couple of months ago, the same thing. We’ve gone out to dinner at restaurants at least twice in 2026, and she has to take a call.

Am I jealous? Nah, it’s important work. Okay, maybe a little bit jealous.

Her primary non-work task is taking care of her mom, which is surely a part-time job in its own right. She’s my MIL’s primary health care and fiscal proxy. All of MIL’s mail now comes to our house; just sorting it can be a task. In the spring, my MIL had to go to the hospital for a couple of days, then to a rehab center for nearly two months. Should MIL move to another facility? (That’s a whole ‘nother conversation.)

My wife also has had some personal financial decisions that got shoved to the last minute.

Define “fun”

Someone asked us what we’re doing for fun this summer. Other than going to the annual family reunion we just got back from, and seeing one concert, I’m not feeling it.

We ought to tackle the storage units we got for MIL’s stuff a couple of years ago. The house needs deep cleaning. These do NOT feel like “fun” tasks.

My wife has about a month remaining on her “vacation.” Maybe something will pop up. The picture of Mark Twain FLIRTING with my wife – or maybe it’s the other way around! – happened because we were going to the celebration of life of the ex-husband of a good friend, so we left for Hartford, CT, a couple of hours early. (I’ll have to write about it.)

Anyway, it’s my wife’s birthday today. I THINK we’ll do something fun today. Last week, she had an appointment every weekday. No, we’ll do SOMETHING; after all, it’s also our lunaversary.

NYT Connections keeps us together

27 years

I’m working on the premise that the New York Times Connections keeps us together. I mean my wife and me.

Here’s Connections’ answers for April 25: —

Body coverings: ENAMEL, HAIR, NAIL, SKIN
Masses, in idioms: CROWD, HAYSTACK, MILLION, OCEAN
Old-timey slang for law enforcement: COPPER, DICK, FLATFOOT, GUMSHOE
Starting with synonyms for “Throw”: CAST IRON, CHUCK E. CHEESE, HURLY-BURLY, PITCHFORK

On this particular puzzle, my wife found most of the first category, and we split the second. I got the third, because I’m old. She saw the fourth.

We see different things, and that works to our advantage. We usually get a reverse rainbow, identifying the hardest one first, mostly avoiding the ruses.

Likewise, when we do the New York Times news quiz each week, I’ll either know or remember the sports stuff. She reads a daily NYT summary and picks up tidbits that my sifting through various sources doesn’t catch, and vice versa.

So I know when she calls my name in the morning after daybreak, she’s asking for the time.

We’re more likely to do schtick together in the a.m. You know, the usual intentional malaprops. “Sam and Janet Evening” (Some Enchanted Evening), e.g., I could ask my wife for more groanworthy examples, usually generated by the situation, but the wordplay wouldn’t make sense to most people anyway.

The Zen of departure

I have finally recontextualized the departure thing. You know: she says either we’re leaving an event now, or a time certain. And then we don’t, almost as a result of her talking to someone. For a time, I saw it was a violation of a contract that SHE had initiated. “We should leave at 12:30,” and then we don’t.

I used to have a conversation with someone, but then she thought we couldn’t depart because of it. No, no – I’m just utilizing the time.

So now, I just sit quietly. If I have something to read (a newspaper, a magazine), I’ll do that. Otherwise, I’ve gotten quite proficient playing backgammon, hearts, and pinochle on the phone. I realize that she NEEDS to have those conversations, even when they’re unplanned, and that they put her own schedule off-kilter.

My wife’s calendar is very full. Her work schedule, ostensibly part-time (HA!), is extremely busy. She has a bunch of stuff involving her mother’s finances she has to deal with; my MIL’s mail now comes to our house. I generally sort out the solicitations, but there is still a slew of bills and other financial items for her to deal with.

Then we’ve been dealing with the Daughter’s art show and upcoming graduation. My wife was the magician who figured out how to pay for those four years of our child’s education.

So, it’s all good. 27 years. Who woulda thunk it?

The picture is of us with our only child. I used it for my blog 18 years ago, so it’s recycled. As NBC-TV ads used to note, “It’s new to you.”

Mother’s Day learning curve

m,y friends’ moms

One of the interesting tensions about having a kid, our kid, was the perception of the two parents. My wife thought she had a pretty good handle on it, whereas I felt I knew nothing.

Okay, that’s a bit hyperbolic. My wife knew there would be some learning curve, but that she’d “get” it. I watched my nieces and babysat a couple of other kids, so I figured that I wouldn’t totally wreck a child – or I hoped not.

The moment I realized we, as a couple, didn’t know something was when we both failed at swaddling. Hospital nurses tried to teach us, but we both sucked as students.

I think my wife was shocked that she couldn’t “get” it. My response was more nuanced; I figured that if I failed at origami, I’d also fail to master swaddling. It’s not that I was HAPPY that my wife and I didn’t catch on to it; that child had powerful lungs. But it did make me less incompetent. Or we were equally incompetent.

But in so many other ways, she was and is a very good mom.

Trudy

Sometimes, I think about my mom. She worked outside of the home, often leaving us in the hands of her superstitious mother. How did she feel about that? Did she wish she could have afforded to stay home like many of my friends’ moms? It is true that I knew some of my friends’ moms more than my friends got to know my mom.

(Interestingly, my dad got to see my classmates, and vice versa, when I was in 3rd to 6th grade because he came to my classroom every semester to sing folk songs.)

I often got the sense that my mom thought she was still “figuring things out.” It could have been a function of growing up with her grandmother, mother, aunt, and at least one uncle, who seemed overly protective, I’ve heard. Since my mom died 15 years ago, I can’t ask her, alas.

My wife was reading my blog

a whoa moment

Much to my surprise, my wife was reading my blog. She mentioned to me in last week of June, she perused the post about our daughter coming back from South Africa, and also the next one.

Then, on Saturday morning, June 28th, I heard music from her office. Usually, if she has any audio entertainment, it’s either talk from NPR or classical music, but this was distinctly not that. No, she was listening to links from my post about the #1 country songs in 1955. This is fascinating because I’ve been writing for two decades, and that hasn’t always been the case.

I remember the days when we would visit my friend Fred Hembeck and his wife and child. Fred and I would talk about things we had in our blogs. My wife is trying to understand what we were talking about.

FGH

In fact, I wrote about it here in 2008: Fred, “our wives and I also had a philosophical conversation about blogging. My wife chastised me for saying that she should look at my blog, rather than me having to explain what I had written. I noted that it isn’t just the information in the blog that I was trying to convey, but the style and manner in which I said it.” Ultimately, I resigned myself to making inadequate bullet points if she asked.

She intellectually knew that I always wrote about her on her birthday and our anniversary, and occasionally on Mother’s Day, though our anniversary and Mother’s Day are very close together.

Now she’s reading the blog, at least sometimes. I’d taken it as a matter of faith that she’s not reading it, so the change is a whoa moment.

Anyway, today is her birthday. She’s taken off work for the summer, though I know at least a few work-related calls. This means that all things she can’t get done during the rest of the year are going on. My wife had to go through that stuff after her mother moved from one retirement facility to another, smaller location.

Things are already better. She’s cleared off the dining room table of the material that had been there since we filed our taxes in April. (Why didn’t I put it away? Because our filing systems are mutually confounding.) She probably has more projects to do than time to do them in the next four weeks, but she’ll use the time well—she likes morning walks—and I’m sure I will be enlisted to work on many of those projects.

Happy birthday, dear. I love you.

Lying about time

inaccurate

As long as I can remember, I’ve been lying about time. When I was growing up, my household, probably my father, decided that the kitchen clock should run 15 minutes ahead. This was an attempt to get us to attend church and other events on time. I think it worked for a short while, but after a bit, we knew we had an extra quarter-hour and would get to events late anyway.

Incidentally, the clock in the kitchen was the only timepiece everyone could see. My parents may have had an alarm clock in their bedroom, but I do not recall a clock in the living room.

I’ve learned to lie to some people about time. If I tell someone I must get to a train station or airport by a specific time, I suggest the train or flight is earlier. I find this to be an acceptable fabrication. Doing otherwise would make me irritated with the driver when I get to my destination with too little time. (I have specific examples.)

Including me

I lie to myself about when I have to leave for a CDTA bus. If I tell myself I must leave by 1 p.m., when I don’t need to leave until 1:05, I can return to the house and retrieve my wallet or find the house key.

When I worked at FantaCo in the 1980s, we had a great artist named Raoul Vezina. However, when he worked on a project, such as a Smilin’ Ed comic, he was such a perfectionist that he was invariably late. So Tom, the owner, would say, “Raoul, the book MUST be done by February 1!” It didn’t need to be completed until February 15, yet he’d still be putting on the finishing touches.

Sometimes, my wife tells me she’ll be home by a specific time. She is not lying, but she isn’t usually accurate. One time recently, I was supposed to start pre-heating the oven and then add the macaroni and cheese she had prepared the day before. I started the process 15 minutes late, just the right timing.

When planning a family trip in early February, the daughter suggested that we all agree to leave by 9:30 a.m., assuring that we would go by 10 a.m. We left the house at 10:08, pretty darn good.

Do YOU lie about time to yourself or others? Do others lie to you about time?