a hint of light

Every now and then we’ll be out shopping for another 50 pound bag of fertilizer or  attending a lecture on sustainable indifference to the neighbor’s wealth, when Katherine will say something like “Hold my bag for a second.” Yesterday it was “Will you go back to the car and get my polka dot handbag?”

She doesn’t do this out of malice. Katherine is the most malice-free person I know. She does it because she keeps presuming, after years of marriage, that I am a normal person. But, really, your normal woman’s handbag fetcher would never be in danger of passing out from holding his breath along with the bag. Normal people do not suffer from handbag apnea.

Quite simply, carrying Katherine’s handbag bag across the merciless marketplace makes me breathlessly fearful of mean men out of touch with their feminine side. These men walk past me and whatever handbag I’m holding (hopefully one that doesn’t clash with my color scheme). They are trying so hard to mask their mocking smirk that it appears to all but the paranoid that they haven’t noticed me at all. But I notice them and I’m not even paranoid.

Their hands are free of female kaboodle and they stand ready to fly into the sky at a moment’s notice to kick some serious Solomon Grundy butt. Supermanly stuff. And there I am, dizzy from oxygen deprivation, stumbling, dying, pushing on with a ridiculous polka dot handbag while bravely offering it up to the souls in purgatory.

Look, if you are dating someone and she asks you to hold her bag the rules are very clear that you don’t have to if you don’t want to. (Sometimes, though, depending on your immediate hopes and dreams for the evening, it’s better just to do it.)

When you’re married there is no option. You have to do it under the “better or worse” clause. In fact, nowadays some clergy will add a rider to the marriage vows listing specific “worsers,” as they are known on the street. Handbag retrieval is always near the top. The next time you hear about a couple divorcing for irreconcilable differences, read between the lines. Nine times out of ten you’ll be able to follow a trail of polka dots.

©Patrick A. McGuire and A Hint of Light 2013, all rights reserved.

Your annual checkup is two months away. You remember the last checkup. Doc comes in, apologizes for making you wait an hour in your underwear. Through chattering teeth you say no puh-puh-problem. I walk around like this all the tuh-tuh-tuh time at home.

 Doc misses sarcasm. Says everything looks fine EXCEPT your weight. “While you’re not exactly the Michelin Tire man,” he says, “you do have a spare tire.” You find this so funny you forget to laugh.

 Doc delivers stern fat ass lecture (Good doc, bad doc technique). You parry with a blubbering defense of the doughnut lifestyle but doc slams the door with cold stats on heart disease and rigor mortis–caused by daily consumption of gravy over deep-fried lard. The gravy, of course, is liquid fat back and a little brown paint, because presentation is everything.

 This year you’re determined to avoid the lecture so you check out diets. You steer clear of those that have a milkshake at breakfast and lunch followed by “a sensible meal” at dinner. If you’d been eating sensible meals you wouldn’t be in this, um, pickle. You also ignore the diets that say you can eat whatever you want. They don’t tell you “as long as it fits on one of Ken and Barbie’s plates.”

 Some diets say it’s easier to accept smaller portions if your plate is colorful—brown soy burgers, green kale, orange squash, yellow zucchini and some plaid gunk that came overnight from Amazon. They say a colorful plate is a healthy plate. Or, as Katherine puts it “You eat with your eyes.” You, however, have always eaten with your fork and, having missed her point, you suspect there was none.

 Most diets have a munchie defense for those moments when you’re gnawing on your steak sauce covered knuckles or subtly diverting the diet’s attention by talking to it about baseball or real estate while you text in a “Step on it Pepperoni Man” delivery order. Of course the typical diet plan’s munchie defense: drink a large glass of water, or eat a sheet of typing paper.

In the past your doc has offered similar advice. “When you’re hungry, try putting a little peanut butter on a carrot or a piece of celery.” You’ve tried this. The last time, you went through a jar and a half of Jiff and three stalks of celery. You saw a rabbit nibbling a carrot in the garden, ran outside and chased him two blocks, eventually pulling ahead of the neighbor’s  greyhound.

 So for two months you eat your carrot, you sniff your Jiff. You substitute something called Cinnamon Song Lite beer (Less taste, Less taste) for your usual Flab Lake Lager. You buy stuff like “I can’t believe it’s not Pork Fat,” and you can’t believe you’re eating it. The growl inside your gut deepens to the timbre of an angry cave troll.

 But by the day of your appointment you have lost 12 pounds. You still have a ways to go but you feel righteous, brother. And you’re sitting there in your underwear–shivering, yes–but singing Ebb Tuh-tuh-tuh tide when the door opens and in comes the doc.

 You gasp. It’s a different doc. Your doc is sitting on the dock of Montego Bay, wasting time at a doc convention. The new doc, who thinks Ebb Tide is about water, takes a look at your chart. “Well,” he says, “you’re not exactly the Michelin Tire man…”

©Patrick A. McGuire and A Hint of Light 2013, all rights reserved.