Last week my wife pulled a little item out the dresser drawer and showed it to me. "What is this?" she asked. I told her I thought it was an underwear puller-upper. It was a little plastic clip attached to a loop of cord, which makes a handle. Overall it was about six inches long. I maintain that it is intended to be clipped to the back of something you pull over your head. Such a garment will inevitably get caught right at your shoulder blades, where you can't reach it. With this little clip attached in the back, the handle will reach down to about the small of your back, where you can grab it and pull your underwear on. (Yes, technically that would make it an Underwear Puller-Downer, but if I had used that as the title of this article the Baptists' Crusade for Decency would have insisted that Mark Beardsley fire me.) My wife's response to my opinion was: "I thought it was something to be connected to the USB port of a computer."
And then there was the time she saw a shark in our pond. We have a quarter-acre pond and as we were driving out one day, she turned and said, "There's something in our pond."
Without looking, I said, "Um-hm."
She wanted a more substantive response than that and continued: "It looks like a shark."
"Yep, that's what it is," I agreed. I stopped the car and turned and looked. The "shark" was a duck. I'm sure these incidents indicate a streak of genius in my wife: her mind knows no limitations. Her imagination is not constrained by the limits of mere reality.
I'm not being critical, you understand. I'm simply expressing my amazement at the surprises marriage has in store. When I was in school I happened to be reading a book in the library entitled The Ten Pleasures of Marriage (published in 1682). A friend looked over my shoulder and said, "I wonder what the other nine are." How little he knew! On the other hand, my wife, reading the manuscript copy of this article, exclaimed at this point: "Are there ten pleasures in marriage?"
Of course there are: there's homemade onion soup on a cold winter's night, homemade bread (at any time of the year), a surreptitious pat on the bottom when your spouse is climbing the stairs behind you, coffee in bed, finding the gas tank filled after your spouse has used the car, chocolate pie with mountains of real whipped cream on top, a surprise bowl of popcorn in the afternoon, hand-made valentines - and hundreds of unanticipated surprises.
And number ten: coming home in the evening and seeing someone standing at the window, watching for you.
Willis Cook is a retired electrical engineer who was born in New Orleans and grew up in the Mississippi Delta. He lives on Varner Road in Franklin County.
