Me and the Wife and Fertilizer
The other day I heard my wife muttering away in Dutch, “Dit gat kaput, en dat gat kaput! “ She doesn’t generally revert back to her mother tongue unless there is something particularly exciting, beautiful or most often, disgusting to catch her attention. I hadn’t noticed any of the above.
“What?” I asked from behind my newspaper.
“Oh, that host on morning television was just making a joke about his aging father coming to visit. Something about the old guy creaking and groaning around the house like a rusty old hinge.”
“Oh.” Obviously the morning man had touched a nerve. At least it wasn’t me.
“Well,” she said, ”young people seem to think we’re so old. They don’t believe it will ever happen to them. At that age people still figure they’re invincible. I know that’s how I felt, even in my thirties and forties. Back then I thought that my mother was really old. She was barely in her seventies at the time. And look at me now.” She rubbed arthritic her arm for emphasis, as if the guy on the other side of the TV screen would pay attention and take a lesson from it.
Obviously, the whole business either went right over his head, or he didn’t care one way or the other because he announced that they had to break for commercials and he’d be right back. So much for that, I thought.
Well, I felt duty bound to step in here with some words of wisdom. I don’t know exactly what point I was trying to make when I told the wife that the new pope was eight years older than I was and he was taking on a whole new career. I was probably trying to reassure her that people can be useful at any age. We old timers are likely tougher and have more stamina than any of these young whippersnappers anyway.
“ No, no,” she returned. “That wasn’t what I meant.”
Rats, I’d missed the point again!
“No, I was thinking about life’s ironies,” she continued wistfully. “First, babies are born and they’re so beautiful. Then they grow and grow into adults. Finally they start on the downhill slope and slowly everything starts to wear out until it all falls apart. The last blow as they age, is that they lose their minds and become like infants again. The only difference is that now instead of being tiny and beautiful, they’re just plain ugly. That’s the final insult.”
Ah vanity, only a woman would think of such things.
“Fertilizer,” I said. It was obviously not the most profound choice of replies.
“What in the world,” she gave me that disdainful, long suffering look of someone burdened with having to put up with conversations totally beneath her intelligence, “has fertilizer got to do with anything?”
“The cycle of life,” I explained philosophically. “A tiny seed sprouts out of the ground and grows into the most beautiful flower.” With the way my wife loves flowers, I thought this would be a perfect analogy.
“It blooms and blossoms into glorious color,” I continued eloquently, certain that I was tuned in to her train of thought, “producing and nurturing its seeds until they are ready to be taken by the wind to stand on their own.”
I was really getting into it now. “As a final act of love and kindness for its offspring, the flower sacrifices its own beauty, withers, dies and rots in the ground to fertilize and feed its young.”
For good measure I threw in, “it’s like martyrdom for the good of creation. Thus the cycle continues.”
The blank stare I got hinted that we were perhaps not in the same conversation, or the same planet, for that matter.
Finally the light in my brain went on. “You’re unhappy with your hair color again, aren’t you?” I suggested.
“Oh, shut up,” she explained.
Well at least it wasn’t Dutch.
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