My Dinner Companion

This week I am in beautiful Banff, a national park in Canada, accompanying my husband to an AHTD conference.  Although one guy told me it means, "Acquired Hyper-tension Disease," AHTD actually stands for "Association for High Tech Distributors." These affairs are old-hat for Jerry but it's a rare pleasure for me to join him.  Yes, I am totally out of my element here.  Meaningful conversation with the attendees will not be happening but I totally can socialize with the other spouses and we are staying in a castle in the mountains.  This luxury is not the normal world I inhabit but I am willing to adapt.

Beautiful Lake Louise
Photo courtesy of
Kathy Golubski

Last evening I found myself at dinner in a noisy restaurant sitting with a table full of strangers.  I was nervous because, as I said, I rarely attend these events and I'm totally clueless about almost any topic which they might discuss.  It's going to be a long, long night, fraught with mine-fields of dangerous opportunities in which I might unintentionally embarrass my significant other.  

The tension mounts.

I choose to forgo the cocktail and I get teased.  I stick to my guns.  I need my wits about me.

There are two other spouses at this table, but I am not sitting beside either one of them.  I am between Jerry and a gorgeous younger woman named Rhonda whom I initially thought was the host's wife.  Of course I didn't keep this assumption to myself.  The very first thing I said to her was, "How long have you and your husband been here?"  to which she chuckled and replied, "He's not my husband; he's my boss."

Oops.  Strike one.

In fairness to me, my husband's chosen career is male dominated so it was an honest mistake.  When you do come across a woman in this field though, you can bet your paycheck that she will be hard-working and as sharp as the blade of a well-honed knife.  Women who succeed in this industry are uber competent and dedicated; there is no express elevator to the top.  Because I know this, I am even more nervous than usual.

The guys were talking about football, or baseball or basketball - some sport.  I have nothing to contribute to this conversation so I'm only half-listening when this gal leans in my direction and says, "Do you like cocaine?"

Panic! 

To say that I was blindsided would be dramatic understatement. My mind froze. Where there was once brains, there are now just icicles.  I could feel the color drain out of my face.  How do I respond to this?  I knew - I just knew - that no matter what I said, it was going to be the wrong answer.

This is beyond awkward. 

After a pause that was far too long, I rose to the occasion.  I may not be in my element, but I have been a mother for almost forty years.  Within this timespan, there have been more than a few uncomfortable conversations.  I prepared for another.

Falling back on hard-won skills that parenthood has taught me, I looked her square in the face and, without flinching, I said, "Do I like cocaine?"

She burst out laughing.

"I'm from Kentucky," she said, "I said, 'Do you like UK?'"

The evening got a lot easier after that.

www.StillSwimmingUpstream.com

T.V. Wars

When we were first married, I got a wild idea that watching television was a horrible waste of time.  (I believe this epiphany occurred during some episode of one of the soap operas I was hooked on.)  That day I unplugged the t.v., took a pair of wire cutters and clipped the cord in half.  It was a symbolic gesture, but the symbolism was lost on my husband who came home shortly thereafter with a larger, nicer television.  "Josh needs it to watch Sesame Street," he said.

Time goes by and eventually, I tried again.  I reasoned that if we had a smaller t.v. maybe we'd watch it less, so I traded the large color set with a friend who gave me a ten-inch black-and-white in return.   We were both thrilled with the exchange.  Jerry wasn't quite so excited about it when he got home that night.

Each time I've done something stupid like this, my husband has seen it as an opportunity to upgrade.  "Pee Wee's Play House doesn't look like as much fun in black-and-white." he said.  And, "You can't tell the Muppets apart without color. You know how much Jessica loves the Muppets."  Soon a new, improved t.v. would appear.

Eventually, we ended up with one of those monster consoles that were popular just before LED screens arrived on the scene.  It was the focal point of our living room.  By that time in our lives, even I rationalized that if our youngest had a good t.v., maybe she'd hang around our house watching it with her friends instead of going who-knows-where and doing who-knows-what.

Wrong!  We never broke down and got cable and so all Kate had to do to get a free pass out of our living room was fall in love with some series on HBO, which she did every season.  On the up side, if we had saved the money we didn't spend on cable, we could have bought our new car cash.  If.

When Kate's giant television went off with her to her first apartment, some friends gave us an old t.v. from their basement. We bought the $40 thingie for it when the government changed the signals, but we never took it out of its box.  By then we were watching mostly DVDs anyway. 

Around this time we also grew to love ("became addicted to" is probably more accurate) playing Tetris on our daughters' old Nintendo 64 which we rescued from the attic.  We played it a lot in the evenings until slowly it dawned upon us that you can't win Tetris.  All you can do is lose more slowly, if that makes sense.  Again, it would seem, I'd stumbled upon a giant time-waster. 

Now we watch movies and the occasional sporting event at our neighbor's house and that seems like enough.  A couple months ago, Jerry was cleaning out the basement and he donated our only television to Goodwill. 

It would appear that after thirty-five years, we are on the same team.  Yet every night when he comes home from work, I'm frightened by what I might find in his back seat.