Friday, March 4, 2011

Say What?

I once witnessed the following conversation between my son and my nephew a few months before my entire family and their families all went on a Disney Cruise together. At the time, my son had no idea we were going on a cruise, much less an understanding of the word itself.

          Nephew: "When we go on the cruise, we're going to have to get shots."

          Son: "You're going to get shot?"

          "When we go on the cruise, we're going to get shots."

          "You're going to get shot? Will you go in the fire?"

          "No, Leo! The cruise. We have to get shots."

          "Wait...what?"

          "The cruise."

          "What?!?"

I think I've had similar sounding conversations with my husband. In fact, this past summer we had...or rather, I tried to have...discussions...OKAY, they were rants. I'm not proud. 

You see, there's this pan that my husband uses for what he calls his cooking (and which I call scorching the hell out of whatever he's wanting to eat). And I needed him to wash this pan whenever he was done. Instead, I found myself being the one to clean this pan. Every time. And you know how these domestic annoyances build up over time.

Infamous pan that almost ended my marriage.

Anyway, sometimes the other person isn't ready to hear what you have to say. Perhaps he (or she) needs to grow more, expand his (or her) vocabulary, as was my son's case. Or sometimes he (or she) might need you to find a way to cut through all the noise of life to hear what you have to say. In my case, I suspect I was like the Charlie Brown teacher to my husband during our discussions.

What I suspect my husband hears when we talk.

So I found another way to tell him. An old-fashioned way. One that made him laugh. One that made him wash the pan. Praise be to God! And one that became the inspiration for the following poem.

I wrote him a note.

To My Husband
Please wash that pan before I divorce you,
with your burned, blackened, stubborn grease
that I have scraped, scrubbed, soaped and soaked.

Now it's your turn.

Please wash that pan before I divorce you.

4 comments:

  1. The information has to be kept simple & straight forward. I love it. Skip the lovely, flowery, ficitonal prose of a Hallmark card. I know you wanted to put a few expletives in there but I am proud that you didn't. G., it is either - or, you make the choice.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Or in Haiku

    My pan charred, my life
    free from the bonds of marriage
    if you don't clean soon

    ReplyDelete
  3. For 10% of the profits from this blog I will write a haiku (or perhaps a regular poem) for each of your blog posts from here on out.

    ReplyDelete