2001-08-12 - 19:56 MDT

THE WONDERING JEW

Obverse - Reverse

Its crazy to sit down to the keyboard with half formed thoughts and ideas swimming in my head like goldfish in a bowl. I have been musing about the old saw that opposites attract. I have always been a night owl - last to bed and hard to rouse, Heather a chirpy day person who can pop up at the crack of dawn and sit on the edge of bed as perky as can be. I always have been an avid reader, Heather always has other things than reading higher on her priority list. She is not a non-reader and spends much time with her Bible, but reading for pleasure is just not her bag.

I think that in the matter of child raising, if we were added together and divided by two, we might average out as ideal parents. I tended to be more strict and she more lenient. Often when the kids were young, a situation would arise that reached equilibrium by her giving in and seeing things through my eyes. Other times it would be me who because of her presentation of logic let me see that my expectations about the kids good behaviour were a bit unreal. We are different in temperament and outlook, but peacefully so. We love each other deeply and have different ways of showing that.

Heather is a shopper who enjoys shopping to the max, I am not sure how much of that is a woman thing and how much of it is a personal thing. I on the other hand find it extremely difficult to go out looking for something for myself. There are reasons that I grew up detesting shopping, logical ones - another time another account. I let my fingers do the walking through the yellow pages, first. Then go directly to that store, pickup and pay for the item and go home.

We are not synchronized enough to work together in our kitchen, which is not real narrow but requires a bit of dodging around each other. I have seen three of the women working in our kitchen, efficiently, harmoniously and no skittering around, a smooth three moving part machine. But with Heather and I it is like Bumper Cars at an amusement park. Soon one or the other of us retreats and waits their turn.

In my life assembly work and machine shop operations had a great deal to do with my habits. With Heather I think, her work habits grew around raising kids, wherein she had to pay attention to many things at once. Often doing things with her hands by the Braille System while she watched over the young ones. Still to this day, if we are working on a project together I puff up like a po'ed tomcat when she grabs one of the tools or utensils I am using. At the kind of work I did, a personal tool box was my companion and my property. Some of the large tools I could get from the tool crib but my hand tools were mine and through experience it boiled down to the fact that if someone made a grab for one of my tools the likelihood of that person drawing back a bloody stump was possible. Wasn't quite that bad, I would loan out a tool to a person who had a track record for returning one just before quitting time so that I could put it in its proper place. I could reach back without looking, open the proper drawer and pick up the exact tool I wanted to use. My procedures and hers are not on speaking terms.

Of course there are many areas of peace and enjoyment in which we jointly take part. And we have had many, many times of pleasure and joy together and in loving and raising our kids together. But, we are different and probably will stay that way.

We are complementary to each other I think and fit together like knife and fork, soap and water, yadda, yadda. Takes two to Tango and also in giving each other mutual encouragement and support.

I suppose that we are like a coin, two sided - who ever heard of a one sided coin ? She is the pretty head, I the blather on the other side, we make a pretty good Obverse - Reverse . . . . . .

Blog