A Mildly Unpleasant Cranky Sunday

A Mildly Unpleasant Cranky Sunday

Here in cranky townhouse land.

Sunday, we had no plans.  Mrs. Cranky was taking an early afternoon nap, I was in my basement cave playing guitar and watching golf on TV.

Life was good.

Then, when I went upstairs for a snack, I heard a strange noise.  It was the vacuum cleaner. 

I chill ran up my spine.

I was usually the vacuumer, but why the sudden fear?

In a previous life when the vacuum cleaner came out if I was doing nothing, (enjoying oneself on my day off was considered “doing nothing” in a previous life) it meant trouble.  The vacuum cleaning was the portent of things to come…bad things.  Oh, there was nothing to stop the bad things, they were boiling and were going to bubble over no matter what. 

There would be yelling and complaining and chores.  Chores that served no major purpose other than to keep me busy.  When the disease hit, relaxing on a day off made her angry.  When the disease hit, I needed to be moving and busy.  There was still yelling and complaining, and it was generally the same.

“How can you sit around doing nothing watching TV?  You are so lazy and worthless; do I have to do everything myself?”

It didn’t matter that I worked 8 hours a day and commuted 3hours every day in packed trains with smelly disease breathing passengers all week, and once my son was in school she cleaned the breakfast dishes and then spent the afternoons with her friends smoking cigarettes and drinking wine.  I was a lazy good for nothing because I watched TV on a Sunday.

I guess I could have told her to shut the F up, but it would not have worked.  I knew that nothing short of domestic violence would have stopped the verbal assaults, so I jumped to and got busy doing something…anything and absorbed the verbal abuse until the disease let up.

On this Sunday when I heard the vacuum I instinctively felt the need to get up and do something.

“What’s up, why are you vacuuming, that’s my job, I’ll do it!”

“I don’t know, I just wanted to try out the new machine.”

“You’re not angry about something?”

“What?  Why would I be angry?  Go back downstairs and enjoy the golf.”

Sometimes I forget, it is a different wife and a different life.

I still had a twinge of guilt, so I did some laundry.