Tales from Exit 22 by Al Batt

 

I’d just married my first wife.

The Queen B has been my only wife. I’ve been her only husband. I’d never undervalue any of my wife’s choices. I’m one of them.

The marriage was a promotion for me, a demotion for her. We moved into an old house. We lived in half of the house and didn’t live in the other half. It seemed spacious as I was accustomed to living in a room with an adjoining towel.

There was nothing other than light switches on the walls. It was a blank canvas and we had a limited palette of paints. Do we repaint and sin no more or go with wallpaper? No matter how comfortable humans are in their own skins, their walls need work. Mother, mother-in-law (and mother and mother-in-law — we each had one of each), sisters, sisters-in-law and friends descended loaded with ideas culled from magazines, masking tape, nails, a level, paint and surplus stuff from their homes. Things suddenly clung to the walls. Plaques carrying inspirational sayings, framed family photos (including a couple of ancient, stern-looking relatives), a reproduction of a painting of a bearded man prayerfully saying grace, coat pegs, a bodacious bookshelf and a portrait of a bird. Knickknack shelves to display trinkets, curios and doodads; and a clock (not everyone was a walking clock in those antediluvian days) rounded out the hanging herd. Even walls that weren’t load-bearing became load-bearing walls.

We wanted visitors to walk in and exclaim, “I’ve never seen such walls. I’ll pay rent to live on your sofa.”

Or perhaps they’d say nothing, too touched to form words. Either way, the goal was to raise the bar on wall schlock. People are strange. We cover the walls with things we like and then watch things we don’t like on TV.

The walls panned out. I was supportive. What pleased my wife, tickled me. Happy spouse, happy house. I hadn’t helped much for fear of pulling a hamstring.

I had only one item to add to the collection. It was a Hamm’s Beer sign that lit up nicely. I thought it pulled the room together. Bless my heart, I didn’t know any better.

I put it in a prominent place on a wall, hitting my thumb only once with the hammer. Seeing the sign was a beautiful experience — the closest I’d ever get to steering a yacht.

My wife gasped when beholding what her studmuffin had done. She was in awe of that priceless work of art. She said something like, “Uhhhehhhummm.” My wife speaks in code as do most wives. They learn that in wife school.

I came home from a day of school and work to be greeted by my crying bride with some bad news. She told me that someone had broken into our house and stolen something. It wouldn’t have been much of trick to break into our abode. We never locked the door.

She sobbed, “We can’t have anything nice.”

I hugged her and said that whatever was stolen didn’t matter. Things are only things. We still had one another. And we had youth and inexperience going for us.

I was surprised when she told me that the beer sign was the only thing that had been taken.

It was the heinous work of a thief with exquisite tastes.

My wife cried in recognition of our loss because as the noted philosopher, Joni Mitchell, sang, “Don’t it always seem to go, that you don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone.”

Much of life is like that. Take a careless look away and it’s gone, but that sign was my retirement plan. I could be sitting on a nest egg of $29 right now. It’d help because as Yogi Berra said, “A nickel ain’t worth a dime anymore.”

Later on down the marital road, I took my bride to Israel. It wasn’t for our honeymoon. We went to the Badlands for that. Israel was a trip of two lifetimes. One of the places we visited was the Western Wall or Wailing Wall, located in the Old City of Jerusalem. The Wall is the western support wall of the Temple Mount. Multitudes journey there annually to visit and recite prayers, which are either spoken or written down and placed in the cracks of the wall. After I’d written a prayer and pushed it into an excellent crevice, I couldn’t help noticing something.

There was no Hamm’s Beer sign on that wall.

That made me feel better.

Al Batt’s column appears every Wednesday and Saturday.