Post Christmas Blues
Mansfield University shuts down for 10 days over the holidays. For many years I looked forward to this mini vacation as a time to get a lot of my projects done.
After many frustrating years, I now know that there is no free time leading up to Christmas. Leigh is stressed out with cleaning the house, Christmas shopping, decorating, packing and wrapping, in addition to her business.
So I’m called in to help cook, play with the dogs, and wrap presents, a job I absolutely hate. In my hands, scissors turn crooked and cut the paper in jagged lines. I never cut it the right size. The presents I wrap always look like they’ve been slept on by an overweight insomniac.
Christmas day is a physical and emotional rush. The post-Christmas recuperation time has lengthened into about three days. I kid you not, I was up and around after surgery faster that I felt half alive after Christmas 2007.
One of the presents for Leigh was curtains for our living room which she’s needed for two years. This year I gave her a note saying I’d buy them but she had to pick them out Kim, our daughter was here. Kim had to leave a few days after Christmas.
It worked.
What I hadn’t thought about was the unholy hassle of assembling rods and putting up the hangers. I did one set the first night and found that the holes already in the wall were not right for the new hangers. I took everything apart, moved it over an inch and drilled a new hole.
There was, of course, no stud there. I measured and re-measured, screwed in the new hanger and found my level was no longer working correctly.
“I’ll just have eyeball it,” Leigh said. I hate it when she eyeballs. “Okay, just tap the bottom a litttttle to the left. Nope! No! Too much. Back just a tich. No! That was more than a tich!
“What in the Hell’s name is a ‘tich’?”
“You know what a tich is.”
Obviously I don’t know if I just moved it more than a tich!”
“Don’t make such a big deal of things. Just tap it –a tich.” She did that just to anger me. It worked.
I was now sweating and wanted a drink, something with significant dose of alcohol in it.
“Ah! Ah! Close. Now put it back to the right a tich.”
I found myself angry that the term tich was getting on my nerves. I tapped it. She stood and stared, studying it. Time dragged on.
“Did your body freeze up?” I asked. “Are you breathing? Communicate, please!
“Over just a freckle of a hair,” she finally said.
I curse the carpenter who first came up with this non-existent universal measurement. I curse all carpenters who keep it alive. And, I realized, I was in a general, all-encompassing cursing mode.
I touched the hanger.
“It didn’t move,” she said.
I touched it harder, the old freckle-of-a-hair-touch.”
She nodded. “Perfect.”
When shared projects like this are over, there’s a feeling of cautious relief. Slowly, we speak to each other to make sure neither one was offended too much. She happily began hanging the first curtain. I fixed a drink and went downstairs to watch The Family Guy.