i botched marty's 40th birthday. i forget why but i'm sure any excuse i could recall or fabricate would be poor and baseless. a year later i attempted to redeem myself. for this, i arranged a surprise brunch that included her mother, her three sisters (one from new york and one from chicago), and her closest friends. i took care of all the food and once the guests arrived i packed the kids in the van (and the three kids of one of the friends) and ushered them out to my dad's place in the woods for the day. for all the kudos and praise i received from the girlfriends, the hateful sentiments i received from their spouses balanced any over-inflation that may have happened for my good deeds.

yesterday, i repeated the birthday brunch. i was less careful about protecting the surprise and less lavish with the eats and this year i plotted a better day for the kids and i (oz movie, skating at rollercade, and then dinner out). but even though marty had a notion what was going down and i didn't catch a tear of emotion like last year, i do think she and the ladies had a famous afternoon.

and, a sign of the good karma i earned, there were still some cinnabons left when the kids and i returned home. that's some good and right living there.

happy birthday walt.

MARTY
that stove is going to look bare one day without your kettle on it.

TROY
where's my kettle going?

MARTY
when you die.

TROY
that's a lovely morning thought to get my day off to a booming start.

MARTY
i do what i can.

shortly after marty and i began dating, in one of those early relationship questions, i asked marty if i died how long she thought it would be before she would date someone else. she thought for a few moments before saying, in a fully seriously tone, "i'm sure it would be at least a week."

a week! a week! now i'd be the first to admit the three years i wished she would say might have been a touch ambitious but a week. in seeing my startled response she quickly adjusted, saying, "not a week -- longer than a week" and then as if bracing for a firecracker to pop added probingly, "like a month -- three months". marty is pragmatic even in matters of the heart, even in matters of new love. but without this cut to the bone approach, marty wouldn't be marty.

she did pay for her cruel offense by shouldering six months of jokes about trying to pick up guys at my funeral and if it would be gauche to invite cute fellas who didn't know me to the funeral just so she could get a jump on the replacement relationship.

several years later when our path together looked a bit more certain, in a quiet moment marty said out of the blue, "ok. so maybe i'd need more than a week before taking up with some new guy." nicer words were never said to my young, longing heart.

marty took me by the hand into the bedroom. she was hoping to steal a saturday afternoon moment. presently our bedroom door doesn't have a doorknob on it. now that i think about it, it hasn't had a doorknob for probably over five years. point is the door doesn't latch and anthony and alex were playing in the hallway just on the other side of the door. anthony had a wooden dowel sticking out of his long-sleeve shirt pretending he had a wooden hook for a hand. during our moment we had to listen to anthony list to alex the things someone with a wooden hook for a hand could not do. you can't pick up a toy like this. you can't pick up a shoe like this. you can't itch your eye like this, or at least, you probably shouldn't.

while there was a time in my life i'd think of chores or math problems to ensure i didn't outpace my partner, i never thought of how impressively having a six year old animatedly enumerate the ways life with a dowel for a hand would suck could replace challenging division problems.

after taking over the morning duties when marty returned to work, the kids informed me that mom made them a hot breakfast (e.g. french toast, pancakes) every morning. under raised brows i asked, "really?". the children amended their estimate to once a week. i quickly committed to matching that routine as i didn't want the kids to feel the parental downgrade that was happening in our family version of corporate downsizing and mergers.

i named wednesday hot breakfast day and it soon became known as hot breakfast wednesdays. that is until yesterday morning when, as i tended my bacon, marty dashed through the kitchen to grab a piece of fruit wearing nothing but bikini underwear and a bra. the dashing part was i believe on my account because she knew if she lingered too long the kids might be mourning a platter of burnt bacon.

but she did remain long enough for me to rename our mid-week breakfast from "hot breakfast wednesday" to "bacon and bikini wednesday".

growing up, i didn't think much about my wedding day. i always considered it a day about the bride and i carried this sentiment right to the doorstep of my own ceremony. but once the day set in and all of our family came together, and all of our friends appeared, no matter where they were in the country and everyone had such great smiles, happiness, and high hopes for us, i found myself swept up i ...

to the question of do i have the note mentioned in yesterday's post? of course i have the note. it even includes a greasy spot from the food.



regarding my penmenship, while it's never great, it's really quite un-great at six in the morning when i'm trying to be quick and sneaky.

and in case you want to read the backside too.

a new TROYSCRIPT was posted today. thursday morning

how i spent our fourteenth wedding anniversary:

• went to work.
• came home for lunch picking up cheap chinese on the way. ate with marty while alex (home sick) and anthony (done with school) watched the original scooby doo series on a computer in the next room.
• back to work.
• after work, walked straight to the kids school for a night event.
• participated in pancakes with pops. this was an event organized by one of the dads to get a group of dads to make a breakfast dinner for the entire school and their families. in this i readied sausages to be cooked, cut fruit and handed out pancakes to tittering, smiling kids and their folks.
• came home and read to anfer putting him to sleep (while marty put alex and bella down)
• at 9pm walked up to get dinner (i didn't get a chance to eat) from qDoba (please note, my usual diet isn't this rife with take-out).
• met up with marty around 9:30 where we shared the day's events over a steak nacho.
• after eating and chatting, we each checked/responded to email for a bit and then met in bed for some reading and sleep.

the next morning i woke and moved straight to the shower. hearing the water running, anthony joined me. in our talks i asked him if he had fun at the pancakes by pops night. he said he did. i asked him how i looked in my chefs hat. he said, "you looked fancy, like in the picture where you married with mommy." this could be a smart and valuable bit of insight at my next required black tie event.

in reflecting on anthony's comment through the rest of my shower, i gotta say, i do feel fancy in the life marty and i have constructed thus far. and on ruminating on it a bit more found i couldn't come up with a more poignant way of expressing it than the little naked blonde kid who was huddled beneath me trying to get more of the hot water did.

these were the first words i heard saturday morning: if you're wondering what that is about, it is code talk between marty and i. if you're wondering what the code is, i'll give you a second hint. the code was born when marty approached me one night and asked if i had time in my schedule to fulfill my husbandly duties. and with that, a new lingua franca was born.

and, i'll let your imagination guess where graham crackers might fall on that scale.

we had friends over for brunch. we had finished eating and the adults were sitting around the table talking. the ceiling resonated with the reverberations and excited shouts of the children playing the made up game of the day. dead in the middle of two conversations the male guest suddenly let loose a loud "oooohhhhhh!" and leaned forward in his chair. he excitedly exclaimed, "so you're both that way. i always thought it was all troy. or all marty. or, i don't remember which, but i thought it was all one of you."

i can't recall which or how many of our rituals he assumed was divined entirely by one of us. nor can i recall who he ultimately gave credit to. but something in the conversation at hand, made him realize that both marty and i contributed to the regiments and rituals of our home, many of which outsiders find near maniacal (e.g. monthly menu).

if you think it's obvious or easy, here's a test. look at the below picture and guess if it would be troy or marty who would devise this contraption to efficiently and effectively extract every last drop from our syrup container. i would predict some folks who just sorta know us might have problems figuring out who would take this on. but then again, those who know us really well, should now the answer straight away.

i was awoken by anthony rushing into my room waving his fist above his head. he moved right next to me, either not realizing or not caring that i was asleep just four seconds earlier. undeterred by my addled response, he instructed me to ask a question. the easy manner in which he did this would have told someone watching that we were ten minutes into a conversation and not that one of the participants was just pulled from a deep sleep. compliantly, yet groggily, i asked why he was waking me up and not someone else. to this anthony vigorously shook his hand back and forth a few times as if making a cocktail, and then stared at his palm. after a moment a deep baritone voice said, "the magic meatball doesn't think so." at this declaration, anthony shrieked with delight saying, "ahhhh! he doesn't think so dad! you lose." dropping my forearm over my closed eyes i retorted in a partially involved voice, "you do realize anthony he didn't really answer the question i just asked, right?" like with the sleep, anthony either didn't realize or care that his sage failed him. nor did he seem interested in talking to his real-life father over this mindless plastic bauble which, by my count, paid as much attention to the actual conversation at hand as my overly self-interested college roommate did back in the day.

as this experience, and volley of questions, continued i found myself ranking this waking to my list of worst wake ups ever. bella's cannonball into the small of my back has proven to be a real gamer that no one has ever come close to matching. while finding this moment's spot in the list, marty entered the room and after a pert, already-showered hello said to anthony:

MARTY (with a mischievous glance my way)
ask the magic meatball if dad is going to get busy today?

ANTHONY (excitedly to the toy in his hand)
magic meatball, is dad going to get busy today!?!?

MAGIC MEATBALL (with bravado and confidence)
the magic meatball says YEEESSSS.

ANTHONY (even more excitedly)
aahhh! you're going to get busy today dad!

anthony's rejoicing at my imminent fortune had both marty and i laughing heartily. and i may have been hasty in my judging of the meatball. he seems ok to me. but, before we stamp any thank you notes, i should add that his prediction may not have been as prescient as he led on because at the time of this writing, i'm rather busy-less. and i assure you no one is bluer on that count than me. truly. in fact, i'm miffed enough to consider a rebranding effort for the magic meatball to something a touch more accurate. fortunately for me, he already mostly has the appearance of the moniker i'd been toying with.

UPDATE: so after i posted the above and before midnight, the magic meatball's promise of good fortune came to be. my apologies mr. meatball.

i used to get those daily far side calendars that would sit on your desk. best as i can recall, my mother gave me one every christmas they were ever issued. me being me, i never threw any of the pages away. i'd just pull them, read them and then stack them neatly in some corner of some drawer of my desk. when marty and i got married and moved into our home she came upon a box full of the residual sheets. she asked me what they were. i told her. she asked me why i had them. i told her that too. she asked me if she could throw them out. appalled i took the box from her hands and said no. she asked why we should keep them. thinking for a moment and trying to meet marty's practical side, i said we could use them for scratch paper. marty gave it a fractional thought, shrugged her shoulders, said fine, and told me to put the box over there. that was nine years ago and we're still using them today.

whenever i use one, before marking up the backside, i flip it over, read the comic recycling the good it had, sense the pulse of nostalgia from the moment, and then resume my business. the other day i saw marty snare a sheet off the stack and start scratching a note out without reading it. i stopped her:

TROY
hey, you're supposed to read the comic on the backside before you use it.

MARTY
what?

TROY
the paper you're using. it's an old far side comic. before you use them you're supposed to read the comic ... because it's still funny ... and it gets enjoyed again.

MARTY (pausing long enough to look at me, then at the sheet, then back to me)
yeah, that's not going to happen.

there are multiple flavors of candor, marty employs the extra-lean, time-sensitive kind.

as of today, i am married to a 40 year old woman.

i remember when i was young and i'd hear old guys say they thought their wives were as beautiful as when they first met them. i'd look at their wives and think they must have been some haggard looking eighteen year olds. but now i'm that old guy and can honestly say that marty looks every bit as radiant and winsome as when she threw that door open in 88 and i got my first ever glimpse of the girl i'd go on to spend my life with.

and, i've now known her for more than half her life (which means i've know her more than my life as well).

crazy how that clock on the wall ticks away so. i hope we're all taking care of the business we hope to be taking care of.


click to enlarge

a dog is in our future. the first time i seriously raised the topic marty stopped what she was doing, turned towards me giving me her full arms-folded, hip-on-counter attention. surprised by her intentness, i moved forward a little uncertainly with things like:

i think the kids are getting older and more mature

and

they surely don't seem to go in and out of wanting a dog.

and

it's not about us, it's something we do for the kids.

the first thing marty said was ...

i won't do anything to help.

in reply, i asked her to elaborate on what exactly she meant by "anything". she said ...

when you go on your annual weeklong ski trip and the children forget to feed the dog and it is laid out, dehydrated in front of its water bowl and just needs me to pour a glass, a tiny glass, of water into it ... i won't. and the first thing you'll have to do after walking in the door after your annual weeklong ski trip is carry a dead dog into the backyard to bury it.

to this bit of insight, i said ...

oh. i see.

given that marty didn't appear to be "on the fence" about the matter, the getting a dog initiative kinda stalled, indefinitely. a few days ago marty told me about a girlfriend of hers who asked her husband about the family getting a dog. in response, her husband said:

i'd rather you had an affair than brought a dog home.

in the end, it turns out marty is near cuddly on the matter.

it was sunday morning. the kids were strewn about the house getting their hour of screen time. marty and i were in bed getting our hour of husband and wife time. the serenity was broken by anthony running down the hallway on the other side of our closed door yelling, "i have to go pee!" (as has been chronicled here before). i acknowledged his call with a household version of "roger, copy that." fifteen seconds later marty broke the renewed silence by saying, "you don't hear that get called out in the background of porno movies too often, do ya?"

ten minutes before i was to leave for work it began to rain, torrentially. when i was ready to leave, i stood in the open doorway of my home not wanting to begin the nine minute walk to the office. from the kitchen where she was doing dishes, marty called to me that she and anthony could drive me to work. i waved her off saying i didn't want them to bother. three minutes later with me still in the doorway, marty appeared with anthony in her arms saying, "c'mon anfer, we're going to drive dad to work." she flashed me a smile as she and anthony ran out the front door to the van.

we didn't say much on the way to the office. after getting out of the car and just before swinging the door shut, i thanked her for going to the trouble of driving me. she leaned towards me from the drivers seat, "watching the rain in the doorway the way you were, you looked like a girl with a new haircut and i didn't have the heart to send you out in the rain to mess it up."

this is definitely not the manly image i wish to project to my wife and lover.

and i'm not sure that i got the punctuation right on that previous statement, i reckon grammar dave will appear soon enough to let me know, but the "wife and lover" descriptor above is meant to refer to one person and not two ... and certainly not more than two.

although, back-peddling explanations like that probably aren't going to doing much for my manly street-cred either.

once a year marty and i pick a show to watch together. we start at the beginning or wherever we left off and watch one episode a night until we are all the way through or caught up as much as is available. we watch at my desk, each in an office chair pushed up side by side in front of the laptop.

many of the nights i'll pop some corn. one night i noticed we each had a way of selecting our next piece of popcorn from the bowl. i watched her pick a piece or two and then sedately asked her how she selected her pieces. flatly, she said it was based on size. she then asked me how i picked mine (i guess i wasn't the only one that noticed our technique). i told her based on butter-coverage. then without further commentary, we returned to watching our show. this is marriage. knowing how and why your partner selects the pieces of popcorn they do from a bowl full of corn.

the show we are watching right now is lost. in a recent episode there was a scene where a woman had to leave her child, never to see him again. as the moment concluded i commented that i could never do that, walk away from my child knowing it was possible i'd never see them again. without looking away from the screen and between bites of popcorn marty replied that she could walk away at three in the afternoon. still without looking at me, she added it would be harder at night when they were sleeping and still and cute.

i was only momentarily shocked by this answer because i've heard people comment to marty how cute her kids were and they wish they could take one home. marty would tell them to come by tomorrow afternoon after two and before six because odds were fair that they could take one, two, and possibly all three home. this is another facet of marriage. knowing what time of day your spouse is most likely to give your children away in a fit of exhausted rage.

a new TROYSCRIPT was posted today. pint size pi

several years ago, i went to a bachelor party. like every bachelor party i get invited to it was not conventional. instead of drunkenness, strippers and vomiting it involved arcades, comedians, and storytelling. at the dinner one of the attendees suggested the married men at the table each offer one piece of marital advice to the groom. we conceded this was a good idea and began. i'm sure mine un-...

marty calls slow, sensual marital encounters 'sexy sex'. she calls for this by saying, "i'm not looking for a mad dash here, i want some sexy sex." problem is, in a house with three children eight and under, that is like saying i want everyone to be fed today but i don't want any dirty dishes in the process. it simply doesn't work that way.

but still, the call for sexy sex gets made on oc...

a new TROYSCRIPT was posted today. street credit

something i didn't mention about our neighbors recent departure from the neighborhood is that they offered us first crack at their house. it is a house that is several pay grades out of our reach but they said if we were interested, they would make it happen. interestingly, this is how we landed in our first house which at the time was also significantly out of reach for us. now here we are ten ye...

this last monday morning i was not stirring from sleep. marty sent the boys up to wake me. they jumped on the bed, climbed on me with their bony knees, kissed my head at funny angles while giggling, poked me in my usual tickle spots, and pushed on my head like it just might roll off the bed. they got nowhere. discouraged and bored, they gave up to go play downstairs. twenty minutes later marty had a bout of true concern. she thought i was dead up there. she later confessed that had she found i had expired in the night she would have had to take the kids to school before dealing with me. i studied her countenance after these words and could tell she was being truthful. my face told her i saw this. defensively she said, "come on, please, i mean give me a couple of hours to wrap my arms around this. i just lost my husband and became a single mother all on a monday morning."