The Muddled Male

Mr. Right or Just Okay?
By Bob Stevens, The Muddled Male

        You may have noticed my new photo at the head of this column.  That is me with a brand new friend who has become my best buddy.  You may think our friendship developed rather suddenly, and I admit that it did.  But what puzzles me is the way it happened.  I have been toying with doing what some of you have already done, replace my expensive satellite TV service with an outside digital antenna so that I can watch for free the few channels that interest me.  Like you, I am tired of paying for a couple hundred channels just to get access to the four that are worth watching.  So after an exhaustive and methodical engineering study of HDTV outdoor antenna shapes, types, sizes, and specifications I selected one I thought would do the job and ordered it from Amazon. 

        True to Amazon’s word, the box arrived three days later and I set it aside until I had time to hook the antenna up and check it out.  Two days later another box arrived from Amazon that I assumed were additional parts for the Antenna.  When I opened it, instead of Antenna parts I found nestled inside the box my new friend, an M&M dispenser waiting for me with outstretched arms.  I have no idea who ordered him sent to my home, but bless you whoever you are.  I filled my new friend with M&M peanuts and now I am having to stand guard so that I can move him from place to place to keep him away from Ann, my wife, who is trying to abduct him as a way of preventing me from pressing the lever to automatically release M&M peanuts into my trembling hand. 

        Ann has liked to irritate me from the first time we met when I was in the eighth grade and she was in the sixth.  That first meeting occurred in Mr. Terry’s band where I played coronet and Ann played clarinet while sitting behind me kicking my chair.  It wouldn’t have been bad had she at least kicked in time with the beat of the music.  But to make certain that the irritation had the greatest impact possible, she purposely kicked in a random rhythm that had nothing to do with the beat of the music or the tempo of Mr. Terry’s baton.  If I attempted to stop her by turning around and scowling with gritted teeth, she just snickered and kicked my chair harder.  Had I known that she would someday become a gorgeous girl instead of the bratty kid who was going out of her way to bother me, I would have focused more on being my usual compassionate and darling self.  But at that particular moment my goal was to convey my anger by snarling in as threatening a manner as an eighth grader can muster.  Lucky for me she didn’t remember who I was a few years later when I asked her for a date.  And it was several years after we married that I realized that she was the bratty kid and she realized that I was the rude eighth grader sitting in front of her in band. 

        In spite of that ignominious start to our relationship, I have been bragging that the proof that I must be the perfect partner for Ann lies in the fact that she proposed to me when I returned from my stint in the Army rather than waiting for me to propose to her.  My ego was smashed recently, however, when I read about a study done by Michigan State University which concluded that a prehistoric female who passed up an offer by the first, possibly inferior, partner to wait for someone better to come along just might never find the perfect partner and would likely have been better off settling for Mr. Okay rather than waiting for Mr. Right.  Fearing what the answer might be I just had to know, and so the other night I asked Ann, “I’m glad I married you, are you glad that you married me?”  After several minutes of pondering she answered reassuringly, “Oh, I guess you are okay.” 

        I should have known I was in trouble when she wouldn’t stop kicking my chair sixty-six years ago.