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