Musings Of A Muddled Male

Dimensional Stress

By Bob Stevens, The Muddled Male

       I thought that moving Ann, my wife, down off the mountain and into civilization where someone else mows the lawn and shovels the snow would eliminate all the stress in our marriage.  But I forgot about hanging pictures.  Over our years of marriage Ann has collected an unusually large assortment of pictures, plaques, clocks, mirrors, and oddly-shaped things to be hung as decorations on the walls of any house where we happen to move.  Because each item has a special meaning for Ann, each has to be carefully taken down and nail holes patched and painted in the house we are leaving, then carefully re-hung in the house into which we are moving.  Over our sixty-years together we have moved at least 13 times, for an average of once every 4.61538462 years.  Yes we have lived longer in some places and shorter in others, but even then we just barely patch up the stress in our marriage created by the last move when it is time to move again.

       The stress to which I am referring is created not because of the number of things to hang, (seventy-four plus eight clocks at last count), but because we speak different languages and see things in a different way when it comes to locating things on walls.  Our last move to Sweetwater Hill was easier than most because we purposely designed our new house to be similar in layout to the house we just left, and I spent weeks before the move taking pictures of wall hanging groups and marking the pictures with enough dimensions to let me just walk into our new house, lay out a few dimensions, insert the obligatory nails or screws, and hang things.  In some cases I didn’t even need to be coached.

       When I say that we speak different languages and see things in different ways, it is because Ann is a girl who thinks spatially, and I am an engineer who is trying to translate the random spatial arrangement she has visualized into something that has a fixed reference point on the wall from which I can use a steel scale and an accurate level to measure up, down, left, and/or right in an imagined x-y coordinate system that I visualize on the wall to help me determine the exact location where I need to hammer a nail or twist a screw.  And don’t forget that the place for the nail is not the same as the location of the picture.  One has to first determine the location of the picture and then figure out where the hanger on the back of the picture needs a nail located so as to end up with the picture hanging in the correct location.  It is much more complicated than a wife’s instruction of, “Just hang it about there.”

       If you came to visit us in the middle of one of our picture hanging sessions you would be overwhelmed first by the volume of our verbal communication regarding picture positioning, and second by the number of pieces of blue masking tape sticking all over the wall with each piece having been marked with some secret combination of vertical and horizontal lines, X’s, circles, and dots to guide this poor engineer in his feeble attempt to organize Ann’s spatial commands into x-y coordinates that I can used to find where I should hammer the @#%# nail so that I can locate the picture in the exact place requested by the lady giving instructions.  That is the same lady, by the way, who after I drive the nail says, “No, that isn’t what I meant when I told you to move it just a titch up and a titch to the right.”  A “titch,” by the way, is a word Ann made up to mean any distance from one sixteenth of an inch to two feet depending on what her spatial vision just told her was the adjustment that would be needed to make the grouping just right.

       And yes, it isn’t your imagination.  Now that I have completed the hangings caused by this move, I am just a titch daft.  And the thing that drives me really nuts is that after making all my precision engineering measurements Ann will look at a picture and say, “It’s crooked.”  And when I check with my very expensive, very accurate level I find that she is irritatingly correct.  But now that we aren’t speaking I will begin to calm down … at least a titch.