My husband recently characterized our relationship as a Felix and Oscar, which is just blatantly untrue. Yes, I leave drawers and cabinets ajar, but I don’t set half-eaten sandwiches on the couch and then go off to bed.
What I do do is float in and out of tidiness. Some days I’ll bend down and pick up the dirty socks that “Felix” left on the kitchen floor. Some days I just walk past them.
What I am not is fastidious. I don’t know how you get like that, but it seems way more complicated than just a decision that’s made over morning coffee. I have a friend who launders his shoelaces and has black rubber galoshes for his windshield wipers. (Wiper booties, they’re called.) Some of my tennis pals have relationships with their irons and steamers and vacuum cleaners that I cannot even begin to understand.
My big problem is that I have no secret intermediary area – a household purgatory, if you will -- where things can reside for a while between the time that I’ve decided they’ve outlived their usefulness and the reaching of their ultimate resting place. I pull things out that need to be recycled, or donated, or trashed, or sold and they just sit out in the open because I’m afraid that if they go in the basement or the attic, I’ll forget about them.
But really, does any of that make me an Oscar?
I’d love to think of my husband and me as more like Ricky and Lucy or even George and Gracie. But if not Felix and Oscar then I think I might have to cop to his other favorite characterization of me:
This one is almost too easy to picture. Me with my nose pressed against the window, wiping my hands on a dishtowel and, in my squeaky, nasal voice, shouting, “Ab-ner!
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