Coming Out Of The Closet, or, Hurricane Megan

I was looking at my life yesterday and was disappointed that I had nothing interesting to post on this blog. So I let Kenneth use the computer to write his family letter. He wouldn't let me see what he was writing and I was quickly becoming suspicious that what he was writing was untrue. Often times My perspective and his perspective of what happened differ greatly and I was preparing to defend myself. I have to say that I really had no perspective while this week was happening and now that I look back Kenneth is absolutely and undeniably accurate. (and I am glad that he stays married to me) So here is what he wrote!

Subject: Coming Out Of The Closet, or Hurricane Megan

Dear family, etc.

How are you all doing? We are fine, thanks.

(editor’s note: this first story is long, so if you just want news, you should skip down a couple pages and read the news).

Well, except for Megan. Somehow I didn’t realize just how desperate she was. In my observation, life has been going very well. We did a lot of Intense Work on our house remodeling project, then we tapered off to Hard Work on the kitchen until that project was finished. Since then, the house has felt rather finished, and I’ve been taking it easy – working sporadically, fixing little things here and there like the leg on my table saw, digging into little projects like the laundry chute, and letting Megan have the run of my shop to do a refinishing project, putting new veneer on a mirror frame for a lady in the ward. Unbeknownst to me, there was a storm brewing, a veritable typhoon, involving the woman I live with, and the room right next to my new bathroom.

I got a glimpse of the turmoil as Megan (the woman I live with) took me to Ikea last week to look at wardrobes, shelves and cubbies to go into my closet (the room right next to my bathroom). Its intensity started to manifest itself the next two nights as we stayed up until 12:30 or later discussing what we wanted/required in the closet. Repressed frustration became evident as our planning turned up the technicalities that had blocked our early tentative attempts at designing the closet interior. As the conversations persisted, I realized that my tolerance for the interior design of the closet was virtually all-encompassing, which was an egregious hinderance to my already diminutive capacity for making decisions. I am moderately okay at making decisions when one path is clearly better than the other, but when the choices are nearly balanced I’m not very good at all. At that point I made the only decision I felt would be wise given the circumstances – I turned over all decision making, with all accompanying accolades, to her (the woman I live with), with a pledge of all my energies and resources.

Still, somehow the urgency of the situation escaped me. In the course of our conversation she revealed that she had been wanting the closet to be finished for quite some time. But it was not until I came home on Monday night to a lighter pocketbook and a van full of heavy boxes from Ikea, followed by a late 15-minutes-left-before-closing-time trip to Home Depot to get closet rods and related hardware, in the pouring rain no less (Megan really hates putting people out by being the last customer in the store, and no one ever goes anywhere in the rain in Arizona, if for no other reason than that it will stop in 30 minutes, so why not just wait), that I really started to understand just how important it is to have a permanent place to hang your clothes.

In retrospect (they say, hindsight is 20/20), there are some things I could have done differently. I suppose it was an eyesore to have a huge pile of coats and tents in the corner, blocking one bookshelf that held my boxes of knick knacks and little treasures from childhood plus acted as a lousy makeshift linen closet dumping the sheets and towels onto the dusty floor with annoying regularity, and another bookshelf holding all of the family sleeping bags. And, the painted particleboard bookshelf in the other corner holding all the textbooks that I never ever read probably inspired great bouts of jealousy, fostering insecurities about whether the woman I live with was truly the most treasured of my possessions. But I’m sure that even those, in all their severity, pale in comparison to the aggravation I could have alleviated by purchasing just one more temporary clothing rack so that first of all Megan could hang all of her clothes, secondly she could add and remove clothes with ease, and lastly and most importantly that she didn’t have to pick it up off of the floor every other week because it had succumbed to the draw of gravity (i.e. taken the easy road, a.k.a. the road of least resistance). But to be completely honest, I may just be making excuses to cover up the true problem – my difficulty as already mentioned in making decisions coupled with my tendencies towards inertness.

Now, at this point nothing should have been able to surprise me. Least of all coming home Tuesday night to find one wall of the closet completely cleaned out, with three completely assembled pieces of furniture screwed to it. I kicked into high gear, and managed to get one closet rod/shelf support screwed to the wall. Thursday when I mounted the other supports, it took Megan a whole 21 seconds to fill it with her clothes, and then generously with a portion of mine. Saturday I was gone in the afternoon for little more than 2 hours, but that was enough for Megan to empty the rest of the closet and start building the last piece of fake furniture.

We worked on it some more on Saturday night, and honestly, I’ve appreciated her vision. The hardest part for me was determining what to do with our beloved laundry chute. It’s just not in a very convenient location: 4 inches from one wall and 9 from the other. It constantly posed a difficulty to my every attempt to come up with a good plan for the closet design. Megan had an idea that she wanted a basket over it, so on our date Friday night we spent some time looking at baskets. No luck. Saturday evening the hunt started again, but this time in earnest.

From the start I could see by the look in Megan’s eyes that tonight, a

basket was going down, and that my only hope was to find one I liked that caught her fancy before one that I didn’t like found her. The hunt was On! Oh, and it had to have a bottom that could be removed without compromising its integrity.

Every religion and culture has its myths, according to Joseph Campbell. These are the stories that define the motives, priorities, and thought patterns of its constituents. The name “myth” makes implication about the veracity of the story; some myths are true, some purport to be true, and some are just stories that illustrate valuable principles. “Bring me a rock” is an Engineering myth of the latter variety illustrating the importance of knowing the requirements before you start working. As the story goes, the manager tells the engineer, “Bring me a rock.” “What kind of rock?” “Oh, Any rock. Just bring me a rock.” Engineer complies, then gets the response, “No, I meant a bigger one.” Engineer complies, then gets the response, “No, bigger than that.” And so on. “Oh, no that’s too big.” “That’s a good size, but I wanted it green.” “Nope, too dark.” “Can you find a heavier one?” And on and on and on.

If I said, “Bring me a basket,” would that explain to you how this myth might apply to 45 minutes of my evening? Only, I didn’t even get that much feedback. “Nope.” “Nope.” “Nope. That’s just not quite what I’m looking for.” Fortunately, statistics and principles of economics were on my side. Given a limited sample space containing a large enough number of samples, eventually one will be able to find the sample that ‘best’ fits the requirements, even though the final solution may not be the ‘best possible’ solution. And, I did indeed get the honor of finding the basket that caught her fancy (actually, to let you in on my secret – I just looked for the ones that were up high where she couldn’t see very well… heh heh heh).

Well, to make a long story short, What? Too Late? The basket entailed tearing up some of my beautiful floorboards around the hole so that I could lay down new ones and effectively reduce the size of the hole to fit the basket. I think it will look really good when she is done, and I did, after all, pledge all my energy and resources to her assistance. So, we are in the process of fixing the flooring around the hole, and modifying the bookshelf that will go above it, plus the basket itself. Unfortunately time ran out last night and the responsibility to attend a meeting at 6:30 this morning compelled us to retire with the fun unfinished.

And, that is about all for the week. Christian and Truman played their Saturday music marathon. They stayed out there all day (from 8 to 4:30) in spite of the fact that it was Truman’s birthday. The draw was the ongoing drawing for prizes, and like their father, they seem to have a difficult time passing up an opportunity to get something for nothing. I didn’t mind – I went early to pick them up, and listened to some of their rehearsing. If you ask the boys though, they will probably not delay to inform you that my true motive was “Breaking Dawn” – the 4th in the Twilight series, and in which I am on page 400 or so. Truman’s birthday was uneventful, but very fun. We had clam chowder and sourdough bread for dinner, and he got a new tennis racket, some legos and a bike. You never way a happier kid, even when we all rode our bikes to church this morning. The chocolate sourdough birthday cake and mint chocolate moosetracks ice cream didn’t hurt his mood at all, either.

Megan and I celebrated the valentines holiday Friday night with dinner and shopping. Megan got our tax return earlier that day, so we both went out (together) to eat at a restaurant that was recommended to us 8 months ago (does that tell you how much desire I have to eat out?), and then to buy some new shoes to celebrate. I got my fill of eating out to last me for another good long while, and in spite of Megan’s willingness to patiently endure my characteristically long indecisiveness as pertaining to shoe shopping (I think it is probably related to the indecisiveness I described earlier), I managed to choose two pairs of shoes at the second store we visited (and the first store that we seriously investigated). Then we walked to a couple more stores, bought some random things, including Valentine’s presents for the boys, then came home and folded laundry and watched a movie. Talk about romantic. Notice I didn’t say that I bought presents for the girls. That is because I got them earlier in the week! Hooray for me! But, to be completely honest, the reason I got them earlier in the week was because Megan was kind enough to go out shopping with me one night (on our bikes) and help me select what to buy for them. All of them. Including herself.

And, that really is about all, this time. We all love you all,

Love,

Kenneth