THE SHADOW OF HER SMILE

Every organization has a structure from top to bottom. In the Navy you have the Admiral and the guy that swabs the decks. In the army, there is the general who tells the private to dig the foxhole and get in it to sleep. In my house there is the concept of the first female admiral and the swabbing ditch digging sleeper. Guess who is what.

In don’t mind the sleeping, it’s the digging that gets me. The other day I got my orders from on high, as I have been for the past 45 years. It seems we have a situation where years ago we installed a phone service with an answering machine, and it is all there on the kitchen wall, an ugly sight of boxes and wires and a blinking light to give it some charm. TLW (The Little Woman) decided that we needed to get a new system of phones that spoke to us when it rang. Something that said: “The National Association of Homeless Telemarketers is calling” and we would know to run to the phone to answer it. Or if it was saying: “Relatives are calling for money” we would know enough to not answer.

TLW calls it ugly, I call it art

We had this wall phone that would be sacrificed for a table top home based thing with two auxiliary phones set up in our den for easy answering or ignoring as the case may be.

“Joe, I want you to design something that we can cover the ugly boxes.”

Me: “How about a cloth?”

“No, it has to look attractive. Come up with some ideas.”

To ‘help’ me along, she comes home with a “whiteboard” that one can make notes on and we would cover the area where she will be happy and I will be done.

'Home Based'

“This whiteboard needs to be put in a frame of some kind. I went to Michael’s and looked at shadow boxes. They had a chalkboard with gold filigree but that would have to be spray painted white.”

Off I go to see for myself, and as I enter Marshall’s, I notice they don’t look like they sell shadow boxes, so I call TLW.

“What’s the name of the store you want me to go into???”

“MICHAEL’S”

“Oh! OK, see you later.”

Fortunately, the stores are in close proximity to each other.  As a non-shopper un-like TLW, I think it is pretty darn good that at least I remembered the first letter in the store name.

So I enter the store with the proper name and look, listening to ladies discuss macramé projects, the fact that one lady needed a frame for her daughter’s picture who got married in May, completely ignoring the fact that I didn’t give two henweights one way or another.

At this moment I have some ideas, but they need to be practical, and do two things;

1)    Look like it belongs

2)    Make TLW happy

And so like any 71-year old husband worth his overweight, I shall rise to the change, or buy something!

By the way, a henweights about two or three pounds