PUTTING UP WITH IT ALL

Being married to someone for a long time can be a test of that time. We get accustomed to hearing the same attitudes and as we get older, our spouses learn the magnitude of the attitude is stronger in old age.

Last week we were in our favorite dinner and I ordered my breakfast. My breakfast is filled with requests to accommodate my tastes. For instance: I order pancakes and they come with these stupid little packets of frozen butter, with the idiotic tinfoil covers over the plastic packets. It takes a time to open each one of the packets, liberate the frozen butter and try to spread it over the pancakes. In all these machinations, my pancakes are cold and will be made colder with the addition of syrup. So, I emphasize soft butter on the side and not those stupid packets!

Then there is my order of eggs, scrambled with rye toast and extra-crispy potatoes, either home fries or French fries. This is very important, I hate mushy potatoes, especially as they cool off.

Sometimes the waitress, who is getting too familiar, calling me: "Honey" falls asleep on the job. I say: "home fries, extra crispy!" and she says: "NO PROBLEM HONEY!"  She then forgets. So, I call over "NO PROBLEM!" and tell her to take them back and do them as I asked. She then goes into panic mode and runs back with the fries coming out after I am almost finished with my eggs! "NO PROBLEM!"

After ordering last week's pancake breakfast with instructions about the butter, I said to TLW (The Little Woman) that maybe it would be easier if I just died, making life easier for everyone. She laughed and said: "Here first!" "I've been living with you so long I'm used to it!" Ha-ha.

But my life is indeed filled with my peculiarities, as I am a big pain in the ass, but I decided that I am 72–years old, that gives me the right to start complaining and making others listen to my quirkiness as I have listened in the past.