My Love Is Like A Red, Red Marker

By Author: pangsiyan
Total Articles: 130
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I am, admittedly, a hopeless romantic. Not surprisingly, then, when my husband and

I celebrated our anniversary recently, I bought him one dozen red permanent

markers. There are, after all, the traditional gift for the man who spends many of

his waking hours drawing shapes on the toes of his white tube socks.

Why does he do this? Because, he explains, for every white tube sock there is only

one perfect partner. To preserve these sacred unions, my spouse assigns each pair

its own symbol — a triangle, a square, a stick-figure wife throwing up her arms in

despair.

For a man who on more than one occasion has mended his clothing with a staple gun,

such conscientious sock matching seems strange. Just the same, I admit I find my

husband's little eccentricities endearing and often make note of them in a growing

file labeled "Mounting Evidence".

One recent entry reads: "Today husband is very happy. Seems the supermarket is

having a buy-one /get-one-free rump-roast extravaganza. Spouse believes a freezer

should always contain ...
... enough meat to host an intimate barbecue for all branches of

the U.S. military. "

I could understand hoarding power tools. Or fishing equipment. But discounted cuts

of meat?My husband wasn't deprived of food as a child. He doesn't overbuy

generally. And, to my knowledge, frozen hunks of beef do not increase in value over

time.

His other fixations are no more easily understood. Take this recent notation:

"Today husband is mad at me. In what can only be described as a wild crime spree, I

removed sixty-six cents from his change dish, in order to purchase two postage

stamps. "

To my husband, loose change is not actual, usable money, but some sort of

endangered species he is determined to preserve. Every night he lovingly removes

all coins from his pockets, and then gently places them in the dish. When the dish

is full, he separates the change and stores it in large containers at an

undisclosed location in our garage. As I understand it, the plan is to buy even

larger containers at some point.

The Mounting Evidence file continues to grow with each tender entry. But yesterday,

it closed with this startling observation: "Today husband claimed I'm sexy. Hmmm.

Make sure to carefully match his socks, overstock the freezer and self-fund all

future stamp purchases. "