Only in Keswick

By Tony Vanderwarker

Face it, Christmas is a tough time for Martians.

Because if you don’t get your jollies wrapping packages and don’t see the value of slathering yards of decorative ribbon around them, don’t enjoy looking through stacks of Christmas cards with families dressed to the nines and smiling like they’re auditioning for The Brady Bunch and would rather have a root canal than go to the 10 PM service, then you are chalked up as not only a hopeless Martian, but also as a complete grinch.

No matter how many pre-Xmas pacts you’ve negotiated about not overdoing presents, when you only own up to having the allotted three, you get grinched. “Yeah, we had an agreement,” she’ll say, “but I didn’t expect you to hold to it—after all, it’s Christmas!”

So if you’re like me, you rush out at the last minute and peevishly squander a bunch of money on a gift hoping it puts you back in good graces again. I usually end up at Angelo’s pointing at some trinket and praying it doesn’t cost an arm and a leg. When the salesgirl tells me the price, I think to myself, “Good, only a leg!”

Chances are the bauble will get you through Christmas dinner, but later in the day she’s bound to say, “I hope next year you don’t have to buy your way back into favor with some lavish gift.” And if you respond with, “If you don’t like it, you can take it back,” only gets you in deeper. It’s best, I’ve learned, just to cut your losses and sit there eating humble pie. Face it, you’re a hopeless grinch.

And God forbid you try to limit the number of gifts each grandchildren gets by saying, “Jeez, you already got Molly the doll, a bunch of clothes and the camera—don’t you think that’s enough?” What you get in return is, “What do you want to do? Wreck the poor child’s Christmas?”

Plus, you’d better learn to back off when she drags you into the pet store and starts chucking gifts for the dogs into the cart. “Don’t you think Rufus will just love these?” Even if you’re tempted to say something like: “I’m not sure that dogs even know its Christmas.” Such a seemingly innocuous statement can get you into big trouble. I should know, I tried it last year and got, “I can’t believe you’d say such a thing–of course they do!”

But the place where you can really step in it is with the tree. First thing you need to know is that to a Martian, all the trees look pretty much the same but in Venusian reality there is no such thing as a perfect tree. That’s why you have to go through every tree in the damn lot to find the one with the least imperfections. You have to listen to, “Hold this one up for me, will you?” at least twenty times.

And of course its freezing cold out there and you’ve forgotten gloves so the needles prick and itch your wrists. So by the time you get to the twentieth, you’re starting to repeat, “So this one looks pretty good, don’t you think?”

“No, no, no, can’t you see there’s a big hole in the side?” Or, “C’mon, it leans way to the left.” Or, “Are you kidding me? That’s the ugliest tree I’ve ever seen.”

Ten more trees and she’s finally resigned to saying, “Well, I guess unless you want to try the other lot, we’ll have to settle for this one.”

“Oh no, I think this one will look great,” you say as you fork over the eighty bucks for the flawed tree and drag it to the car.

Then the fun starts. I swear Christmas tree stands were invented in medieval times. High tech they aren’t. I don’t know why someone doesn’t invent a remote-controlled gizmo that stands the tree up straight and screws it in automatically. I mean, now you can turn up the heat when you’re in Zanzibar and vacuum your house with a robot, I don’t know why we’re condemned to this Stone Age mechanism.

Here’s the drill. First you have to approximate a 90 degree angle with the tree, then hit the deck and scoot under the branches, hoping the tree doesn’t decide to do a sudden lean on you. Christmas tree stands have these thumbscrews that rust in place over the summer so you have to crawl out and get pliers to loosen them. You painstakingly screw each one in a little bit so you gradually surround the trunk, hopefully holding it in place only to creep out to hear the wife saying, “You call that straight?” So it’s back under the tree until you get it right. One Christmas, I got sent back under four times.

Every Christmas it seems like there are tons more ornaments. And of course there are the lights that don’t work. I swear someone sneaks in over the summer and adds more ornaments and sabotages the strings of lights so that you have to make a trip to Lowe’s and buy more. You stand in line with a bunch of fellow saps all holding items to replace the ones that went on the fritz the past year.

I don’t know when I’m going to learn to toss the lights and buy new ones next Xmas. But jeez, I think to myself, what with the bracelet I bought at Angelo’s, the toys for the grandkids and the dogs—doesn’t someone have to be fiscally responsible around here? Maybe I’ll wait on the lights until next year. That’s when you come to realize the whole cycle is destined to repeat again.

And finally there’s the damn antique star that goes at the tippy-top so you have to risk a hospital trip by getting up on the tallest stepladder you have and, leaning precariously over the top of the tree, insert it onto the tree’s top, praying you don’t slip a step and end up in a full-body cast for the holidays.

And all the time you have to smile and grin like you’re having the time of your life, when you’re actually praying she’ll forget the last box of ornaments and call it a day. No such luck. Every one of the 633 ornaments is going to go on the tree. It’s enough to make you start drinking eggnog early.

So every Christmas I say to myself, Hooray for New Years! It can’t come soon enough.

By Tony Vanderwarker

We had back-to-back AirBnb renters recently and Annie was worried we wouldn’t have time to wash and dry all the towels so I generously volunteered to take the mountain of towels down to the laundromat and put their industrial-sized machines to work for us.

Big mistake.

I hadn’t set foot in one in decades and entering this laundromat was like stepping into an Edward Hopper painting, rows of Eisenhower-era washers and whale-eyed stainless dryers arrayed on the far wall, the whole place drab, colorless and filled with the CLANK, CLANK, CLANKING of clothes tumbling around in the machines. Not only was it an alien experience but I’m feeling definitely Laundromat-impaired—more used to hanging with mowers and weed-whackers than washers and dryers.

My first Man From Mars mistake was forgetting to bring detergent and dryer sheets. I looked around and found this grey box on one wall with coin slides and Tide and Bounce labels under them. I fished out a wad of quarters and tried to fit them into the slots.

But no-go, the quarters wouldn’t slide in. No instructions anywhere, no signs on the box, no illustrations. I looked around to see if there was an attendant I could ask. NOPE.  Just when I was beginning to feel terminally stupid, I realized there were two slots that would accept the quarters, EUREKA!

I inserted two quarters and KACHUNK, a box of Tide came sliding down into a slot at the bottom of the machine. Two more and KACHUNK, same with the Bounce. Only problem was, my hand was too big to fit into the slot. I finally worked them out using my index fingers as prods.

I triumphantly walked back to the washers and started stuffing in towels. Loaded up one machine and started putting quarters in. But how many quarters? Again, no signs, no intructions. Suddenly my eye catches numbers flashing on the machine’s display. $1.75, $1.50—now I get it! Two bucks worth of quarters.

Now for the detergent. It’s in a throwback-looking 1940’s cardboard box the size of a deck of cards. But no tab to pull it open, No printed OPEN HERE instructions. So I have to wrestle the sucker open, working my fingernail under the flap and tearing it apart bit by bit. Finally I get it open and shake the white stuff onto my towels.

I start the machine and head over to the quarter machine to reload. It eats six of my one-dollar bills and spits out quarters in return.

I load up two more machines and feed in quarters. Now I’ve got three machines on my side, each one SHHHUSH, SHHHUSH, SHHUSHING my towels, all three counting down the minutes to done-time.

So far, so good. I go over and check out the dryers. No signs, no instructions, no pictures. A lady is unloading a dryer so I ask her, “Ma’am, how many quarters for how long?’

She looks at me as if I’m from (guess where?), shrugs and says, “I dunno, couple minutes, I just keep feeling the clothes to see if they’re dry and adding another quarter if they’re not.”

Then I get an inspiration, I’ll put a clock on the damn thing! So when my first load is done, I load all the towels into a dryer, rip apart the Bounce box, add a sheet, drop in a quarter, push the START button and activate the stopwatch on my iPhone, thinking, Piece of cake, I’ll beat this damn place yet!

As I load up another dryer, having determined that you get seven-plus minutes dry time per quarter, I’m beginning to feel supremely confident.

That is, until I put my second quarter in and somehow it sticks halfway through and now the START button won’t depress. I slowly turn my head to see if there is some security guard who has noticed that some novice laundromonger has just busted one of their machines but seeing none, quickly load my towels into the next machine, out one quarter but having ducked the repair costs.

Long story short, eight bucks worth of quarters and two hours later, I load my laundry basket piled high with fresh, clean, dry and neatly-folded towels into the trunk of my car and, saying sayonara to the laundro, I head back home, having once-and-for-all totally disproved the theory that Martians can’t do the wash.

 

By Tony Vanderwarker

It’s a Chinese conspiracy of the highest order. I can imagine a bunch of people sitting around a table in Beijing thinking up ridiculous Christmas gifts to peddle to Americans. “How about we take these plastic animals and put a mechanism in the back so they can defecate little balls of candy? Maybe we can fit a sound chip in so it will play a Christmas carol while it’s crapping?”

“Wow! That’s a great idea, Boss. I’ll get the team to work on it right away.”

And sure enough, I find myself Christmas shopping in some store crammed to the rafters with junk.

“Aren’t these cute?” the wife asks, holding up two small plastic animals. “They poop candy,” she giggles.

“Silly, absolutely ridiculous,” I answer.

“C’mon where’s your Christmas spirit?”

“What does pooping candy have to do with Christmas spirit?”

“The kids will love them.” Then she trots out the ultimate put-down: “You’re just no fun, a matter of fact, you’re a real pain to go Christmas shopping with.”

See, the problem is, stuff like little plastic animals that crap candy don’t interest me. Not only are they a waste of money, but they are the kinds of things you find molding in a closet eight months later and quickly pitch as you think to yourself, “I knew we’d end up tossing these out.”

So to get through the holidays, you have to put up with all kinds of stupid trinkets made in China flooding into the house. Plus the endless catalogs she waves in your face saying, “Don’t you think Tina would love these glittery butterflies?”

That’s the way it is for us Martians. Me, I speed shop over the holidays. Hit three or four stores, grabbing this or that like someone’s timing me, pay for them in a flash, and get the hell out.

The rest I do on Amazon. I have a list I throw together, order the items and hit “Place Your Order.”

But the agonizing tromp through stores I avoid like the plague. Of course, I usually get kidnapped into one or two shopping sprees.

One thing I do not understand is why women have to pick up every single thing in the store, fondle it for a couple seconds, then jab it in front of your face and exclaim, “Isn’t this just the cutest?”

Fighting a sneer, you answer, “I don’t see why in the world you would want to buy that?”

“Oh, c’mon, it’s a great stocking stuffer.”

Stocking stuffer—that’s the greatest contribution the Chinese have made to the world since the Great Wall. They invented it so it would worm its way into every Venusian’s brain, giving them a free pass to buy ridiculous items.

For instance, the motion activated Singing Christmas Ornament. She tosses that into the cart saying, “Isn’t this great, it sings Jingle Bells every time someone walks by. Susan will just love putting it on her tree.”

I wince when I pick up the ornament, see it’s made in China, and read the price, “$7.99.” Egads! China wins again.

But she doesn’t stop there, next it’s the Egg-A-Matic, the boiled egg mold that turns your egg into a round little chicken. “Isn’t it just the cutest?” she exults.

Just when I think it’s safe to go back in the water, just when she heads toward the checkout, she announces, “Let’s just hop over to Marshalls. They have great stocking stuffers there.”

Instead of Christmas, I’m convinced the holiday should be called Chinmas.

By Tony Vanderwarker

Detritus is what my favorite Venusian calls “misplaced stuff ”. Using a word with a Latin derivation, she characterizes out-of-place objects as an offense against nature, like bestiality or sadomasochism.

To me, it’s a coffee cup sitting on the counter. To her, it might as well be a dead mouse. “There’s detritus all over this place,” she says with a sweeping gesture. The definition of detritus is “loose material that results directly from disintegration.”

And she picks right up on it, pointing around the bedroom and saying, “It looks like a bomb went off in here. There’s detritus all over the place, look, two pairs of shoes, all kinds of clothes scattered around, a beer can from two nights ago, damn Stickies pasted all over the place, magazines, books—c’mon! Maybe you’re comfortable being a slob, but I can’t live like this.”

So I have to sheepishly trundle around harvesting detritus.

But that’s not the end of it. Because to properly convert a piece of detritus back into an object, it has to go in a special place. Otherwise you get, “That’s not where the spatulas go, that’s for forks. Spatulas go here!” This is where she slams the spatula down in its proper place and the dogs go run and hide.

That’s part of my frustration. How am I supposed to know where everything goes? There must be over a thousand objects chez nous and while my memory is still chugging along, I couldn’t begin to tell you which drawer the meat thermometer goes in or what racks in the wine cooler are for white and which for red.

My buddy Bob gets badly hung up on the dishwasher. He can never remember the proper area for wine glasses and the right one for drinking glasses. Shrugging, Bob says, “Sometimes I load it so badly, Claire comes up and elbows me out of the way, huffing, ‘I’ll just have to unload it myself and start over.”

Detritus can also be found outside, on the car for instance. “I can’t stand the car being so dusty—just look at it!” We have a gravel drive so our cars are dirty all the time. Me, I buy into it, but the Venusian I live with can’t deal with it. “We can’t go to this party with the car looking like that!” Never in my life did it occur to me that our friends would think less of us for having a dusty car. But that makes no difference because I always end up washing it.

See if you don’t agree with me that sometimes Venusians plant detritus just to nail us. I swear I didn’t leave my sweatband sitting out on the dining room table. But sure enough, she finds it, snatches it off the glass and holds it up accusingly.

Just like my drill instructor did at Quantico. After we’d spent three hours scrubbing every square inch of the head, he came in for an inspection. Now we had used toothbrushes to clean around commodes, buckets of water and tons of rags. I mean we had that place completely spic and span.

We’re standing at attention as the D.I. goes in one stall, checks it and goes into another. He disappears into the third and suddenly we hear this loud CRASH as he kicks the door open with his foot and slowly exits, dramatically dangling a banana peel in our faces. Twenty-eight of us had cleaned that place, no way we would have missed a honking big banana peel. He proceeds to scream at us that we’re a bunch of lousy, no-good incompetents who will never make good marines and orders us to clean the latrine again.

The other thought you have to keep in mind is Venusians don’t have detritus. Nope, instead, they have another classification–what they call things. It doesn’t sound fair but if they are things, they can be anyplace and get a free pass. As in, “Those things I left out on the table—they are to go to Ada’s” Or, “All the things on the bed in the guest room are for my trip to D.C.”

But one Martian’s sweatband is a Venusian’s detritus. And with so much stuff in the house, there’s no way to win—unless you spend every waking hour searching out your misplaced possessions.

So just get used to losing the detritus wars. For Martians it’s a lost cause.

By Tony Vanderwarker

“You want me to fill the tub up with water?” Is what I thought she said.

“No, I said I want a rum and tonic,” she corrects me.

That’s a typical conversation between an aging Venusian and an older Martian. Though both of us have had our hearing checked, our communication keeps going off the road on a regular basis.

Doesn’t help that our house eats sound, few rugs, concrete floor, high ceilings, she can call out my name from the other side of the house and all I hear is something that sounds like a thick magazine hitting the floor.

“Did you say something?’ I yell back.

Nothing.

Then I think I hear Virginia Living landing on the floor again. So I have to go search her out. She’s in the laundry room which is around three corners, she could just have well been talking to me from inside a submarine.

“Did you call me?” I ask.

“Yes, three times and you didn’t answer.”

“I can’t hear you from the other side of the house.”

“You really should get your hearing checked again.”

We must say to each other, “You must get your hearing checked,” three times a week, almost as much as, “Did you lose your iPhone again?” Neither of us goes, of course so we keep playing the game of dropping the ball.

“Looks like rain…”

“What?”

“I said, ‘It looks like rain.’”

“Sorry, but I missed that.”

“IT LOOKS LIKE RAIN,” she screams at me and the dogs all go run and hide.

“Yeah, sure does,” I answer.

And god forbid she’s reading something, a book or checking her email. I’ve learned to fire a warning shot first, as in, “Can I have your attention for a second.” Otherwise it’s like talking to a wall.

So the question, “Did you say something?’ is asked on a regular basis around our house. And if you get, “No, why?” in response, you begin to worry.

“I just thought you said something.”

Then you get The Look. The look that says, “Are you losing your mind?” which doesn’t help because that has already occurred to you.

So when I think she’s talking to me but can’t make out what she’s saying, I often resort to cupping my hand behind my ear. That way, if she doesn’t respond, I can just pretend I was scratching the side of my head and I don’t get The Look. If she does answer, all’s right with the world.

Now trying to start a conversation from across the room is like trying to start a fire with wet wood. That’s when you have to resort to the “run up to the net” technique, like in tennis. So you take a few steps toward her and ask, “How about going to lunch at Bodo’s?”

No response. She’s not even looking up. Now you’re halfway across to where she’s sitting and you try again, “How about going to lunch at Bodo’s?”

Finally she looks up, “Did you say something?”

Now you’re right up at the net and you hit the ball back and just to make sure, you raise your voice a bit, “YOU WANT TO GO TO LUNCH AT BODO’S?”

And what you get back is, “Please, you’re standing two feet away. Do you think I’m deaf?”

Then, if she’s staying true to form, she’ll ask, “Now what did you want to ask me?”

So that’s the way it goes when two planets try to talk to each other. Once I got so frustrated, I came up with the semaphore trick. “So when I want to talk with you, how about if I wave my arms like this?”

“That’s pretty silly.”

“Let’s just try it.”

“Okay, if you insist.”

I let a half hour go by and walk back into the room, stand in front of her and begin waving my arms.

“What in the world are you doing that for?” she asks. “Standing in the middle of the room waving your arms like a crazy person.”

I don’t even try. Shrug, turn and walk out of the room, thinking, “Maybe I’ll write what I want to ask her on a Post-It note, paste it to my forehead, and put my head in front of her face.

Might be worth a try.

By Tony Vanderwarker

In the middle of the night, she’s awakened by the sound of a car pulling up outside. Checks the clock, 3:14. Gets out of bed, pulls back the curtain and peeks out into the dark. She can barely make out a car. Then she sees two flashlights flicker on, iPhones eerily peering around the driveway.

“Claire, wake up, there are people out there, men, four of them, I think,” she says, shaking her partner.

“What?” Claire grumbles, sits up.

“Do you think they are burglars?” Naomi asks.

“Tony and Annie said they never have problems.”

“Well we do now, I think they are coming up here. I can see their shadows, just barely but that’s what it looks like.”

“Oh, s***! What do we do?”

“I can hear them opening the door.”

“There’s a paring knife in the kitchenette.”

“You think I’m going to stab someone? Now they’re coming up the stairs. I’m going to go and put my weight against the door, try to keep them out.”

“Better put this on first, you’re stark naked.” Claire says as she throws Naomi a robe.

Shrugging on the robe, Naomi leans against the door, with her hand gripping the door handle. She feels it moving in her hand. Ginning up her loudest voice, she pleads, “Please, don’t open the door.”

Silence, then footsteps.

“I think I hear them going down the stairs.”

Claire goes to the window and cranks it open. She sees four guys walking across the lawn toward the parking area. She says to them, “Is there anything I can help you with?”

One of them looks up at her and says, “No, sorry about that, I guess Tony must have double-booked.”

Of course, Tony and Annie slept through the whole thing. Not even the dogs heard their car coming in.

“Can you believe I said that?” Claire says the next day as she tells us about their nocturnal adventure in our studio. “I didn’t say, ‘you better get out of here, I’ve got a gun.’” Instead I say, “Is there anything I can help you with. Now I’m English, but that’s being a little too proper.”

Fortunately they are being good sports about it.

“We’re so sorry,” we say.

“I got a text from the guys,” Annie says. “Let me read it to you.”

Hi Annie –

So apparently I booked the wrong dates –  I meant to book Friday – Sun.  Me and my party arrived late last night. We met the people currently staying in the studio. We accidentally woke them up not knowing they’d be there. Gave them a bit of a scare – please extend my apologies to them! They seemed in good spirits about it tho.

We made accommodations by staying at holiday inn last night, so it worked out for us.. Again, so sorry for waking your guests up last night, I feel terrible about that!

“That’s an honest mistake,” Claire said. “Dumb but honest—I’ve certainly done my share of stupid things.

Claire and Naomi, who live in the Cotswalds, had booked the studio for five days so Claire could show her partner where she lived for ten years in the 80s.

“Again, we feel terrible. What hosts we are—slept through the whole business.”

“Actually, it’s the most exciting thing that’s happened on our trip to the States, our friends back in England will love hearing the story.”

“You bet,” I joke. “It’s not always you have a home invasion and live to tell about it.”

The day before, they had asked if they could extend their stay.

I told them it was booked but they were welcome to stay in our guest room on Saturday, “It’s the least we can do,” we said.

Fortunately, everything worked out for both parties, the guys stayed in the studio on Saturday and the ladies in our guest room.

And we were invited to spend time with the ladies at their house in the Cotswalds. That’s Airbnb for you, people who locked themselves out, owners who book themselves out, and guests that get woken up in the middle of the night. But all’s well that ends well.

By Tony Vanderwarker

You’ve probably heard all about these automated cars that are being developed. Maybe you’d like to know what driving one is like? Let me tell you.

It’s not like I have a Tesla, but I have my favorite Venusian (men are from Mars, the others aren’t) who sits in the passenger seat and drives the car for me. These people from that planet are a talented lot. Which is fortunate since us Martians wouldn’t ask directions unless we had a gun held to our heads.

“Turn here,” she says.

Then, “Don’t follow that car so closely.”

“Slow down.”

“Stop driving so pokey.”

“Watch out for that car.”

Once you get over the desire to scream at her or punch her in the face, it’s actually kind of nice. All the decisions are made for you so you can just relax and sit there with your hands on the wheel knowing you’re not going to have an accident and you’re absolutely guaranteed to get where you want to go.

But that’s not all the benefits to a driverless car. There’s also an automated parking feature, “Park over there, no, no, not that one, this one.”

Plus, if you’ve had one too many, the driverless car prevents you from getting behind the wheel. The prerecorded voice says to you, “You’re way over the limit, I’m driving.”

And the driverless car automatically selects what you want to listen to, even if you don’t know its what you want. “I’ve had enough of this NPR crap, we’re going to listen to some country.”

It’s also got a terrific backup feature also that prevents you from running over a ten year-old child, “ Stop! Jesus H. Christ! Thank God I saw him, you were about to mow him down!”

If the poor guy who did himself in when he autopiloted his Tesla straight  into a tractor-trailer had my D. D. (Designated Driverless) system, he might still be happily driving around. “Watch out for the f****** truck!”

“Whew, thanks, I never saw it.”

Now there are some drawbacks. Once in a while if you enter the wrong address, the system will bark at you, “I can’t believe this. How in the hell did you get the address wrong? This isn’t where they live.”

And if you happen to leave the car on empty, the system will come back at you with some frightening invective that I can’t even begin to relate here. Just rest assured that it’s enough to never let you run out of gas happen again.

There is one major problem I’ve found with driverless cars.

There’s no trade-in. Once you go for it, you’re stuck with it for life. But the car makes that clear right from the get-go, “You’re stuck with me, Buster, so just get damned well used to it.” So just make sure you like the vehicle before you commit.

My brother doesn’t have a driverless car but he’s got the next best thing. A state-of-the art computer guidance system installed in his back seat that was developed on Venus in cooperation with MIT. It’s an ingenious combination of Siri and an advanced GPS system that he’s named Susi after his wife, Susan. Its so advanced he doesn’t even have to tell it where he wants to go. Susi intuitively knows his destination and, having calculated all available routes and traffic conditions, immediately tells him what route to take.

“Take the expressway!”

“No, too much traffic, get off here, we’ll take Mass Ave. Get in the right lane, dummy.”

“No, no, not there, turn at the next block.  You’re in the wrong lane again.”

Susi is one amazing system, just ask my brother.

Supposedly, this is merely the first generation of driverless cars. There are all kinds of upgrades in the works. One of the things I’d like to see them work on is the voice. Instead of treating you like some low-grade moron, I’d like to see the voice show a little more respect. I know driving is no laughing matter, but if the voice could be a bit more Siri-like, I’d appreciate it. Instead of constantly pointing out what you did wrong, if the voice could say, “I know you didn’t mean to make that left, but I was glad I was able to correct you,” that would be great.

I know that’s a lot to ask for and it will probably never occur, but there’s always a chance that miracles will happen.

By Tony Vanderwarker

At first I thought, “What could be wrong with it?” Annie loves flower arranging and is good at it, why shouldn’t she join a group of ladies with a similar interest? What could be the downside of signing up with a couple and hanging with fellow flower fans?

What I discovered is that garden clubs are like crack cocaine. You try a little bit and before you know it you’re hooked. In no time the garage is jammed with tables covered with greenery, containers, hunks of driftwood and a million other bits and pieces of flower arranging detritus. Flowers are flying in from Florida and boxes of containers and Oasis arrive from Amazon. You have to perform an acrobatic ballet to get from the car into the house.

“I’ll clean it up after the Daffodil Show,” she promises. But then comes the Lily Show, then the presentation to the club in Norfolk followed by the one in Winchester. Instead of getting cleaner, the garage turns into an obstacle course. One false move and after tripping over a hidden flower bucket you’re flat on your keyster.

“I know it’s a mess but I just have to get through these next three shows and then I’ll get to it. And by the way, I have a delivery coming tomorrow with a bunch of stuff I’ve ordered and I’m going to be up in Orange so could you take care of it for me?”

The delivery turns out to be seven five-foot long boxes that have to be hustled in from the cold, opened and the flowers have to be “processed”. Processing is like a booster rocket for flowers, dousing them in water and adding a couple jiggers of plant food to restore them to their original condition.

So I’m impressed into the garden club as a temporary guest worker, opening the seven boxes, unpacking the flowers, unwrapping them, making fresh cuts in all the stems, stripping off excess foliage and immersing them in water sweetened with flower preservative.

As I’m processing, it occurs to me that all these flowers were packed up by migrant workers who take home maybe seven dollars a day—I’m unpacking the same stuff so what does that make me?

It takes me an hour and a half and I don’t even see the measly seven bucks. And when she gets home, invariably I get the remarks,

“You cut these too short.”

“You left too many leaves on.”

“These need to be in a bigger container.”

I want to say, “That’s what happens when you hire unskilled labor,” but I know better. Instead I grin and bear it.

When the garden club comes over for cocktails, guess who turns into the butler/bartender? And when she forgets something critical for one of her lectures, guess who turns into delivery boy? That’s okay, I only write for three hours a day, I have plenty of time to do menial work.

Let’s not even talk about when Annie does an arrangement and calls to me, “Will you come here, there’s something I want you to look at.” Carefully making my way through the garage minefield, I see my wife standing in front of a half-finished arrangement. “Does this look too representational? It’s supposed to be abstract,” she asks. Demurring does no good, “C’mon, I need your help, please tell me what you think.” So with no other choice, you step right in it.

Now here’s where the ice gets really thin for a garden club guest worker.  Because if she takes your advice and doesn’t bring home a blue, you’re getting some of the blame. “I shouldn’t have listened to you,” is what you get. “I knew it was too representational right from the start but I let you talk me into it.”

But it gets worse. From crack cocaine, addicts often go on to heroin. It’s the same with garden clubbers. They take the leap from doing flower shows to putting on Garden Week. Annie got dragooned into being deputy-dog this year.

It’s like a military campaign. All across Virginia, thousands of garden clubbers mobilize to put on a week of house and garden tours across the state. It’s an 11 million dollar operation and it takes regular army to pull it off. Chief-of-Staff, generals, colonels, captains, lieutenants and thousands of grunts. Annie is a captain reporting to Colonel Catherine.

The campaign begins a year before when Google Docs start flying and they begin reporting to Richmond on a regular basis. As Richmond was the capital of the Confederacy, it’s now the nerve center of the Garden Week campaign.

“I’m going to Richmond tomorrow for a meeting,” is what I hear a couple times a week. Annie’s target is Culpeper. So if she’s not off to Richmond, she’s in Culpeper.

A year ago, they sweet-talked a bunch of poor suckers into putting their farms on the tour. In late winter, their properties get invaded by the army. They make plans to station women in each house as guides, assign teams to do multiple flower arrangements, recruit car parkers, hire buses and port-a-potties, make arrangements for food and drinks. As you can imagine, our phone rings off the hook and emails pile up on Annie’s computer.

“I must get fifty a day,” she tells me as her fingers tap, tap, tap, on her phone. So even though my wife is home, she’s really not because she’s got her nose in her iPhone 24-7. If I have something to say to her, I have to book the time to talk.

And then there are the crises when she makes a mad dash to the car, screams down the drive and speeds to Colonel Catherine’s for an emergency meeting.

If I try to tell her she’s taking everything too seriously and needs to step back and get some perspective, I get, “You just don’t get it, do you? This is a tremendous undertaking and we have a million things to do. So you just better get with the program, okay?”

Oh well, after Garden week is over maybe I can divorce the garden club and see if I can remarry my wife.

By Tony Vanderwarker

So I have a book coming out in September from a publisher in Mississippi whose covers I don’t particularly like. So in my contract, I stipulated that I had the right to design my own.

Long story short, Mary, who’s my graphic designer and an old friend, had a great idea for a cover. Since the title of the book is, I’m Not From the South But I Got Down Here As Fast As I Can—How a Connecticut Yankee learned to love grits and fried green tomatoes and lived to tell about it, she imagined kind of a Green Acres cover, Tony in a suit holding a pitchfork with a stalk of hay dangling out of his mouth, would be perfect, she told me.

I agreed, she hired a photographer and we set a date. As the day approached, Mary called with some ideas. She’d been talking to the photog and learned she had a couple chickens.

“So what do you think of the idea of you standing there in your suit holding a chicken?”

“As well as the pitchfork?”

“We’ll shoot it both ways,” she said.

“I don’t know, I have kind of a thing about birds.”

“How’s that?”

“You really want to know?”

“Tell me.”

“Okay, when I was little, I lived on this big farm and someone decided that Tony should go down with TeeDee, the Albanian gardener, and feed the chickens every morning. Problem was, these were Rhode Island Reds. If you’ve ever seen one, you know they are big suckers. If chickens played basketball, they would be centers.

Now I’m two, a short two, so these chickens towered above me. I was the small forward on a court packed with centers and when they dashed to and fro after the feed TeeDee kept throwing around the yard, they swept me along with them, a sea or Rhode Island Reds carrying me back and forth across the chicken pen.

Now I was terrified but TeeDee thought it was terrifically funny and kept cackling through the few teeth he had left like he was watching the clown show at the circus. I was making his day and me, all I was making was a load in my pants.

“Every time you take him down to feed the chickens,” my grandmother asked one day, “Tony poops his pants. Maybe he doesn’t like it?”

“Oh no, Ma’am, kid like so much, why kid makes poop.”

By this time, Mary was howling. “I can’t believe this!”

“So I have this thing about chickens.”

“I can see why. So did he keep taking you down to the chicken coop?”

“Every damn morning, I think it was the highlight of his day. I wish I could remember what he kept saying in Albanian. It was sort of, “Ooobeshousta megova oobeshousta megova” or something like that. Must have meant, “Holy shit, is this funny or what?”

“I’m surprised you’re not permanently scarred.”

“There are a few. Every time I crack an egg, I’m afraid a dead chick will drop out.”

“Ughh.”

“But that’s more into the bird thing.”

“The bird thing?”

“Yup, dead birds, I can’t stand them, as a matter of fact, can’t stand them dead or alive. Hitchcock didn’t help either—The Birds? I still get nightmares. Every time one gets stuck in the garage, I have to get Annie to get it out. They scare the crap out of me. Except for hummingbirds, I can do them. They’re like big bugs so I’m okay with them. And Annie can’t stand bugs, spiders, wasps. So Tony does the bugs and Annie does the birds.”

“Maybe that’s why you’ve been married so long?”

“Part of it, that and mayonnaise.”

“Why mayonnaise?”

“Neither of us can stand the stuff. So we try to avoid summer picnics. They put mayo on everything. When we do go, we always come away hungry, or bloated from eating too much watermelon.”

“So let’s get back to the chicken.”

“Do we have to?”

“What if the chicken just stands on the suitcase next to you?’

“That I can do, as long as I don’t have to touch it.”

Anyway, when I checked the photo concept out with the publisher, he went for the idea but nixed the chicken.

I guess that’s what you call a dead bird.

By Tony Vanderwarker

No time to say, “Hello”, goodbye—I’m late, I’m late, I’m late.

I’ve suspected that like eye and skin color, baldness and IQ, punctuality must be an inherited trait. My mother wasn’t just punctual, she was terrified of being late, always working herself up into a wild frenzy, “We’ve got to get a move on, get your coats and get out the door right now, c’mon, c’mon, c’mon,” she’d be shrieking as she hustled my brother and I down the hall.

She’d get worked up about the most trivial appointments, taking the car in to get fixed, taking the dog to the vet and God forbid she had a dental appointment or a 9:30 with her doc, Patty and her two boys would be on a dead run, “C’mon, c’mon, we can’t be late!”

When we were little we had go to every appointment with her so imprinted on our psyches was the absolute necessity of being “on the dot.” In our house, punctuality was next to godliness, if you were late, you’d pay big-time. The punishment for being late had to be so horrible it was beyond description, unimaginable, something akin to the horrors of hell, but much worse.

So we spent our childhoods rushing everywhere, herded around by our mother at breakneck speed.

And what do I do? Me, the one who’s inherited the got-to-be-on-time gene?

I marry a dawdler of the worst sort.,

Annie couldn’t give a fig about being on time. “What’s the big deal if we’re a few minutes late?”–is her standard line. Of course a few minutes morphs into a half hour and me? I’m a basket case, fretting myself into a noxious stew of anxiety, completely convinced that the God of Tardy is going to strike me dead.

But that’s not the half of it. What takes it over the top is my wife’s tendency to gear down, gradually winding down her preparation speed until she’s moving in slow motion. Honest to God, she moves like cold glue.

Say we’re going to a party. Start time is 6:30. Me, I’m ready at 5:45. Annie, she’s still sitting in the living room tapping away at her tablet, playing some inane game, oblivious to the clock ticking down to departure time.

At 6:05, she still hasn’t taken a shower and I’m beside myself. If I say anything, even the tamest suggestion such as, “It’s getting on, dear, maybe you should start getting ready?” I risk a further slowdown.  Instead of a half-hour, she’ll stretch it out to an hour. And it’s not in retaliation, it’s an innate response. The closer she gets to departure, the slower she moves—like molten lava inching down a hill, only slower.

And the slower she goes, the crazier I get. So I have to stifle my rapidly accelerating angst by rapidly pacing up and down the front hall like some demented person, occasionally peeking into her dressing room to check on the lack of progress. Which just gets me more bonkers.

Now normally, I’d pour myself a glass of wine to calm my nerves, but in this situation, booze is off limits. Because with the Dawdler in full slowdown mode, one glass would turn into four and I’d be half in the bag before I even got to the party.

Occasionally, I’ll abandon good sense, stick my head in the door and suggest, “It’s already ten minutes to seven, you want to get a move on?”

She’ll turn to me, give me a sneer and say, “They never serve dinner until eight, what’s the rush?” Which, translated into Annie-speak, means, “Push me any more and I’ll just go slower.”

Now this has been going on for forty-one years, so you’d think Tony would have learned to turn on Netflix and watch Ben Hur, take the dogs for a long walk, sit down with a weighty novel, but no, I’m still wearing out the carpet in the hall.

When I’m almost at the breaking point, she breezes out of the bedroom and gives me a cheery, “Okay, I’m ready, let’s go.”

And when we get to the party, it’s still cocktail time and I get: “See? What did I tell you? You’ve got to stop being so crazy about being on time.”

That doesn’t stop my full-blown phobia. Let’s say I have a chiropractor appointment. It’s up on Rio and you know what the traffic’s like up there. So I leave forty-five minutes early, constantly checking the clock, fretting that if I’m late, the God of Tardy will put a black mark on my record. Enough marks, and its not pretty what happens.

Now I’m aware that that this level of anxiety is not healthy, so I try to throw some water on it, saying to myself, “Take it easy, Tony, it doesn’t make any difference if you’re five minutes late.”

But then the God of Tardy has me honking the horn at some slowpoke and I’m barely able to resist flipping the bird at him when I zoom past.

It goes like this, back and forth between the sane Tony and the loony one until I pull up in front of the chiropractor.

And I’m always twelve minutes early.

Some people never learn.

Like Tony and the White Rabbit.