Infinite rooms ...

My wife’s a light sleeper.

I have a morning routine.

We live in a small house.

Sometimes irresistible forces meets immovable objects.

Monday, fer instance.

After splitting a tiny pack of cat food between Viktor (a gentleman who savors) and his brother, Roman (the Joey Chestnut of tiny packs of cat food), I fish the blender from the dishwasher to initiate lunchtime smoothie prep.

Sometimes, the door squeaks.

Monday, fer instance.

I do my best to stage some things the night before, including:

• the peanut butter from the cabinet (to mitigate further morning door squeakage).
• the spoons (one for me, one for the cats) from the utensil drawer (they get jingly)
• my Yeti and lid from the high shelf (for reasons that elude me, we keep lids in a separate container rather than with their parents; ergo, jostling ensues).

Excavating the cold items, though, is often fraught.

Monday, fer instance.

Grabbed the almond milk and yogurt without incident. Also, the apple and blueberries.

So far I’m rollin’ sevens.

The spinach, however, was waiting to totally f*ck me over.

It was a fresh pack. Still sealed.

Nothin’ you can do but grab it at the corner and say a prayer.

You ever hear someone using packing tape in an echo-y warehouse to cinch up an oversized cardboard box?

My wife did Monday morning.

I tried to be quiet by going slow.

Which made it worse.

Which is a consequence of most, if not all, of my honorable intentions.

No sooner do I pull open the lid than I hear the thwump of the recliner from the next room returning to starting position.

Karry slept in the recliner the night before.

She’s been doing that more often. With the fan on, because (see above) she’s a light sleeper.

And I’m an awful sleeper.

I’m an awful dreamer, too, which to anyone within blast range, also exacerbates the awful sleeping part.

Dream-wise, I traffic primarily in two genres.

I’ve had almost every variation imaginable of the ‘I’m not prepared’ dream. A partial IMDB listing …

Of course, the classic “Wandering the Halls of College” — where its deep into the semester and I realize I’ve not been going to one or more classes whose locations and schedule I can’t remember. These have been in rotation for decades.

My subconscious is also a big fan of the “Opening Night of the Play,” series, where I don’t know my lines and the curtain’s about to go up.  Once, my hippocampus workshopped a WTF version where it was opening night and not only did I not know my lines, but the performance was in a language I don’t speak or understand.

Work-related jawns? Hold my beer. I’ve had a ton inspired by my current gig, and also flashback episodes back to my deadline-driven newspaper days, which are terrifying.

I also nightmare my hobbies, including the “I’m playing in a band and the gig’s about to start but either I (a.) can’t find my drum cases or (b.) am still putting my kit together while discovering that parts are missing,” dreams. My favorite being the epic, “I’m filling in with the Rolling Stones after Charlie Watts died, and I walk onto the stage of a full stadium, just as Mick starts counting off the opening number in a set list I’ve not seen, and (wait for it), I look down and my kit’s missing the bass drum pedal.”

They’re not all nightmares, though.

I also have this recurring one where I’m in ‘my house,’ and I go downstairs and discover all these rooms that I either never knew were there, or had forgotten about. Usually the openings to the rooms are rounded, and the interiors beyond are always illuminated. The feel is almost cave-like. None of the rooms are furnished.

I wake up before I even have a chance to discover how many rooms there are.

It’s always the most wonderful feeling to stumble upon … the knowledge that they’ve always been there. Just waiting for me to either discover or remember.

__

Back to the recliner.

It was not a happy thwump.

Twenty-eight years of marriage, one knows from thwumps.

This was the fomenting angry thwump of a grizzly.

On her good days my wife is not a morning person.

Rob her of a sound sleep? She’s Denzel Washington in The Equalizer.

And the bad guys are played by the entire world.

Fortunately for me … the spinach was my last ingredient. I held a feint hope that if I could just make it to the steps, I might be OK.

From the darkness of the living room, I heard her voice starting to climb over the hum of the fan blasting on high.

The only words I could make out were swear words.

Got to the steps just as she was shuffling into the hallway. She was mid-sentence in a spew of bile that was still in crescendo. My back was to her, which absorbed most of her verbal shrapnel as I feigned obliviousness (a plausible defense) as I grabbed for the door, closed it behind me, and hit the steps in stride.

By the time I reached the bottom and exhaled, the door and floor now between us was only slightly dulling the sharp edges of her spew, which was lasting excruciatingly longer than the spinach pull.

Safe for the moment I fired up the old Vitamix, itself permanently evicted years ago from the kitchen after it was discovered that its roar reached through our bedroom door to Karry’s side of the bed with little, if any, depreciation.

I lingered a couple extra minutes downstairs before tiptoeing back up the steps, hoping to walk on eggshells long enough to fill my thermos and get on my way to work.

Both my smoothie and my feelings were mixed.

In full transparency, my first instinct was a defensive one.

I mean, I’ve had the same morning routine for, what, decades now?

So it’s not like my fumbling in the kitchen is a new thing. And, I mean, you open things, you make noise.The refrigerator makes noise. The utensil drawer makes noise.

And I’m the first one up because I gotta get out the door earlier for my 45 mile commute.

And it’s not my fault Karry’s a light sleeper. Or that our house is small.

It’s all just an unfortunate set of circumstances, you know?

I mean … it’s life, right?   

But, if I’m being honest, after 28 years, I’ve learned that my first defensive instinct is almost always bullshit.

And if I’m being honest honest, you can strike the almost from the record.

Upstairs, I caught Karry as she was heading down the hallway to start getting ready for work herself.

Her back was to me. She was proly still muttering under her breath.

I called out to her.

Said I was so, so sorry.

I apologized to her for making so much noise. For waking her up. Especially on a Monday, of all days.

Said I was really sorry again.

Knowing she had every right to be pissed at me for the foreseeable future, and also knowing that her morning bile takes much longer to cool than her typical house blend, I braced myself for giving her such a clear shot and so much ammunition.

I mean, I've seen the Equalizer.

So I wasn't prepared for what actually came out of her mouth.

“It’s ok,” she said.

Said it was no big deal.

I told her maybe, you know, I could start storing stuff in the downstairs fridge. Assembling everything in the laundry room.

She said not to worry about it.

“That’s a pain in the ass,” she said. “No need to go to that amount of trouble.”

That’s way more grace than a person deserves on a Monday morning.

Especially one who’s been making a morning racket pretty much every day for going on three decades.

__

That night, after taking out the garbage, I went about staging my things for the morning.

The peanut butter from the cabinet.

The spoons from the drawer.

The lid from the container.

Kept going.

The milk.

The yogurt.

The apples and blueberries.

The f*cking spinach.

Stacked and leaned it all against my chest and walked gingerly down the steps and into the laundry room.

Set the peanut butter on top of the dryer, the yogurt spoon on top.

Put everything else in the old downstairs fridge where we keep beverages … with plenty of room to spare.

Got up the next morning.

After splitting a fresh pack between Joey Chestnut and his gentleman brother, I went downstairs.

Assembled and Vitamixed all my ingredients on the spot.

Found Karry still sleeping in her recliner with the fan on high by the time I came back upstairs.

Irresistible force.

Eminently moveable objects.

__

The recipe for a long marriage does not always mean an always happy marriage.

There’s a lot of little things to overcome.

Our best intentions.

Routines.

Losing the directions to a good night’s sleep.

Monday mornings.

The slow accumulation of things and grievances.

Our bullshit defensiveness.

Even if you can make it past all that, sometimes the spinach is just waiting to f*ck you over.

Under the weight of all of the above, it makes even the tiniest grace you don’t deserve a pretty incandescent thing.

Mustering a “No big deal,” while walking down the hallway is a big f*cking deal.

Because you appreciate how much it costs.

Because it gives our Mondays a fighting chance.

The chance to wake up one more day and stumble downstairs.

And finally discover infinite rooms that have been there all along.