The Loved One looked up from her laptop, removed her glasses, and asked me, accusingly, "So, you bought a book today? How much did it cost?"
I was ready with the snappy comeback: "Huh?"
"You wrote in your post today that you bought a book."
"Oh." Clearly I was at the top of my repartee game.
It took a few beats for me to get her drift. In Tuesday's post, I wrote about what an intellectual titan I am. I stood on my head to separate myself from the common clay, illustrating this by pointing out that the radio and television banality I'm being bombarded with during my stay at the Holiday Inn is so, well, weird - at least to me. My concluding line was that I was going to jump up and rush to Barnes & Noble to buy Isaac Newton's "Principia."
I was, of course, being a smartass. I bet I'll never actually purchase a copy of one of the two or three most important scientific works ever written in any language. In it, Newton lays out his Law of Universal Gravitation and explains his Laws of Motion. I mean, for gosh sakes, who hasn't heard the line, For every action, there's an equal and opposite reaction? That isn't exactly how Newton wrote it, but it'll do for us here. Suffice it to say that the physics of everyday life are laid out tidily in this three-volume set.
A quick search on Amazon reveals that used sets of the Principia start at $337, and therein lies today's tale.
A good marriage, I am discovering after having experienced a bad version or two, mixes two people whose strengths and weaknesses dovetail nicely. It would be impossible for me to illustrate this better than to admit that The Loved One handles the checkbook and I do not.
In earlier posts, I've revealed that my mother was a fiscal tyrant. She was the type of person who looked out the front door in search of the mailman because the electric bill was due. Long before things like online banking, Ma kept a stack of envelopes - marked electric, gas, car insurance, and so on - into which she'd parcel cash from each of her and Dad's paychecks throughout the month. She kept such a close eye on these envelopes that when I, at the age of ten, began feeling aggrieved that my baseball card addiction wasn't accounted for in them and decided to help myself to some of their contents, she knew immediately what was going on. The next time I went in for the dip, I found a note written by her saying, essentially, Gotcha!
Ma became a paragon of bill-paying in reaction to her mother, who was not. I, in turn, rebelled against Ma's ways. And so it goes. Had I chosen to spawn, my daughter or son would probably have become a CPA. Thankfully, I've spared at least one poor soul that cruel fate.
Anyway, I've lived most of my life like a drunken sailor. I've suffered more third-degree burns on my right thigh than I'd care to admit. Poor old Pat Arden, my former editor at the Chicago Reader - the microsecond after any of my stories ran in his paper, I'd be banging on his door to find out when he could cut me a check. And god forbid I should spend that check on anything as silly as bills - not when there were motorcycles to buy, rounds to pick up, women to impress and, yes, books to accumulate.
Whereas Ma couldn't mail the check to the electric company fast enough, I looked upon utility bills as mere suggestions. The real bill, in my warped view, was the disconnect notice. This system worked well except for those times I forgot to open the disconnect notice. Trying to read in the dark is such an ordeal.
The Loved One was aghast at my pecuniary discipline, or lack thereof. Fortunately, she was drawn in by one or two other facets of my character and so we became a going concern. Only she made it clear from the start that she would be the Chief Financial Officer and if she caught me thumbing through the checkbook, she'd cut said digits off clean.
Now that's a system that really works. Rather like Newton's everyday universe.
