My ex boyfriend, Bill, as you know, is now my tenant.

(For how that happened see the first entry in my blog.)

We’re outside, early in the evening, under a large scrub oak tree. I’ve got the hose going on the fruit trees and Bill has just come home from work. He settles into a garden chair and grins.

“Well,” he says, “I washed my expensive sun glasses in the washing machine last night and I dried them in the dryer, too.”

I giggle. This is the man who gave me his reading glasses this morning and asked me to take them to his optometrist for repair. Once again, he has sat on them.

The very first weekend that Bill spent with me when we were dating, he lost his wallet.
I flew into a frenzy, calling the restaurant we had been to the night before and retracing all our steps. I went into a major search and find mode.

He asked me why I was so upset. With a bit of chit chat I finally grasped that he lost his wallet with regular regularity.
Eventually, we found the wallet, on the ground, in front of my mother’s ramp into her mobile home. It had apparently dropped out of his car door. How did that happen? It’s best not to ask.

A few years ago, he lost his wallet, again. This was maybe the tenth time he’d lost a wallet since I had known him. As it sometimes happens, we really couldn’t find it and Bill had to cancel all his credit cards, get a new driver’s license (which caused a host of frustrating problems including the fact that his bank wouldn’t give him money without his driver’s license!) and replace everything else he had in the wallet.

A week or so after all the changes were completed, he found the wallet tucked nicely into his office chair, right against his butt. In plain site. He had been sitting on it, every day.

Many of his shirts have been ruined with ink pens in the pockets as they go into the washer and dryer. And he always leaves kleenex in his pockets, and money. And matches, and other items of interest. You can imagine what sometimes happens inside my washer and dryer.

I am a very patient woman.

But, sometimes I explode and shout, “Eeeh gads! What planet are you on? Where are you?

When I met him, I noticed right off that he had some goofiness. Very early in our relationship when I went back east with him, to meet all his family, he borrowed a brother’s car to take me to get ice cream.

He managed to hit the curb outside the store and blew a tire clean off the car. I was horrified. He had to call his family to come and get us. Nobody seemed concerned about this odd happening.

Later, at the family gathering, I mentioned the car incident to his mother and some of the family and I shared with them how he had lost his wallet in my mother’s drive way.

His family sort of snorted and chortled and acted like, ‘This is news?’ Then someone said, “Oh yeah, and he has a nephew just like him.”

That’s when I began to think he had an oddity in his genetic stream.

But then, who doesn’t?

I was walking the other day with my friend and neighbor, Lynn. We were chatting about how a few years ago, her husband had a heart attack, died at the fire station down the street from us and was brought back to life.

Lynn said, “Yes, and my daughter and I were praying over him as he was dying and he looked up at us and shouted, ‘Stop that!!’
So, we went in the back room and prayed for him.”

I’m telling Bill this story about the neighbors after he has told me how he washed and dried his sunglasses and I have just told Bill he is a nut, for sure.

He’s good natured about my assessment.

Then we veer off into a conversation about my old boyfriend, John who lived with me for about 5 years, before Bill came along.

John still calls me every few months and sometimes comes to visit. He is happily, (hopefully, still?) with a lady now, but the last time he visited, he was single.

Bill and I are remembering and marveling about what happened on Christmas Eve when he was here.

Bill made a big prime rib dinner with mashed potatoes and gravy and peas and corn and salad and biscuits and blueberry pie. And wine and egg nog. As he’s getting ready to put it all on the table, John pops in from a shower all dressed and jumping around with nerves. He tells me he’s off to San Diego (an hour away) to go to some dance club.

I say, “What? It’s Christmas Eve! Bill made us a marvelous dinner! I thought we’d have Christmas Eve together. Why are you going to a place where you don’t know anyone and it’s Christmas Eve and nobody will be there, it’s Christmas Eve!!’

He couldn’t be dissuaded from his dance club idea but grudgingly, he sat down, ate fast, declined dessert and left.

I looked at Bill as John raced out the door and said, “That’s one reason he doesn’t live here, anymore.”

Several hours later, John was back and he was mad. There was almost no one at the dance club and the women who were there weren’t worth going for and he had wasted his time!

Duh?

OK, so it’s this kind of thing that makes people interesting. Maybe it’s just a matter of how interesting you can stand?

And, of course…I haven’t even mentioned all my quirks.
Oh wait. Maybe I will mention one. When I was 8 years old, polio was very popular. I developed a horrible fear of polio and as I realize now, almost everyone had the fear.

But, somehow, I got the idea in my little pointed head, that if I could kick my legs, one leg at a time, up against my butt, I didn’t have polio. I spent a lot of time walking around constantly kicking my butt!

And, just now, I got up off my tuffet to see if I can still kick my butt. I can. But not quite so well with my right leg. I will have to work on this.

This entry was posted on Saturday, April 12th, 2008 at 3:41 pm and is filed under Words from Venus. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.