Kathy and I have been living together for nearly 30 years. Now you would think after all this time I would have a pretty good idea what she was thinking. Oh sure, I hear people say they know each other so well they can almost finish what the other is saying, but they're lying. There is no man alive who can ever understand what his wife is thinking. That's just an urban legend fed by Oprah and Dr. Phil. Granted, men and women can live together peacefully, even enjoy one another's company, but understand one another -- never.
Let me give you a perfect example of what I mean. For the past 30 years Kathy has made it very clear that she hates cats. Sure, she kept our son's two cats for a year while he was stationed overseas, but she gritted her teeth the whole time. When he finally came home and claimed his pets, they both needed extensive therapy before they felt safe again.
So you can imagine my confusion when last month Kathy came to me all upset about some cat caught in our tree. "She can't get down and she'll starve to death up there," she told me with tears in her eyes.
"This is a joke, right?" I asked. "Remember, you hate cats."
"But she's in trouble and you have to climb up there and get her down."
Like I said, no man can even begin to make sense of what a woman is thinking on his best day, and my best days are long past, so I got my ladder and climbed 40 feet up the tree to rescue what Kathy was now convinced was a poor starving kitten who would surely be dead by noon if I didn't intervene.
Let me tell you something about cats in trees. They aren't real trusting of old men on ladders trying to grab them, especially when they can see Kathy on the ground waiting for them. So this poor starving kitten sinks her very grown-up claws into my jugular vein and draws about a quart of blood by the time I finally reached the ground.
Now if you still think men can understand women, let me tell you about the raccoon.
Kathy loves her garden. It's therapy for her, she says. She spends hours out there every day. But mostly she loves sharing her crop with friends. She takes tomatoes, peppers, beans to work with her. Gives them to everyone. And that's why she had me add a second garden this year. "I want all corn in this one. Then I can give a lot more vegetables to my friends," she told me in May.
So all summer she has been watching, waiting for her corn to be ready. She even had a list of people lined up to share the first ears with.
But come July when the first ears should have been ready -- nothing. Then August, still nothing. So I did a little investigating and decided that raccoons were getting into her garden and eating all of her corn.
Like I said, Kathy is no animal lover, and raccoons are just cats with a smelly fir coat anyway, and I can guarantee you a couple weeks of going to the garden and finding nothing but broken, empty stalks just about put her over the line.
"I want you to get a gun and sit there all night and kill every raccoon who comes into my garden," she demanded. And she meant it.
After an hour I convinced her that it was probably illegal to fire a gun in the city, even if it was for a good cause like killing a raccoon. So she finally agreed to let me set a trap and catch the raccoon, then take it out into the country and have some farmer kill it.
Sounds simple enough, but coons are a lot smarter than cats. So night after night, not only was our corn gone, but the bait in the trap, too. In time we finally gave up on the corn and went to the store and a couple bought dozen ears to give to her friends. "Right from the garden. Grew them myself," Kathy lied.
But then last week, long after the last ears were stolen and we had forgotten about the trap, we caught our first raccoon. My guess is he was so fat and lazy from stealing all Kathy's corn he got careless and wandered into the trap out of boredom.
Now you would think she would be elated to finally catch her corn thief. You would think she would be glad to see justice served. You would even think she would want some vengeance. But you would be wrong.
"He must be so uncomfortable in that little cage. And look, his legs are bleeding from trying to get out. You should give him something to eat and let him go."
Like Sigmund Freud once said, "The great question... Which I have not been able to answer...is, 'What does a woman want?'"
John Graham is an Advocate Columnist. His column appears each Sunday in the Advocate. He can be reached at jgraham19@woh.rr.com.
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