Siegfried und Brunnhilde
I am not a patient man to begin with, and spending 40 minutes at a dead stop in traffic while a bunch of clowns repave a highway that doesn’t need it in the first place is not likely to sweeten my disposition.
What made it worse this particular morning on Topanga Canyon Boulevard was my position in line behind a Ford van plastered with bumper stickers that proclaimed the driver’s stance on everything from the Boy Scouts of America to ownership of a springer spaniel.
Under less trying circumstances I might have simply shrugged at the man’s presumption that anyone gave a damn about his love of Jesus, Robocop and the National Institute for Suicide Prevention.
But being locked behind him for 40 minutes and having to read those things evoked an image of a self-righteous, close-minded jackass who would someday go berserk and gun down the entire clientele of a Westside hot dog stand because God told him to.
By the time I got home I was not only enraged by the traffic delay and the man’s hypocrisy, but at my own vision of him exploding, arming himself and heading for the red hots.
“Something’s got to be done about this,” I grumbled as I walked into the house.
My wife was sitting on the floor surrounded by parts of a rototiller, sketching a diagram of each part as she removed it from the tiller’s engine.
“Setting the world straight is one hell of a job,” she said without looking up. Then she asked, “Do you know what a carburetor looks like?”
Today’s topic is man’s patience under stressful conditions, and how those conditions shape his responses in a marital situation.
Right, it’s a husband-wife column. If you’ve got something more significant to read it’s best you get on with it.
I, on the other hand, am still fuming over the long wait on Topanga Canyon Boulevard and the bumper stickers plastered over the back of that van.
Asking if I know what a carburetor looks like is not a terrific question to hit me with when I am in a bad mood, but Cinelli never worries about that. By her estimate, I have been in a bad mood for 37 years.
“Don’t you care that the man was a time bomb of hatred?” I asked, foaming slightly at the corners of my mouth.
It’s an ethnic trait. I’ve noticed others of my race foaming when they are in a rage. By contrast, you rarely see a Dane foam.
“Let me reconstruct the core of your pique,” she said. “You had to wait while they worked on the road, you were behind a vehicle with bumper stickers you hated and you have no idea what a carburetor is, right?”
The woman is amazing.
She is not only psychic but cultured and patient as well. The other night, for instance, she watched all five hours of “Gotterdammerung” on KCET. I had trouble concentrating on a rented video of “Honey, I Shrunk the Kids.”
We are as different as Siegfried and Brunnhilde.
“I don’t understand why you aren’t more mechanically inclined,” she said. “You scored high in that in the Marines.”
“The test was given by a master sergeant who couldn’t read,” I said. “It was a blind guess on his part. I should have been a combat poet.”
“Then why did they put you in the infantry?”
“The Corps requires that all combat poets serve in the infantry before they are assigned to specialized units of haiku, blank verse or rhyming couplets. I ended up in the 78th Blank Verse Battalion.”
She removed another part from the rototiller engine and held it up. “Is that the carburetor?”
“I have no idea,” I said.
That got to her. She is of the opinion I am capable of doing anything I want to do, but deny her my domestic skills out of spite.
“You know everything when you’re at work, but nothing when you’re home,” she said. “Yesterday you understood every word that man said you were talking to and he was about as articulate as the Mumbles character in ‘Dick Tracy.’ ”
“He was an editor. They aren’t paid to be articulate. They are paid to be hostile. Someday one of them will all be at a hot dog stand with the guy in the van, gunning down innocent eaters.”
“Is this a carburetor or not?” she demanded, becoming increasingly angry. “Pretend some sexy, dark-eyed cookie is asking.”
“Well, in that case, sure, it’s a carburetor, cookie. I see it as a device for mixing vaporized fuel with air to produce. . . .”
Exit Brunnhilde, fuming, to find a picture of a carburetor in the dictionary, while Siegfried tried to recall what he’d been angry about in the first place.
It requires a certain amount of courage at that to face the world armed only with bumper stickers.