The small TV in the kitchen is on. From my seat in the living room, I can't hear what show is keeping him company, just the background sound. I bet it's an HGTV rerun.
I hear him drying the dishes. It bothers him to have pots and pans and my plastic drinking cup, with its hard plastic straw, drying on the counter. Even when he was working, drying the dishes was a priority. He'd get up from his desk in DC and walk to the subway, hop on, transfer trains, all the while carrying his heavy black backpack full of office work that he'd look at after dinner. Then, once in Virginia, he'd walk to the shuttle bus, wait, and board the bus for the 10 minute ride home. He'd hop off, walk home, and climb the stairs to the kitchen. After kissing me hello, he'd park the backpack by the stairs, and still in his suit, pick up a dishcloth and dry the dishes I had placed there to air dry while I was cooking.
It is important to him to have clean counters, to have everything in its place, to have our lists of things to be done checked off one by one. Once -- once!! -- he left his shoes in the living room and I immediately knew something was wrong. I wondered if he had died. (He just forgot them.) The world, he, must be fine, as the counter is empty, the bills paid, the credit reports reviewed, the trash taken out, the furnace filter changed -- all on schedule. It's taken me awhile, but I'm on board. Routine is our joy. Sometimes I dry the dishes too.
Someone once called us The Blandos. It wasn't meant as a joke; rather as an insult. But I knew, even at the time that the words were spit out, that they came from jealousy. The person dismissing our life had a life in chaos. I understood.
But it got to me. Bland. Tasteless. Boring.
I used to worry that we were missing out on life. We haven't been on a safari or a cruise to Alaska. We don't eat out much and we stick close to home. Staying up past 9 is a distant memory. But I don't worry about that anymore. Sometimes nothing is more sweet than listening to the same sounds every day, eating the same meals, watching the same TV shows, all with someone you love.
Perhaps that's why the past few years have pushed us off kilter. Living in Belgium for a few months, hospital stuff, surgeries, the move to Dallas -- this isn't the life of The Blandos. But here we are, back to a routine. It's a new routine. We miss our old one. We miss our friends and our neighborhood and the DC skyline. There's a lot to miss. But, one year later, and there is a lot to embrace, particularly our son. It was the right move.
Now I hear him turn off the kitchen lights and turn on the back porch light and the alarm system. He's walking to the living room, carrying his tiny white bowl of wavy potato chips, a beer, and two (not one, not three) Hershey nuggets. I'm in my seat on the sofa near the lamp and in a few seconds he'll join me on the sofa in his seat, on the opposite corner. We turn on Lester Holt and the NBC Nightly News.
Life, gratefully, is bland again.
