Case in point, one year we purchased an above ground pool for the family. It turned out that the pump assembly we bought was not big enough to properly filter the pool. The replacement assembly would cost around $500. We did some of the normal juggling of funds and managed to purchase it. I picked it up from the pool supply company in our SUV and placed the boxed assembly in the back. When we arrived home I unloaded the pump assembly and left it behind the vehicle as I needed to get some help to get it into the backyard. As I was searching for help my cell phone went off with an emergency service call and seeing as how I just shelled out $500 I thought,
“Great, maybe I can recoup some of the cost!”
So off I went. As I was driving back up the street on my return I noticed the pump assembly still behind the SUV.
“Good,” I thought to myself, “now maybe I can get that into the backyard.”
Just then I notice the backup lights on the SUV light up and to my horror I saw Angie sitting in the driver’s seat preparing to leave, no doubt going to do something very important that she just remembered. As she started backing up, I started pounding on the truck’s horn and screaming in the cab.
“Nooooooo!”
Of course, Angie is oblivious to all this just as she usually is to all other things going on around her. The neighbors, however, were not and were coming out to see what the racket was all about. The sight that greeted them was of their usually sane neighbor acting anything but sane in his work truck, laying on the horn and screaming to himself as he watched his wife back up, pushing the $500 pump assembly toward the street. As it hit the gutter of the street it tipped over and the mighty SUV just back right up on top of it. As the SUV rose over this expensive piece of equipment, I noticed Angie glance up into her rear-view mirror.
“Good,” I thought, “she’s going to stop.”
But no, that would have been the normal course of action when one realizes that perhaps there was a problem, what with the back of the SUV now obviously sitting on top of something, but then again, we are dealing with a far from normal person whose own universe is solely just that, her own. Angie just did what Angie always does when presented with a confusing situation…. Full steam ahead!
She gunned the powerful engine and rode the pump assembly out into the middle of the street. Then put her vehicle of destruction into drive and dropped down off the now severely mangled box and headed off down the street to destinations unknown, most probably even to her. This left the neighbors to watch her poor husband climb out of his truck and walk over to the battered box in the middle of the street muttering to himself words that are not allowed to be muttered out loud.
I must say that the packing company knows their business. The equipment which I was assuming would be irreparably damaged wasn’t even scratched despite the severely battered appearance of the packaging. By now some of our kids were outside due to the noisy commotion made by their father’s excited reaction to the effects of the mini hurricane he refers to as his wife and their mother.
They smiled slightly as I related the experience with “that woman I married! I must have been insane!” they knowingly nodded and patted me kindly on the back as if to say.
“Yes, father, we love you and you will live through this. Remember, we are putting her in the care home when she gets older but you, you we will take home.”
Their father’s final comment was.
“I wonder how she remembers to breathe?”
The kids helped me get the equipment into the back yard and in short order I had it hooked up and working.
Several hours later I was working on some paperwork in our office when Angie came rushing in with a concerned look on her face and asked.
“Have you seen the new pool pump anywhere?”
I calmly looked at her and thanks to several bottles of liquid medication also known as beer replied.
“Yes, I was watching as you pushed it into the street and backed up over it.”
“Oh,” she replied with her normal downward glance of guilt, “I was afraid that was what it was.”
“And when is it exactly you realized this?” I asked.
“Oh, about two hours later when I pulled into the parking lot of Raley’s”.
I had to ask, “I noticed you looked in your rear-view mirror when the SUV rose up, why didn’t you stop?”
Her reply was classical Angie, “It wasn’t trash day.”
After further questioning her reply made sense, not to me, or to any other person with a normal thought pattern, but she was satisfied with it. It seems, unbeknownst to her long-suffering husband, that almost every trash day she backs over the trash can. This is although her husband intentionally puts them nowhere near the vehicles to prevent such an occurrence. When the SUV raised up, she simply looked up and down the street and saw that the neighbor’s trash cans were not out, so it was not trash day. Seeing as how this was the case, it must have been nothing that rose the vehicle! So off she went. I often wonder how the neighborhood kids managed to survive their childhood with such logic operating a three-ton rolling vehicle of destruction.
Another example of the “Wonderful World of Angie” took place while we were out in our door-to-door ministry on a Saturday morning. We had taken with us the Hale family and Angie was working with their 8-year-old daughter, Anna. Earlier in the morning Angie had experienced a slight wardrobe malfunction. It seems that the elastic band on her underwear had decided to go on strike and stop working at all. Gravity, being what it is, kicked in and the result was a sudden appearance of Angie’s panties around her ankles. Of course, Angie’s solution to the problem was to walk rather bowlegged to prevent the rapid descent of the offending panty. I watched her walk off with Anna in a strange cowboy sort of way and then lean down to Anna and whisper something to her when they reached the door. No one was answering the door, so Angie pulled off a near perfect imitation of John Wayne on her way back out to the street to where I was standing with Anna’s little brother, Jacob. I couldn’t resist chuckling to myself at her approach. I asked her.
“What did you say to Anna when you got to the door?”
“Oh,” Angie replied, “I just told her to let me know if she sees my underwear fall off while I was talking.”
My mind raced with several imagined scenarios of the poor homeowner’s conversation with their mate after Angie’s visit.
“I discovered something I never knew about Jehovah’s Witnesses just now dear. Every time they open their Bible, their underwear falls off.”
Angie was and still is the perfect wife/mother for our unique family. She does, however, have a few slight phobias that make life more interesting. One of her biggest fears is food spoiling. This, combined with her pack rat habit of never throwing anything away, makes for some interesting situations. Angie’s theory as to when to clean out the refrigerator is when you see a small revolution going on inside the fridge between the veggies and the meats. Your first clue that maybe it was that time is when you open the door and find a moldy peach holding a gun on the brown lettuce. This is a perfect indication that your food has gone bad.
One year, when our daughter Marisa was in elementary school, Angie had made a bag lunch as usual for her to take to school. When it was lunch time, Angie was making a sandwich for Ben who was still at home when she noticed that there might be a problem with the lunch meat she had used. Her first clue was when she went to grab it in the fridge it ran over to the other side and hid behind the gallon of half solidified milk. Her second clue was when she finally caught it, it had slipped through her fingers from the heavy coating of slime it had developed. It was then that she realized that Marisa’s lunch was potentially fatal, or at the least, she would never have to get penicillin shots again in her life. She snatched up Ben and ran three blocks down to the school and burst into the lunchroom screaming.
“Marisa! Don’t eat that!”
Normally, this kind of abrupt interruption to the lunchroom of a school would result in pandemonium and panic. Not so for this little school as all the children and teachers knew of the wonderful world of Angie. Years later Marisa finally figured out why none of her classmates would trade their lunches with her.
I have discovered in my many years married to this two-legged hurricane I refer to as my wife that I am not surprised by many out of the ordinary things. This might be because my life has been out of the ordinary ever since I can remember.
One day, early in our marriage when we lived in Idaho, I was heading out to a service call. I had just left the house and was traveling down the road when I noticed this woman running down the street towards me, she was carrying a small child under her arm. I quickly recognized that it was my beloved, and our firstborn Marisa was dangling under her arm imitating a good martini, which is always shaken, not stirred.
I stopped in the road and rolled down the window to ask her about this new exercise routine and to inquire where exactly her car was. She shouted.
“I ran out of gas down near the 7-11!”
I looked up the street and saw Angie’s car sitting in the turn lane several blocks away. To my horror, I also saw a Twin Falls police car pulled up behind it with his lights flashing. I pulled up behind him and saw the officer walking slowly around the car while looking up and down the street for its driver. He saw me and walked over while I hastily explained it was my wife’s car and that she had run out of gas.
“Where is she then?” he queried.
I simply pointed back down the street and he saw her running back again, still dangling our daughter under one arm. He simply smiled and shook his head and then asked if I would like some help pushing the car across the street to the gas pumps not 100’ away at the 7-11. I thanked the kind officer when we stopped her car in front of the pump, and I had the nozzle in the tank when Angie came running up.
I asked, “Why didn’t you just push the car across the street to get gas?”
“Oh,” was her reply, this is always her reply to any commonsense question presented to her.
Today, she is still doing this sort of thing but with the invention of the cell phone I now get several frantic calls a day, that is, when she remembers to take her phone, that is if it’s charged, that is, if she can find it in whatever safe place, she put it.
As you can see, Angie’s solutions to life’s everyday problems are not the normal way people deal with the mundane things in life. As mentioned before, Angie is the kind of person who never throws anything away. She just relocates it to another place so she doesn’t see it and have to make a decision about what to do with it. This also applies to the dry cleaning and stuff that she needs to return to other people. The most common “hiding place” Angie has for such things are the rear compartment of her SUV. The only problem is when she must put something else in the back; she must find another place for the contents that are already there.
This was the case with my suits that were supposed to go to the cleaners. She was again off on a very important mission of which she wasn’t quite yet sure of what it exactly was, but it was important anyway. She opened the back of the SUV and discovered it was full already of the dry cleaning she forgot to take in several weeks earlier.
“Now where am I going to put this?” she thought to herself.
Her solution was to put them in the driveway behind the travel trailer, right next to the garbage cans so that nobody, including herself, could see them.
For the next several weeks that was the hiding place of my suits until one day Angie walked behind the trailer and saw this pile of strange clothes laying there.
“What in the world is this?” she said to herself.
Upon further examination she realized it was the dry cleaning she had lost last month. Seeing as how she had already forgotten what she was on her way to do she decided to finally drop them off at the cleaners. She threw the clothing back into the rear of the SUV again and she was off on her mission. She took the clothes into the cleaners and deposited them on the counter. The lady behind the counter said she would be right with her, and Angie started sorting through the pile to separate the different types of clothing. She noticed many small white things in the clothes and thought to herself.
“How did this rice get in here?”
It was then she noticed the “rice” was moving and realized that instead of the main staple of most of the third world she had brought hundreds of future flying pests into the drycleaners. Maggots, to be exact, lots and lots of maggots. You see, another unique habit my sons have is that when they have exhausted their excuses and/or reasons for not taking the trash out, which probably took three times the effort than the requested task, they consider the job well done if said trash lands within a five-foot circle of the container, never mind if the lid is open or not. This added joy in my life resulted in the inclusion of these little rice imposters into our dry cleaning. Angie’s solution to this dilemma was to quickly shake out the clothing and sweep the wiggling masses on the floor where the clerk could not see them. Remember Angie’s motto “Out of sight, out of mind”!
With the preceding accounts in mind this next story should make a lot of sense. I had taken the boys to the movies and Angie had stayed home. When we got back around 11pm we heard Angie snoring through the bedroom walls. Angie is world famous for her ability to project the loudest known sound to man during her sleep. I have become accustomed to it, but it is quite noticeable to others. On one occasion I had to stop our #3 child, Ashley, from asphyxiating her in the middle of the night when she shared the hotel room with us during a trip. I had awakened to find Ashley hovering over her mother with a pillow in her hand and a wild look in her eyes.
I asked, “What are you doing?”
“I can’t take it anymore” she said, “I haven’t slept all night!”
I advised my beloved daughter that, although I could sympathize, I didn’t feel her actions were appropriate and that I didn’t think prison life would suit her very well, however, just to be on the safe side, I did promise to visit regularly.
As the boys and I entered the house I thought it would be best to at least let Angie know we were home. If she is not advised of the presence of others in the house it could very well result in one of the infamous “naked mother” sightings that has shocked and scarred many an unsuspecting visitor.
As I opened the bedroom door, I was greeted with one of the most unique sights I’ve witnessed to date. The lights were on, the TV was blaring and there, sprawled out in the most un-lady like fashion possible (here the word “splayed” comes to mind) was my beloved wife. The lower area of her anatomy was thankfully covered by the sheet, the upper half, however, was not.
To add to this disturbing vision was that right next to her, on my side of the bed, laid our eighty-five-pound, boxer mix, Jack, snoring loudly and sprawled out in the popular “splayed” position of the evening in all his thankfully neutered glory. The first thought that occurred to me was that something very, very wrong had transpired in this room.
The second thought that occurred to me was “Where’s my camera?!”
Sadly, before I could act on my idea the mother of my children, bride of my youth and living proof that gravity has severe effects on us all over time awoke with a ladylike snort.
“What’s wrong?” was her barely intelligible question.
“Nothing my dear” I replied, “everything is just as normal as it always is here.”