Married With Children

                 Holy Matrimony!

The garage at the back of the house

was absurdly cavernous;

I could have fit six of my ’79 Corollas in it,

but I only had one.

My girlfriend lived on the next street,

her carport backing up to the end of the driveway

at the far end of my block of townhouses.

The house itself was embarrassingly upmarket,

considering that I was a first-year teacher in a slum school.

It belonged to my mother.

She’d said that she’d bought it as an investment.

Then she’d said that she’d stay in the spare bedroom

when visiting her Texas grandchildren

from her place in the Keys.

Then it looked as if she was moving in

and expected to bully and dominate and abuse me at will

until her slide into dementia –

which she never mentioned

except to explain to me,

as if I were a dense preschooler,

that she was being coy about something –

left me to take care of her.

I considered absconding to Mexico,

but instead married my girlfriend

and shifted to a funky old place one suburb over.

I felt dysfunctional gratitude to that wife for years

for saving me from the inhuman old maternal unit.

It was only during the divorce negotiations

that she told me that my mother’s money

had been a major consideration

in her decision to marry me.

            Ask A Stupid Question …

When my wife was first pregnant

some boring asshole asked me

if I wanted a boy or a girl.

I opened my mouth in preparation

for going into a rant

about what a pointlessly stupid

assertion of shit values that question was,

but decided that the boring asshole

wasn’t worth the trouble

and shut it again.

He persisted:

“Well, what do you want – a boy or a girl?”

I answered, “Yes.”

“What kind of an answer is that?”

he wanted to know.

“Just a straight answer to your question:

Yes, I do want a boy or a girl.

Kittens would be embarrassing.”

“Naw, c’mon!” he insisted.

“Which one do you want?

I bet you want a boy.”

             I Should’ve Known Better

I remember only part

of my first-born’s second-birthday party.

It was on Guam.

I’d been drinking the bubbly

for most of the day,

but after I’d switched

to Johnnie Walker Black

and had started dancing

with the skinny woman

who was living in a ménage à trois

on a trimaran

with one of the other teachers

at the school where my wife taught

and that teacher’s white-bearded paramour,

I blacked out.

I discovered in the morning

that I’d barfed on the carpet.

I don’t recall seeing that slender free-lover again,

although she did send me – not us –

an xmas card about a year later.

                       One Up

One product of changing societal roles,

especially in regard to gender –

or sex – or both

(I’ve become confused in regard to being au courant

with which means what this century

as semantic fashions have changed),

a situation that was also a product

of the quirky division of labour

resulting from the basic characteristics

embedded in the personalities

and ongoing realities

of my then-wife and myself,

is that for about three years there

I was a kindy mum.

I’d bet that David Bowie,

for all he accomplished,

couldn’t say that

truthfully.

          Early-Childhood Empiricism

I forget what the little peccadillo was,

but I considered it appropriate to admonish

my then three-or-four-year-old younger daughter

in a kind but faux-shocked and scolding voice,

“Abbie! Good girls don’t do naughty things!”

She thought about it for a couple of moments,

smiled, and explained confidently,

“This one does!”

                   Bible In School

My daughters went to a primary school

in the small rural town of Otorohanga,

so I shouldn’t have been shocked

to learn it had a ‘Bible in School’ programme.

I opted out of it reflexively,

the prospect of subjecting my girls

to bullshit propaganda from adults in authority

being completely out of the question.

It was weekly, on a day that I didn’t commute,

so I was able to pick them up at the time it was scheduled,

sometimes observing the stressed-out looking Bible-banger,

the wife of a former colleague,

bustling into the school, barely able to keep

her sales-literature-for-Jesus

from blowing away from her grip.

I always took my girls to their favourite tearoom,

where I encouraged them to get whatever they wanted –

ice cream included.

If we had time afterward

I’d take them to the park across from the Kiwi House.

One time at the park a large and angry goose confronted us.

Geese can be mean creatures when they’re riled;

had God arrived to teach us a lesson?

I was defending my young, though,

and the bird’s young were nowhere in sight,

so after a standoff lasting for a couple of minutes

I launched myself in a sudden rush

and gave it a boot up the guts.

It departed.

I guess that goose hadn’t been God, after all;

at least no more than everything else.

It’s all just semantics, anyway.

Unromantic Random Romantic

She was the sort of person

who never read the instructions

and then expressed

bewildered disappointment

and sometimes outrage

when things didn’t work

the way that she expected them to.

          Domestic Bliss

She bitched at me

for not wiping all the excess water

off the kitchen bench

after I did the dishes.

I replied,

‘That’s pretty rich,

coming from somebody

who will not,

under any circumstances,

clean the filter

of the coffee plunger.’

That shut her up

for a few days.

           Mica’s Dead Now

She wasn’t much of a wife

– okay, she was a really crappy wife –

but she did have a sense of humour,

from time to time,

and when I turned fifty

– which was one of the years

when she didn’t forget my birthday –

in response to my nagging,

she hired a clown

to hit me in the face

with a pie

as my present.

So there I was,

in front of a couple dozen students

in a lecture theatre

when in walked Mica the Clown

in full regalia.

Then,

after carefully tucking a towel into my collar,

he carefully smeared the contents

of a cream pie into my face.

It was a transcendental experience.

Best birthday present ever.

I highly recommend it.

You’d have to find a different clown, though.

A few years later,

when Mica was my neighbour,

he died suddenly from a brain tumour.

         Magic & Me

For about 15 years

I was involved

with a cat named Magic.

I’m a dog person,

not a cat person,

but Magic’s nominal person,

my younger daughter,

had gone off with my nominal wife

on some overseas adventure

when Magic’d been but a sickly kitten,

leaving me to be the one

to administer the medicine,

and the scrawny feline

more or less

held me in low esteem ever afterwards,

but not as low esteem

as I hold for myself.

The way Magic died

probably reflects poorly

on me –

I should’ve made a greater effort

to comfort her whilst she was freaking out –

but I’d assumed that

someone as delicate as Magic

would outlive us all.