How Entertaining

Let's just be clear about something right up front:

Martha Stewart doesn't live here.

If she did, she'd probably be either handcuffed to a pipe in the basement lavatory, or her severed head would be the centerpiece on our dining room table.

Hungry?

In our house for a little less than a year, my dear, sweet wife and I are newly minted entertainers. Actually, we're more like probationary entertainers. If entertaining were more heavily regulated, as it should be, there would be a Field Training Officer stationed in our kitchen to closely supervise us on those dubious and exciting and rare Saturday nights when we decide to get a little frisky and admit a non-blood relative into our abode for a little chinwag and some home-made grubbage.

Now, at the risk of offending some "group" other other, my wife and I are social retards. Give us a Honda Fit and a six-hour ride to Rhode Island, or a sofa and two cups of tea and an episode of "Intervention" and we know just what to do-- very, very well. Throw a third or, God forbid, fourth person into the interior walls of our house, and our brains simultaneously catch fire.

Preparation for a guest is never fun, but I'm sure it helps to have several Dominican servants, a Roomba, or that mechanized bitch with the feather-duster from "The Jetsons " who, I think, would be the perfect combination of both. In the Apron home, it's just the missus and I, and our various, colorful mental profundities. And, at times, a dry Swiffer cloth.

The prospect of having anyone enter our home instantly turns me into a raving maniac. The thought of people who have the ability to observe, perceive, smell, judge, and then return to other people with similar capabilities and then report their and observations findings turns my stomach into eight-month-old ricotta cheese. I am able to see the disorder, clutter, and chaos that comes from activities of daily life engaged in by two busy, creative, harried, well-meaning though absent-minded people, but when I know someone is coming to our home, every item that lies in disarray suddenly has a bawling four-year-old child standing on it, screaming incessantly, wailing at the top of its lungs, begging to be changed or whatever four-year-olds scream about. In essence, every clump of dog hair, every coat carelessly thrown on the back of every dining room chair, every out-of-date Jo-Ann circular on the coffee table is instantly, suddenly, and dramatically calling out to me, loudly, to be dealt with immediately.

This is not pleasant for my wife.

I rush around like a wild animal, scooping up fur-coated dog toys, dragging my shoe-covered foot against the entire length of the living room rug to pick up dog hair (why vacuum when this is so much more... athletic?), I have three coats, three hoodies, one jacket, two hats and one scarf in my hands as I stumble upstairs and downstairs like a fucking lunatic. My wife, meanwhile, is in the kitchen, calmly wiping down the countertops, methodically making lists of everything we need from the supermarket, and trying her best not to get run over by the coat-covered freight train that is careening throughout the house.

Because I am obsessed with time, I am also constantly preoccupied that the concentration camp-style cleaning operations, the food shopping and, most importantly, the meal preparation will not be completed on time. Insecure, panicked and sweating out my ass, I pepper my wife with maddening questions and unhelpful comments.

"How much time does the lasagna have to cook for?"

"Shouldn't we have set the table already?"

"I wish this didn't have to cook for so long."

"What time is it?"

"Let's just scrap the bread."

"What time is it?"

"What if she gets here and it's not done?"

"These zucchini aren't going to be done in ten minutes."

"Why don't we have a bigger saucepan?"

"What time is it?"

That I have not yet been stabbed in the neck with a salad tong is a fucking miracle.

Of course, our guest, who was supposed to be at our house at 5:00pm, called at 4:54pm to report that she was just leaving her apartment, a mere 20 minutes away.

"Oh, so you mean you're going to be late?" I asked her. She laughed.

I'm glad people know me so well.

Entertaining is supposed to be entertaining, I think, but not for the people who are doing it. Once the company gets there, I'm usually more relaxed than I am before they arrive. I'm able to let down my guard, I can be funny and self-deprecating and spill liquids on my trousers and make awkward sexual comments or absurd cultural references that nobody else understands. This is what people expect out of a dinner with me, so they're not usually surprised, or disappointed. When my wife is involved, they know to also expect much cuteness, laughter, and delectable desserts. Tonight was chocolate-covered pecan bars, still warm and soft.

Thank God she's here. Because, when I get really nuts before the guests arrive, she's always there to soothe me, reassure me, give me some task to do that's nearly impossible to ruin, or shove a chocolate chip into my mouth to shut me the fuck up.

Fantastic Mr. Apron

My oldest sister is 42 or whatever. She lives in a spotless condominium that contains super-expensive white leather furniture that she is afraid to sit on. Nobody else lives with her in her condo, save for two stuffed dogs whom she calls Genevieve and Bedford.

Her idea of a good time is going over to my parents house so my mother can make her toast and eggs, and my father can make her coffee. Actually, she never really has a good time when she's there, so maybe it's her idea of a bad time, just with food. She is very fond of the coffee. After she's efficiently polished off a cup, the manner in which she attacks the innards of the basically empty mug borders on pornographic.

She has some sort of gastrointestinal malfunction that severely limits what and when she can eat. Though my oldest sister burps frequently, seismically, and athletically, I don't think she has farted since 1997.

She is frequently berated, belittled and beseiged with the inanities of an unappreciative family and an unkind world. It is because of this that my wife and I take my oldest sister out to the movies.

They're usually kid movies, because that's sort of where she's at. I don't suppose it's any coincidence that one of her favorite television shows is "Arrested Development" because that basically describes her perfectly. Her second favorite show, by the way, is "Sponge Bob."

I don't mind going to kids movies with my wife and my oldest sister. She can saddle up that tricycle anytime she feels the need to. Sometimes, though, I get sad when I think about what might have been for her. If my mother didn't get pregnant at 17 or 18 or whenever it was. If her first marriage didn't collapse. If my other sister and I hadn't come along. Would it have been radically different? Would we be seeing her on "SNL" or be greedily reading her "Going Rogue" right now?

Well, maybe it is good we came along after all.

When she was still living at my parents house at age 26, it was easy, and funny, for me to envision what the next fifteen-or-so years were going to look like for her. As we've grown older, I suppose it is still easy, though sharply less funny, to picture her future. Needless to say, it will most likely involve lots of plastic-covered furniture, a Jamaican nurse, a 20-year supply of Chocolate "Ensure" drinks, and several restraining orders.

Earlier this year she announced that, if her life doesn't change drastically by the time she's 50, she's buying herself a Maserati. Or maybe it was 45. I suppose I wasn't really listening closely enough-- which is typical, really. Not, of course, that her acquisition of a Maserati will encourage people necessarily to listen to her-- but they'll certainly see her coming.

My wife often tells me that I'm "a good brother." I don't really know what means. Is it sending holiday cards? Because, I don't do that. Is it sending funny emails to my sister when she forwards me text alerts from the local police department about college students getting donked on the head and robbed at gunpoint? Well, that I do-- but that's kind of just what I do. Is it taking her to the movies whenever something rated PG comes down the pike? Maybe.

Two weeks ago, we saw "The Fantastic Mr. Fox," and we all loved it mercilessly together. I think mostly because it's about a fucked up family that has a penchant for dressing interestingly and saying the wrong thing.

Travel Plans

My wife's funny.

We're trying to decide where to go on vacation this summer.

"We should go on one last big trip before we have a baby," she says. That sounds reasonable enough.

"Great," I reply. Where?"

"Oh, I don't know. Somewhere on a plane."

"Ah."

My wife loves to try and get me to do things I hate doing-- like recycling. And flying. She's not particularly dying to travel somewhere intercontinentally, but she wants to fly somewhere with me-- to get me out of my comfort zone. She feels this is good for me, the way that fathers feel that football is good for their pale, gawky, awkward sons. This sometimes covert, sometimes overt prodding is very similar to her insistence that I hold other peoples' children. I know part of the reason she wants me to do it is so that I get comfortable doing it, so that I'll hold our own child when we have one, and part of the reason she does it is so she can get that warm, gushy, schmoopy feeling a woman can only get when she sees her husband cradling a child, thus proving that he's not a total immature, knuckle-dragging, incompetent, retarded asshole. Every woman wants not to think that about her husband, and, even if it's true, no man really looks like that when he's holding a child, unless he's holding it upside-down, or over a balcony railing (no offense to the recently deceased).

We were originally planning on returning to Maine, like we had done last summer, only we would venture a little farther North than we did last year, to explore more of the state. I have recently been reading "Northwest Passage," an extremely poorly-written (lots of misuse of the contraction "it's" which is just unforgivable in a published work) biography of Stan Rogers, and then the idea hit me.

"Hey! Why don't we go to Maine for a little bit and then, you know, just keep going-- up to Halifax or Nova Scotia. We can go to a different country-- without flying!"

At first, my wife saw this for what it was: a totally transparent cop-out by an errant, insipid coward, but, the more I talked the idea up, the more it began to grow on her. Her parents had been up that way for a wedding recently and had nice things to say about the area. Bob, our friend who is building a master closet for us had been there with his wife and son and loved it.

"You know, instead of doing the drive, which friends of mine have done and they say it's lovely, but long, you can catch the auto ferry from Portland."

My wife's ears perked up at this. Here was an opportunity to go where I wanted to go, but to make me do another thing I don't like: travel by water.

Several years ago, we took the auto ferry from Plattsburgh, New York to Vermont and there are a couple pictures of me clutching onto the railing for dear life with a wince on my face that gives the impression some unseen bully had just smeared fresh blueberries all over my pants and called me a "faggot" but I was told I still had to smile for the picture. I think I ended up negotiating with my wife that, if I made it for the first half of the trip (probably around six minutes) that I could sit in the car for the remainder of the watery voyage.

I am very well aware that I am going to die one day, probably of a respiratory-related ailment, and though I'd like to put that off for as long as possible through constant calls to my doctor and a steady diet of maintenance inhalers, I am also pretty fanatical about avoiding dangerous situations that may hasten my demise. These situations include, but are in no way limited to:

Flying.

Taking the train.

Going out on a boat.

Flying.

Mowing the lawn.

Repairing the roof.

Walking during a thunderstorm.

Driving during a thunderstorm.

Flying during a thunderstorm.

Shoveling snow.

Getting into altercations or arguments with unknown entitites.

Parking near a BRINKS armored car.

Visiting an ATM after 7pm.

Eating the contents of any can with a visible dent.

Consuming food products past the expiration date.

Consuming medication past the expiration date.

Using public lavatories.

So I try to minimalize my chances of early demise by avoiding as many of those, and other, activities as I can, and yet, I still do lots of them-- though I'm pretty diligent about the dented can rule. You can easily spot me in the supermarket: I'm the guy obsessively fondling every goddamn can in the aisle like I'm a blind fetishist or something. But I'm really not at all crazy about flying, especially if there's no pressing reason to other than to get me to do it more (and of course, statistically, the more frequently you do it, the greater are your chances of dying while doing it-- so there) especially right before we're about to start trying to conceive. It'll make for an absolutely awful local news interview with my mom or sisters after we die over the Atlantic:

"And they were just about to start trying to have a baby.... *Boo hoo hoo!*"

Jesus-- fucking awful-- is that what I want the community to hear about me and my wife? During our honeymoon flight from Jakarta to Bali, the plane started going up and down like a fucking Yo-Yo, and that was all I could think about-- the inevitable, terrible interview sob-story that the vultures would just eat up:

"And *sniff sniff* they were on their honeymoon!"

Awful. Just fucking awful.

No thank you. I'll take that goddamn auto ferry, though. When's the last time one of those went down?

No, seriously-- will someone wikipedia that shit for me? I'm too scared to do it myself.