DIARY
A husband should never go Christmas shopping with his wife
by
Robert LaFrance
On Sunday, Nov. 27, I went Christmas
shopping with my wife. On a scale of one to ten, where ten was the worst
mistake since the Crusades, this was an eleven, perhaps a 12.
Let’s go back to the beginning: she
wanted to buy a certain item – ONE certain item of clothing she saw on a sales
sheet – at Mark’s Work Wearhouse and said she would only be about half an hour.
We had other stops in Grand Falls so I went elsewhere to do them. I said I’d be
back in 45 minutes. (I know her quite well.)
When I returned she was, as my
brother Lawrence would say, still turning things over and was no closer to
buying that one item than if I had dropped her off at the Timbuktu, Mali, Elks Club.
So I decided to have a cold bottle
of lemonade, non-alcoholic since I was driving, at Kat ‘n’ Dan’s, a nearby
restaurant. When I arrived there after a tiring walk of nearly half a minute, I
saw two tables around which were seated nine or ten men. I looked closely and I
knew most of them. Can you guess who they were?
Husbands.
They were in various stages of
mental disturbance and I knew why. Their wives were all shopping, and by the
way, that verb – ‘to shop’ – is not part of the male vocabulary. We walk in a
store, buy what we want, and go home.
Feinster had glassy eyes because, as
he said later, he had been there the longest, something like three hours. His
wife Molly was shopping for socks for their nephew. “He must have 26 feet,”
said Feinster, “because the last time I looked, her shopping cart was FULL.
I’ll have to work overtime until 2018.”
Blentan, who is from Tilley, kept
drumming his fingers on the table and muttering “damn Santa” which was right on
the verge of sacrilegious; his eyes were also glazed over and not from the
ginger ale he was drinking. “Why didn’t I stay home?” he asked no one in
particular. “She said it would take no more than an hour, guaranteed! I came in
here just after Feinster. I just checked and she hadn’t bought anything yet.”
And so it went, all around the
table. The pitiful stories of shell-shocked men, tortured beyond endurance by
their wives’ shopping. There was a theme that kept going around among them: “If
they want to buy something, why don’t they just go, pick it up, pay for it, and
go home?”
Here’s the answer to that question:
BECAUSE. Another answer might be that wives (not necessarily women in general)
are wired differently from men. ‘Shopping’ is like the Holy Grail. No, it IS
the Holy Grail. Husbands are merely the taxi drivers to hell.
After a while though, there was a
happy ending of sorts. Feinster’s wife came in first and took him by the arm as
he, slack-jawed and muttering something about Donald Trump, went out to their
car, a 1989 Gremlin. At a guess I would have said the total cost of all Molly’s
purchases would have allowed them to upgrade to at least a 1997 Lumina, but
that’s just me.
Blentan was next, followed by Ed
Sprant, George Williamski, Pierre Dumas and others I didn’t know. For a while I
was happy for them, until I realized that I was sitting there alone. And
sitting.
Just about an hour before most of
the mall stores closed, my wife appeared and it was clear she had decided to
discard me for a younger model. An athletic looking chap, perhaps a soccer
player since he seemed fit, was carrying what looked like 226 pounds (in the
metric system it would be whatever equals 226 pounds) of purchases, and he even
had some on a little trailer of sorts.
“Well,” she said, “are you ready?
I’ve been waiting by the car for almost five minutes. This is Julian, who
kindly offered to carry my packages since my husband was in here swilling
lemonade.”
She drove home. I was in no shape to
be behind the wheel where other humans, possibly husbands, were on the road. I
had had no lemonade, only a bowl of Shreddies
with peanuts, but I had been reduced to a babbling lump of incoherence.
(Don’t say it.) As we passed Portage Road, she said: “We should come up here
next weekend; there’s a big sale at Wal-Mart.”
It
was then I stood up like a man and put my foot down. “Do we have to?” I whined.-end-
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