James M. Redwine

Females/Pick on Peg

Rome Was Built In A Day

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In the musical My Fair Lady by Lerner and Loewe Professor Henry Higgins is a middle-aged speech specialist who attempts to pass off the cockney flower girl Eliza Doolittle as a socialite. Eliza is young, crude, pretty and most of all female. Her audacious resistance to Higgins’ efforts to turn her into a fraud is beyond frustrating to Higgins. He sums up his Eliza dealings with a statement to his co-conspirator Colonel Hugh Pickering, “Why can’t a woman be more like a man?”

I suggest the main reason My Fair Lady is one of the most successful musicals in history is this eons long male quest to control or at least understand their female companions. Every man, especially every married man, commiserates with Professor Higgins. When Higgins asks Pickering if Pickering would get upset if he did not speak to him for hours or if he forgot Pickering’s birthday, Pickering scoffs and replies, “Of course not”.

The reason I raise this subject pertains to Peg’s totally unreasonable reaction to my involvement in our move from Posey County, Indiana to Osage County, Oklahoma. I don’t get it. Regardless of what activity or inactivity I am currently engaged or unengaged in Peg believes I should be doing something else, something she declares is essential to national security or at least to getting us moved. And whatever it is it is vital that it be done immediately! No time to finish watching a ballgame or drink a cup of morning coffee or an afternoon beer.

Let’s take yesterday as an example of Peg’s recalcitrant attitude. I will leave up to all fair-minded husbands if I was in the right. Wives need not trouble themselves with a response.

I turned on the television about eight a.m. and was in the process of continuously switching between CNN and FOX in the hope of finding some news squeezed among the vitriolic diatribes at both ends of the impeachment debacle. My coffee had hardly cooled when Peg burst into the den with fire in her eyes and a dust rag in her hand.

“The buyers must never know we lived here for twelve years without dusting behind those boxes in the closet. Are you about ready to quit griping about the national news media and the government and help me?”

“Uh, can I finish my coffee or will Rome fall if I don’t immediately go searching for dust devils?”

“Oh, don’t let me interrupt your delving into the fine points of who did what, to whom and when. I am sure they will contact you for your solution to war in the Middle East!” I ask you, husbands of the world, does such sarcasm sound familiar? I calmly responded it appeared to me the dusting and packing of yet another item we had not used for years could probably safely wait until my coffee was finished. Such was not to be.

Anyway, it does appear we will get completely packed up this year. I am looking forward to my instructions on unloading and unpacking out on the prairie. Wish me luck all my fellow testosterone travelers.

P.S. From Peg, who has to type all these Gavel Gamut articles, post them to the jamesmredwine.com website, Facebook, and send them on to the newspapers, which happens to take 3 hours of her Friday because the author waits until the last minute to write them: “No wonder the National Organization of Women’s credo is ‘Men just don’t get it!’. And, by the way, I am more like a man! I have had to help my Dear Jungle Jim move quite a few pieces of heavy furniture from one room to another because he decided he wanted them in a different room than the moving crew originally moved them into!”

Nothing’s Plenty For Me

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The First Load, not The Last!

For those of you who read last week’s Gavel Gamut and are wondering about Peg’s and my cinematic futures let me report we have not yet received a call from Martin Scorsese. I know he has been busy. We remain both confident and hopeful. However, as we await stardom life goes on. Specifically, what we have going on is the interminable saga of our move from JPeg Ranch Hoosier in Posey County, Indiana to JPeg Osage Ranch in Osage County, Oklahoma.

Peg and I bought a cabin in Osage County last December. Our plan was to vacation there occasionally as we have numerous family members in Oklahoma. What we have discovered is the truism of the ancient admonition, “Where your treasure is there will your heart be also.” And as our modest treasure has ever so increasingly been “invested” in the cabin we have slowly shifted our focus to the Tall Grass Prairie. Let me say the simple pleasures described by Laura Ingalls Wilder in her Little House on the Prairie books have been put in jeopardy by our transition.

We are in the throes of our tenth round trip of 1,200 miles with a loaded trailer and pickup.  (This time we have graduated to a U-Haul, my guess is Atlas Van Lines is in our future). At first we amused ourselves with the bucolic image of The Beverly Hillbillies with junk piled high as they headed west. After a couple of trips the analogy became too apt. Now we feel more closely aligned with the fate of Sisyphus. We are not sure why, but it seems the completion of one trip only guarantees we must start another. And what we have discovered is that no matter what household item we need in one place is always in the other. We now have duplicates of everything from can openers to skillets.

Peg and I used to wonder how other people had such difficulty with everyday tasks such as how does one keep track of where they put what. Now we get it. However, the question we now most often ask one another is, “Why did you ever buy that?” We are continually discovering items that have not surfaced in years, many still in their original packaging. Of course, we must pack and move them anyway. This phenomenon has tested our ability to refrain from asking one another, “Can we just throw that away?”

I have found that a great deal of what Peg holds to be indispensable is really superfluous. And I resent her attitude about many of the items in my Man Cave; wait until we start on the junk in her Girl Cave. She does not understand that I might need some of what she calls worthless items someday. I suggest we ask the husbands of the world to fairly judge what should be placed in the Conestoga and what should be dumped along the trail.

What Peg and I do agree on is the mystery of how over thousands of years we have gone from maintaining what is truly essential to accumulating thousands of items we forget we have. George Gershwin’s old song goes:

♫ I got plenty of nothing

And nothing is plenty for me.

I got no car.

I got no mule.

Got no misery. ♫

Porgy and Bess (1935)

Well, paring down to the essentials is a fine thought but I must end this column as Peg is calling out to me to load another box onto the trailer.

Hang Together Or Separately

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You may already know Peg and I bought a log cabin in Osage County, Oklahoma. Our home in Posey County, Indiana is a converted barn with 4,000 square feet of finished space and our barn/home also has a barn. Our cabin in Oklahoma is 2,000 square feet and we had to add a barn. Four thousand square feet of stuff does not smoothly fit in 2,000 square feet of space. However, my suggestion to Peg that we simply leave everything but our toothbrushes was not kindly received. Ergo, we are in the process of triage. I have learned the hard way to not suggest which items are disposable. My role is to take down and re-hang not to judge what should be preserved.

Benjamin Franklin and his wife, Deborah, lived much of their married life separated by the Atlantic Ocean as Ben served as Minister to France while Deborah refused to accompany him. But they managed to raise three children and stay married for many years. I suspect their marital success was in large part due to staying put in one house most of their marriage. When Ben’s famous quote, “We must hang together or we will surely hang separately”, is cited most people probably assume Ben was talking about our Revolution from Great Britain. I propose he was giving marital advice. You know Ben was famous and got rich for his advice column Poor Richard’s Almanac. Why not accept that he was an early Ann Landers?

What I think Ben meant was, if you and your spouse wish to avoid all out warfare, you should never engage in moving and especially not in what should be hung and where. For example, when I was sixteen my parents moved one block to a different house. Our family had three pictures on the walls. One was a black and white 8” x 10” photograph of our immediate family and the other two were Leonardo da Vinci’s Last Supper (not the original) and some European’s creation of a blond-haired Jesus. All three were taken down by my mother and put back up by my father. No argument, no stress.

On the other hand, Peg and I have countless photos of us, of our three kids and their spouses, of our seven grandkids, some of whom already have spouses, and one great-grand kid. We have knickknacks from family vacations, from gifts and from school projects. Every wall in our Indiana home/barn is festooned with something. And Peg demands all of it must be hung in our much smaller Oklahoma cabin. Of course all our furniture has to be carefully placed somewhere too. Well, you see the dilemma.

We are gingerly adjusting to this new strain of “Cabin Fever”, but there is a constant simmering of strife just below the lip-biting surface. My position is usually reasoned and rational, but Peg’s is often influenced by emotion. For example, yesterday we spent over an hour negotiating if a forty-pound mirror should be saved and, if so, where would it go? Peg’s position was it is a family heirloom and my response about it not being from my side of the family was not charitably received. The mirror now hangs in its new location.

Peg and I have now made nine trips to the cabin with items crammed onto a trailer and in a car (SUV) and a pickup. We have about two more trips to go. Each trip takes about twelve hours each way and requires a day to load and another day to unload. The nitty gritty of what goes where will consume the remainder of our lives and marriage.

Now, if you Gentle Reader, wish to be a modern day Ben Franklin marriage saver, feel free to give us a hand and bring a truck!

 

Eden Revisited

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*** Update from Peg: After reading this article please see pictures below along with explanation! ***

The Garden of Eden set a standard no other garden can match. All Adam and Eve had to do was wander around fig leaf-less and enjoy earth’s bounty. Well, there was that small inconvenience of avoiding the fruit of one tree, but even with that tree there was no pruning, no Japanese beetles and no cultivation. Not even the concept of weeding and tilling were mentioned. In sum, neither a hoe nor Roundup were issues. There was no need for Adam to devise strategies to avoid his wife’s complaints that Mother Nature was winning the battle over whether fruits and vegetables or crabgrass would dominate. Adam could simply prop up his feet and, if he could have accessed cable T.V., watch football without guilt. Ah, if only Peg’s garden were the same.

“Jim, have you even looked at the garden recently? I have no idea what that stuff is growing out there but it sure is not the late-season vegetables I planted. It is humiliating to see the neighbors’ weed-free plants. Don’t you care?”

I bit my tongue and suppressed a truthful response. “Would you like for me to till the garden AGAIN?” Then I suggested IGA had a cornucopia of ripe and blemish-free tomatoes and onions. “You know, Peg, grocery stores need our business.We should try to be good community members and help keep those folks employed.” That sounded reasonable, to me.

“We buy plenty of groceries that we can’t grow such as paper products, detergent, peanut butter, and practically everything else we need. The stores won’t close if you weed our garden so we can grow a few fresh tomatoes. Is that stupid football game about over?” I did not tell her it was the third game of the day.

As I put down my iced tea and forced myself off the couch my life flashed through my brain. How did this come to be? Did it go all the way back to Eve? Did her seemingly benign offering of a weed-free apple to Adam determine the fate for all husbands for all time? And if it is not too impertinent to raise this issue, why did God include weeds in His grand scheme anyway? It’s probably as simple as He didn’t have a wife so He wasn’t worried.

Anyway, I slowly went from my cool den to my hot barn and found my two-cycle gas tiller. The tiller was about as reluctant as I was to face the hopelessly entwined non-edible vegetation. I primed the engine. I used starter fluid. I pulled on the cord for what seemed like an hour, so much so I caused a blister, before the tiller gave up and started. Then I trudged through the tangled mess that Peg claims is a garden. I completely understood the poetic analogy of William Cullen Bryant’s poem Thanatopsis in which he cautioned against approaching death (or gardening) like one being “scourged to his dungeon”. What I could not do was conquer my desire to dig out my old container of 2-4D and use the nuclear option. Unfortunately, Peg had anticipated just such a course of action and she had already disposed of it.

Okay, after only two hours and one blister the garden was tilled. Perhaps it will be at least two weeks before the weeds reemerge in all their sardonic evil. Once again, I ask you, would it have been too hard to design the whole thing better?

P.S. From Peg:

Folks, don’t feel too sorry for my hubby. Our neighbor, Chuck Minnette, took pity on him and offered to help as per the pictures below!

Table Talk

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F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby is generally regarded as a portrayal of the evils of America’s wealth-driven culture. I suggest it really was about Fitzgerald’s tumultuous marriage to his wife Zelda who constantly drove him crazy. When the book’s narrator, Nick Carraway, says about the wealthy Tom and Daisy Buchanan, “Let me tell you about the very rich. They are different from you and me”, I submit Fitzgerald really has Zelda in mind for Daisy. And he is not referencing Daisy’s money but her infuriating ability to easily manipulate Jay Gatsby and, ergo, Zelda’s penchant to drive Fitzgerald over the edge.

It is the institution of marriage, especially Fitzgerald’s complete inability to keep up with Zelda, that was the impetus for one of America’s great novels. Most married couples can relate to such a theme. For example, let’s you and I consider the dynamics between Peg and me as we negotiate our move from Posey County, Indiana to Osage County, Oklahoma. If there is anything more challenging than paddling a canoe for a couple it is moving.

I do want to be fair in relating both Peg’s and my viewpoints on the matter, but let me point out it was not Adam who first suggested taking a bite of that apple; original sin in-deed! Anyway, let’s start at the beginning when Peg first saw our cabin on the prairie.

“Oh, Jim, it is perfect.” That should have been my clue but then I am a man and female-speak will forever remain a foreign language. I did not comprehend that by perfect Peg meant everything from the yard to the interior absolutely required change. Let me suggest the fact that women generally outlive men by several years disproves Dr. Joseph Brady’s Executive Monkey Theory.

You may recall that in 1958 Brady published the results of his psychology experiment in which two monkeys would both be shocked if one of them did not “correctly” press a lever. One monkey had control, the Executive (or wife), and one monkey (or husband) had no control. The non-executive felt no pressure and lived a normal life. But the Executive died young. So, there, Dr. Brady; why do not us non-executive men live longer? But back to our move to the prairie.

Please allow me to cite just one example of a marital disaster in moving. It involves our “new” antique dining table that Peg saw as perfect until we moved it into the cabin. Then she demanded I modify it so there was more leg room. Not being completely obtuse I referred the problem to an expert, our general contractor in charge of implementing all of Peg’s changes to our once perfect property. Gentle Reader, I assume you agree that tables play a huge role in our lives. There is Leonardo da Vinci’s table of the Last Supper. There is Sir Thomas Malory’s Round Table in Le Morte d’Arthur. There were the endless squabbles over the shape of the “peace” talk tables between South and North Korea and South and North Vietnam. And there is Peg’s once perfect antique dining table.

So, I told Mark, our highly skilled contractor, about my problem and he, also of the male persuasion and also not conversant in female-speak, volunteered to help. You know what they say about good deeds. Mark understood the problem to be not that the sides of the table were too low to allow leg room, but that the whole table was too tall. When Peg saw all four legs had been cut off by four inches, well, somethings cannot be printed in a family newspaper.

All’s well that ends well however as Mark was able to apply his magic and restore Peg’s table including ample leg room. Peg, of course, never blamed Mark anyway. I am the one who had to deal with my own Zelda crisis. Well, Gentle Reader, let’s just table that thought!

The Armadillos Cometh

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Last week Peg and I drove down I-44 from the eastern edge of Missouri to the eastern edge of Oklahoma. We observed the remains of a few deer, several opossums, one or two raccoons and over one hundred dead armadillos on the roadside. The normal final position of an armadillo was on its scaled back with its clawed paws stuck straight up. Occasionally a beer can would be nestled among the claws. Frequently the carcasses were totally flat. This phenomenon occurred so often it became obvious people went out of their way to squash the critters. Such a violent reaction to the mere existence of the armadillos becomes understandable if one should have to deal with the creatures on a daily basis.

Gentle Reader, you probably grew up as I did encountering an armadillo only when you wandered through northern Mexico or, perhaps, southern Arizona, New Mexico, Texas or California. I recall being amused by the resemblance to something akin to a roly-poly dinosaur. And the sightings were so rare I was excited to come across one of the adorable little oddities of nature.

It was not until the beginning of the 21st century that I began to notice the evermore prevalent incursions of armadillos as they have migrated north, east and west. Peg, who was born in New York and reared in Indiana by way of Massachusetts, used to be amazed at the “little armored ones” as named by Spanish speaking peoples in South America. In fact, as we arrived last week to our cabin in North-East Oklahoma we almost ran over an armadillo waddling along the lane to our door.

“Oh, Jim, look, we have our very own armadillo!” I kept my thoughts to myself but they involved a shotgun.

The day after we arrived Peg was all excited to go to Lowe’s and purchase about $300.00 worth of plants such as herbs, vegetables and flowers. She worked all of one day planting, watering and protecting them from rabbits and deer with special fencing. Actually, Peg instructed me in this regard. Regardless, when we checked on the plants the next day every one had been clawed up by a “cute” armadillo looking for grubs, ants and worms.

Peg’s response was about like one might expect when asking Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi how much she planned to contribute to President Donald Trump’s 2020 re-election campaign. As this article will appear in several family-oriented newspapers I shall not quote Peg’s actual words other than the part where she asked, “Where’s your shotgun?”