One Thing I'm Thankful For

Last Monday I came home from work depressed and out-of-this-world grouchy. We were short on money at the clinic, and I thought we were going to have to cut back on our pharmacy purchases, which is how we supply the uninsured in Dayton with the kind of drugs you can't buy at Wal-Mart for $4.

(By the way, you know what the difference is between the statins (hypertension drugs) that retail for $4 and the ones that cost $100+? The expensive ones don’t have the side effect of causing erectile dysfunction.)

As soon as I got home, I started making sloppy joes with a solidly-frozen 3 lb. roll of ground turkey Old Dog had purchased at the grocery last week. Once I finally got it thawed, it wouldn't fit into any pan that I have, so I kept spilling stuff onto the stove, which promptly scorched, sending up clouds of burnt grease and tomato sauce stench. Every time I’d yell (and this was, minimum, a 15 cuss-word dinner prep), Old Dog would say, “What’s wrong?”

And I’d respond, “Someone bought three [expletive deleted] pounds of ground turkey and it won’t fit into the [expletive deleted] pan, [expletive deleted].”

The first time, he responded, reasonably enough, “You had two pounds on the list, and they didn’t have a two-pound roll.”

“Did it occur to you,” I snarled, “to buy two one pound rolls?”

A half hour later, when I finally had sloppy-joes-for-20 simmering in a big soup pot, he came into the computer room to check on me and I growled at him again.

It wasn’t until 7:30, when the joes (which I make with onion and green pepper and spinach, and they’re really good) were finally ready, that I sat down to watch TV with him and this is why he’s the perfect husband for me:

Because instead of continuing the fight, he just put his arm around my shoulders, smoothed my hair, and said, “Better now?”

And it was.