PEOPLE: Getting Along

A smile is just agenda, and the kiss is the eraser of bad feelings in the human way of living life.

Last night we put together plastic shelving for the flooded basement room to stack the boxes off the floors in case a pinhole in the pipe decides to blow our lives for days again. An engineer and a creative spirit may have much in common, but when it comes to working well together there is usually a point of disagreement early on.

I truly don’t know if we’d produce higher quality products if given the chance again in the U.S.A., but nothing now is easy, nothing fits precisely, and it will all eventually come down to human ingenuity to make it work. When faced with a pole and a hole that it fits into but doesn’t quite straight from the box, I took my handy Stanley knife and starting shaving round the edges while he insisted I would cut myself that way. This was really just a stall until he finally couldn’t bear it and simply blurted out that I was doing it all wrong.

While I shaved and fit, and shaved and fit, the seconds ticked almost audibly in sync with the gears in my husband’s brain. He came back with the perfectly sized and gauged rasp and took the pole to work away at it while I focused on the other poles and shelves.

Relieved, I hear the phone ring and before his back is turned to go upstairs I have the knife to edge again, careful not to cut myself and prove him right of course. Before the phone stops ringing, the pole is firmly set in place. The shelving is up and standing and being loaded before the wrong number is answered and J is back downstairs, happy that “he” has fixed the problem and we seal our situation with a kiss.