The Test of Our Progress

(continued from yesterday…)

Johnny did not, in fact, take his birthday money to the pub on Thursday night.

The plan for Thursday night was to at long last do that kitchen floor. We did, after all, have eighteen people coming for corned beef on Saturday. It didn't make sense to get this close to finished-finished and not cross the line before the guests arrived. Johnny said the job would take a couple hours; his plan was to shut me in the bedroom with the cats at 9:00 p.m. or so and finish it up by eleven, so as to give it the entire night to dry. He didn’t want to go to the pub early, therefore, because he prides himself on his work (especially in his own home) and – although I know some of you will find this shocking – he doesn’t always come home from the pub in a condition conducive to meticulosity.

I was on board with the no-pub plan, but I didn’t think the bedtime thing was necessary. I have a bathroom and a tv in my bedroom; with a bag or two of Baked Ruffles and a few liters of Diet Coke, I could happily hole up in there for days. And if I should suddenly remember I’m supposed to be accomplishing something with my life instead of shortening it with chemicals and wasting it on the social and siliconic intricacies of Bret Michael’s Rock of Love, then I can get to my office without passing through the kitchen by going out through the AssVac's posterior and back in through the front. But Johnny insisted the bedtime thing was the best plan, and I do always (as I’ve said before) acquiesce to him in matters regarding the trade he’s been practicing for thirty years.

(Oh. I might have written in this space last week that he’d been practicing his trade for forty years – I may even have accidentally put those words in his own mouth – but it’s not true. If it was forty years then he would’ve had to been at it when he was nine, which is obviously absurd. When he was nine, der, he was in school. Between that and delivering milk before, coal after, and meat for the butcher shop on weekends -- when would he have ever found the time to paint?)*

So I deferred to his judgment on the waiting-for-bedtime thing, and we decided to wait for bedtime together. Sitting across the kitchen table from one another. Admiring our (for which read: mostly his) handiwork around the room. Trying to remember what it once looked like. And, um, well, quite honestly, drinking a lot of beer.

Needless to say, by bedtime Johnny was in no condition for meticulosity. Nor was I, for that matter, as documented by the inedible squash casserole it took me hours to produce. So we decided we were just fine with our eighteen guests on Saturday seeing the floor as it was. Hell, last year when they came the room was half-and-half, and the year before that we cooked in crockpots in the living room and washed dishes in the tub. That damn floor will just be the final step of kitchen progress for all to ooh-and-ah over next year! Yay! I'm really drunk! Let’s go to bed!

But first, let’s have some ramen noodles. Because I'm also really starving, and there ain't enough beer in the world to make that squash casserole taste good.


*This is me, hedging against future corrections: I may have those details slightly wrong. It may have been butcher after school and coal on weekends, or whatever. And the “nine years old” thing might just be a convenient writerly construct. He might have been eleven at the time, or eight. I don't remember, and I can’t run it past him right now because he’s all hopped up on Vicodin. Why? Well, I guess you’ll just have to wait and see...