Time to reset relations

I don’t play many tricks on my wife, but this one was a doozy. In the early days of PCs (and our marriage), we owned a Leading Edge computer that I apparently spent a little too much time using for Elena. “Leda,” as Elena dubbed her, was her competition, the “other woman.” And one day, Leda spoke her mind.

These pre-Windows machines ran a text-based operating system that fogies-in-training will recall as DOS, and when the computer was done booting up it would say so by displaying what was called a prompt; “C/:>” was the usual one. But geeks like me knew you could change the prompt to whatever you wanted. So one morning I asked Elena to turn on the computer while I was shaving, and—to keep her at the screen—to launch a certain program. This time the prompt read: “GET AWAY FROM ME I WANT MY EDDIE:>”

That behavior could be explained. Today, we’re ready to call in an exorcist.

The letters “O” and “X” stand for hug and kiss, so I guess her name is Hug Kiss Hug. In retrospect, that alone should have raised a flag for Elena, but it’s not like a kitchen timer could name itself. It was electronic and could time three events at once, with a different alarm for each timer. And we found the five-ounce doodad (here’s a picture) at Williams-Sonoma, Elena’s fantasyland. What could go wrong?

Plenty, we were to learn. It wasn’t that it was complicated to set up or use. Once its clock was set, once whenever we replaced the battery, all we needed was to press a button for which timer we wanted to set, use the numerical keypad to set the duration and press stop/start. It seemed simple enough.

One day, though, we noticed something peculiar—the timer’s clock had reset. No big deal, we thought. You didn’t even need the clock at the right time in order to use the timers. But OXO seemed to notice one certain geek who couldn’t stand to have a digital clock suddenly displaying “12:00.”

Things at home were never quite the same. OXO began resetting her clock several times a day, each time with a four-beep announcement we took to mean “Me! Me! Me! Me!” It would often happen when we set something too close by on the counter. But over time we could be on the other side of the house, several steps from the kitchen, when we’d get the call: “Me! Me! Me! Me!” She knew, after all, that I’d soon appear to reset her clock. To make things worse, OXO would not reset if Elena was out of the house or in another room while I was alone (with her) in the kitchen.

Eventually, we couldn’t even set the timers for anything whatsoever. Whether I noticed her clock wrong and tried to reset the clock, she would cry out with all three timer frequencies simultaneously, show unfamiliar symbols (Babylonian pictograms, maybe?) on her little LCD screen, and screech multiple sets of her four-tone cry. Elena has stopped asking why I use the pronoun “she,” for she knows I will keep resetting the clock, over and over, giving her the attention she demands until I can walk away quietly.

This very moment, in fact, I have her sitting quite complacently beside me as I write. No clock-resetting, no shrieking. She has what she wants. For now.

Okay, a little correction. That day everything began…it wasn’t quite an accident. Daughter Katie was over, and it seems she’s inherited a smidgen of my geekdom. At the same instant, we wondered aloud: “What would happen if we set all three timers to go off at exactly the same time?” Apparently it was too existential a question for OXO’s little Chinese-made processor.

Her time may be coming. Resetting her clock and distorting her display, we can deal with. Polyphonic screeching, okay during daytime. But the night she starts levitating or speaking in tongues other than tones, out she goes.

Unless Elena gets her with the sledgehammer first.

When apartment life was a project

There’s lots of yapping these days about owning one’s home as a way toward grasping the American Dream. I can relate to that, all right. Just the thought that every bit of mowing, raking, tightening, replacing, fixing, painting, weeding, planting, cleaning, watering, drying, trimming, oiling, and myriad other ings is solely ours to do is surely the stuff that dreams are made of. Nightmares, too.

Still, as someone who grew up in one of “the projects,” those New York City-subsidized apartment buildings sprinkled throughout the boroughs in the ’50s through the ’70s, I often think back fondly to my youth. Apartment living, I must admit, is something I never fully appreciated.

Even in the apartments Elena and I once called home, we learned early that we’d always have company besides one another. Almost like gated communities, both had sentries at the entrances. We certainly felt secure from the day we moved into our first apartment, when one accompanied us in to check the condition of the cabinets that had just been put in—but not into hers. (She was so, let us say, congratulatory.) In our second apartment, the other sentry cared so much about making us feel safe that we could bring nothing into the building without, all the way to our door, explaining where we’d gone and what we were carrying. You can’t get that kind of security just anywhere.

Once it was just the two of us, apartment life was only looking up; they were the first years of our marriage, after all. But in my earliest years, in the New York City-subsidized apartment I lived in with my parents and five older siblings, life was better described as a series of ups and downs. What else could it be since I lived on the 10^th floor and needed the elevator just to check the mail?

After the kindness of most of our neighbors—I’ll get to the others shortly—the next-best part of the projects was the elevator. Regular readers of this blog will recall my everlasting appreciation for riding up with the next-door neighbor we affectionately called Mouth. But he clearly didn’t make that big a splash in my early years. No, the big splash is what seemed to hit the elevator floor, several times a day, moments before I stepped in to use the elevator for its intended function. Every apartment in the building, I was to learn, really did have a bathroom.

But I clearly benefited. Riding the elevator after such routine generosity taught me how to stand on my toes, a skill I’ll recall the day I take up ballet. It taught me to hold my breath for a whole minute, longer if the previous occupant had thought to press all the buttons before getting off. That will help when I become a deep-sea diver. And from the occasional instance when the entire elevator floor was awash, I exercised my biceps by pressing the opposite elevator walls while holding my feet aloft. Trust me…I’ll come in very handy the day we’re together pushed down a narrow, watery pit of snakes.

In my late teen years before I entered the military, I trained for boot camp by habitually going both up and down the stairs. For that, I have neither Mouth nor the wayward weer to thank. My true inspiration? The rampant practice of “stucking.”

Before you decide I’ve lost my grip on the English language—and welcome me at last to the Internet community—let me explain stucking. Most elevators today have inside and outside doors that open in unison, either from one side or from the middle. Our elevators instead had an inside door that opened by itself, plus a hinged outside door that required a person on the floor to open it.

Here’s where it got interesting. Once the inside door closed all the way, the outside door locked. But in the instant before the outer door locked, if you pulled it open only, oh, about an eighth of an inch and held it, the elevator’s passengers (typically me) would be stuck with the inner door closed tight and the elevator going absolutely nowhere. To these kindest of neighbors, I owe thousands of dollars of therapy for curing me, in advance, of any claustrophobia I’d been planning to develop.

As an adult visiting my parents, I’d sometimes run into some of the same kids, now grown with kids of their own, who’d delighted in stucking me. The obvious temptation, nice fellow that I am, would be to ask their thoughts on how life had stucked them from rising out of public housing. But it never was to come up: All smiles, they treated me almost like family.

Still, I’m still taking no chances. Someday, keeping up a house will get to be too much for us. That’s when we’ll downsize to a smaller place. But if it’s an apartment, I’ve just a couple of preferences. A first-floor unit…a secret entrance….