His Dogness

This column first appeared in the October 2014 issue of Forsyth Family magazine:

I grew up in a household in which the toilet paper rolled from the top. That made sense to me, and, when I had my own house, I always put in a fresh roll so that it rolled from the top.

After I met Garnet, I soon discovered that, in her house, toilet paper rolled from the bottom. Surely, there must be some mistake, I said. No, she said. It rolls so much better from the top, I said. That may be true, she said, but it looks far neater rolling from the bottom.

Since we married, I live in a house in which toilet paper rolls from the bottom.

Doobins likes to drink his milk from one of the glasses in his Garfield collection. He doesn’t want anyone else to drink out of those glasses. That one is easy. No one drinks out of his Garfield glasses.
After Sparkle Girl gets up in the morning, she likes to sit quietly for a while talking to no one. Garnet and I do our best to build that time in when we are figuring out what time we should wake her up.

We don’t have a dishwasher so we wash everything by hand. To my way of thinking, when I’m not going to wash dishes right away, it makes sense to fill the bowls that had corn flakes in them with water so those little bits of leftover corn flakes don’t dry out and stick to the side as if they were attached by Super Glue. I put water on the cookie sheets, too, so that burnt bits have a chance to soak.

Of course that approach means that dishes may end up spread out all over the counters, and you have to be very careful when you pick up the cookie sheet or water can spill all over the floor. I wholeheartedly agree that water all over the floor is a bad thing.

Garnet believes that the kitchen should look as neat as circumstances allow. So she stacks dishes in the sink even if that means that corn flakes sometimes get glued to the side of the bowl and the burnt bits on the cookie sheets don’t soak. We have talked about this. But have come to no consensus. So we each do what we do.

Each of us has innumerable things in life that we like a certain way. Living together as a family means taking note of such things, freely giving each other what is easy to give and, when it’s less easy to give, doing our best to figure out a way to make it work for the long term. Sometimes, you don’t find an official solution and you just muddle along.

When I become irritated because the way that Garnet, Sparkle Girl or Doobins like something to be is not the way I want something to be, Garnet will say, “And, to think, you used to be all alone.”

Without fail, that makes me smile. I used to be alone and now I’m not.