As some of you know, I from time to time use this column to write about the antics of Mrs. Griz. While I could probably fill lots of columns with my conservative political views, Mrs. Griz, who is usually the first to read what I write, tells me to lighten up a bit and quit preaching gloom and doom. So I sometimes do and write about her.
After all, she might be right. If I wrote each week about the ways overstepping big government tramples the U.S. Constitution -- and, yes, there is plenty to write about in that category -- my file at the federal government's Department of Homeland Security might get too big and I really would see black helicopters following me around. I'd have no choice but to turn off my cell phone and pop the battery out to keep the NSA from eavesdropping on my private conversations.
But there's a danger, too, in publicly exposing the words and actions of my dear wife even if she does give me a plethora of things about which to write.
Sometimes she hides things from me just to keep me from using her for writing material. And there are those times when she does or says something and then looks me straight in the eye and says, "This better not show up in the paper!"
Isn't that censorship? She is trying to restrict what I say with my pen and interfere with the freedom of the press, don't you think?
And there's always the possibility that she could demand equal time. A number of people have asked her why she didn't write an occasional column of her own -- kind of a rebuttal to what I've written about her or, at the least, payback. And she's told me a few times she was going to write a letter to the editor but fears that by the time the editor edited her letter it wouldn't say anything which could embarrass him anymore. Do you really think I would do that?
She might tell you this story about me caulking our bathtub and shower without my reading glasses and then asking her, because she was wearing hers, to read me the cleanup instructions. The part about Liquid Nail Remover kind of tipped me off -- at least, after she repeated it to me several times -- as to why the caulk was so hard to apply. Cleanup took a lot longer than I anticipated, too.
She might tell you a story about me stopping to photograph a field of sunflowers back in Kansas and walking through this ditch in my new cowboy boots, only to learn that the two inches of water I could see in the ditch was two or three feet of running water hidden by tall grass. Yes, my boots were well oiled and waterproofed but I had to take them off to dump the water out.
She'd probably make mention of the time I substituted just a little Ivory dish soap for the dishwasher detergent which I forgot to buy and saw this blob of soap crawling out of the kitchen toward my easy chair in the living room. She wouldn't even help me clean up the mess. Instead, she ran to get the camera and take pictures to send to family and friends on the Worldwide Web. For a while, my father-in-law called me "Mr. Suds."
And so, I'm certainly hoping you'll understand if I don't tell you what happened to her last weekend even though I do feel that my freedom of speech might be somewhat in jeopardy and the story would be good. But if I did, she might tell you of my efforts to fix the garage door opener and all the adjustments I made before I found out the whole problem could be fixed with one simple turn of the screwdriver. Or, she might tell you of the hours I spent trying to reprogram a cell phone when the fix was so much simpler than that. She might even tell you about the bathroom getting toilet papered while I was in the shower because I forgot to put the puppy in the kennel before closing the shower curtain.
Anyway, life is never dull with Mrs. Griz around and ... well, I better stop there.
Randy Moll is the managing editor of the Westside Eagle Observer. He can be contacted by email at [email protected]. Opinions expressed are those of the author.
Editorial on 06/04/2014