The Duffer

by Ian Robinson

DUFFER ……..my wife at middle age

By Ian Robinson

So the music of my life turns out to be a Credence Clearwater Revival hit with the lyric:  I see a bad moon rising/I feel trouble on the way…

Even though he was but a youngster when he wrote it, somehow I figure John Fogarty must have looked into his future—and mine—and conjured up one of the worst horrors that can befall a man.  And when I say one of the worst I mean it, and I’m including such things as: 

1)     Having the doctor hold your chest X-ray up to the light and say, “What the hell is THAT thing?”

2)     Noticing that the doctor holding your chest X-ray up to the light has a diploma on his wall from Haiti’s Baby Doc’ University—Party School of the Caribbean.

3)     Waking up in a livestock pen in a pool of your own vomit with your pants around your ankles, three new tattoos, and the last memory you have is you saying, “Oh sure, I like tequila!”

4)      Remembering the other thing you said after “Oh sure I like tequila!” was, “I’m not afraid of biker ex-convicts,” and figuring the fact your pants were around your ankles was somehow related to the ex-convicts crack.

5)      Being a Calgary Flames fan. (Nuff said.)

6)     Having a 14-year old daughter who brings home a guy for you to meet, and you experience a nagging sense that you’ve met this kid before and all of a sudden it hits you:  he looks and acts just like a 14-year old version of YOU.

7)     You realize the kid your daughter brought home has probably told his family where he was going tonight, so the fact that you own a shotgun, a shovel and a bag of quicklime won’t do you any good at all.

8)     The realization that there are problems in the world that can’t be solved with a shotgun.

9)     Being thrown into a charnel pit and having your entrails eaten by rats. 

Nope.  Numbers one through nine pale before the terrible enormity of the horrible thing that has befallen me.

Here it comes.  Prepare yourselves.

I have a wife.  And she’s about to turn 40.

(And a collective shudder went through the room.)

Now when I turned 40, I was a calm and reasonable human being.  But then I’m a guy.  I said, “I don’t want any fuss”, so of course my wife threw me a surprise 40^th birthday party.  (And women go on Oprah and whine about how we don’t listen, don’t they?)  And I spent the evening walking around telling our guests that “I freaking hate surprise parties.  Aren’t you leaving yet?” And they said, “We’ve only been here 20 minutes!” And I said, “Hey that’s long enough.” And they ignored me and drank my beer which was, I suppose, my definition of a mid-life crisis—I ran out of beer on my 40^th birthday, and I’d started with four cases of two-four and I only had, if my memory serves, about three bottles myself.  Those freeloading SOBs my wife invited to my surprise party drank the rest.  And I thought she’d bought me 96 beers on my birthday ‘cause she loved me.  And I was looking forward to drinking 96 beers.  I mean, I didn’t think I’d make it, but it was the sort of thing a fella should try to do once or twice a lifetime.

Anyway, when they make a fuss of your 40^th, you tend to sit around for a minute or two and take stock of your life.  And so I did.  I was not rich, but then, I’d never expected to be, so that was okay.  When I was 16, I was kind of socially inept and had pimples and was sexually obsessed.

Now that I was 40 I didn’t have pimples.

Bonus.  Not that much has changed.