I ruined my wife's weekend.
Betty and I had planned to drive up to Burlington, Vt., on Saturday to visit my stepdaughter, Becca, who's a college student there. It was going to be a nice, leisurely drive up Route 89. We'd enjoy the fall colors just beginning to peek through a few scattered trees along the green rolling hills. We'd walk along Church Street, the hub of one of the best college towns in America, and visit a new crepe place Betty wanted to try.
But I got sick instead.
It started early Saturday morning, a few hours before we were supposed to leave. My limbs began to ache, I felt lethargic, and I had a disquieting thought that I'd soon need to set up shop in the bathroom.
Betty didn't accuse me of faking it. Just the opposite. She noticed that I looked "a little green" and suggested I get back into bed while she called Becca to cancel our visit. Betty kept me hydrated and on a steady diet of plain toast and Pepto-Bismol. She remained attentive and caring throughout the morning, but I started to question her sincerity when around midday she asked one of our cats, "Are you bored too?"
I was happy to stay in bed because the TV remote was close by. With the announcement that Barack Obama had selected Joe Biden as his running mate, the cable news networks provided nonstop coverage rivaling, but I don't think surpassing, their minute-by-minute analysis of the death of Anna Nicole Smith.
Once I got tired of all the Scranton, Penn., talk and how the die-hard Hillary supporters were reacting, I switched to the Sci-Fi Channel. I watched one movie about bio-genetically enhanced killer locusts, and then another featuring bad French accents spoken by bad actors who almost competed with all of the bad special effects. Lots of giant, rampaging cockroaches, lots of screaming teenaged girls, and a starring role of Christopher Atkins, the once young stud who charmed Sue Ellen Ewing on "Dallas." Atkins isn't young anymore, but he still has that same mop of blond hair. Good for him. And he's still earning a paycheck by battling enormous bugs, but not quite the same class of vermin he encountered at Southfork.
I loved it.
I don't need much of an excuse to assume the stationary position and be amused by bad television. And being sick legitimizes it. I watched, I dozed, I watched a little more. And no one could suggest that I might want to get up and clean my desk or the greasy grill.
So while I watched demonic insects dismantle scores who always seemed to fall just within the clutches of the beasts, Betty ironed clothes. Or she checked her e-mail. Or she ran errands — to the post office, the drug store and the grocery store.
See, Betty can't sit for hours watching cockroaches, be they of the horror movie or political stripe. She's got to be doing something most of the time, even if it means running the DustBuster along the edges of the kitchen floor. If dirt makes its presence known I'll tackle it, but it needs to be about as threatening as one of those movie bugs.
By Saturday evening, I was feeling a little better, so I ventured downstairs. Betty was reading a book, but she asked me if I wanted to watch something on television.
You bet. I'm good at that.
I reclined in the La-Z-Boy, anxious to see if there was a movie on about killer rats, or maybe "Snakes on a Plane." I'd only seen a few minutes of that one. But Betty scrolled down the list of shows our DVR had recorded, and she clicked on an episode of "Grey's Anatomy."
She might as well have laced my Pepto-Bismol with arsenic. At least then I'd be dead before I had to watch an episode I'd seen part of before, the one when glamorous resident surgeon Izzie gets so depressed — probably about her future high-six-figures income — that she collapses onto the floor and refuses to get up. And as the sappy musical score picks up in the background, all of her beautiful female surgeon buddies, who live equally miserable lives, get down on the floor with her, to validate her pain.
I felt sicker than I had all day. I'd ruined Betty's weekend, and there would be hell to pay.
John Edmondson is a teacher in Hampstead. His column appears Wednesdays in the Derry News.
