My husband is a risk-taker. He’s not the kind of person who’ll bet against the stock market or jump out of an airplane, mind you. He takes small, everyday risks that usually don’t result in bodily injury or catastrophe, but can turn out to be a magnificent pain in the ass.
For instance, he seems to enjoy riding around in a car equipped with less than a hundredth of a tank of gas. No, he’s not pulling a Richie Cunningham, conniving to run out of fuel so we’ll be forced to pull over to the side of the road and neck. (We should only be so randy these days.) It’s just that he honestly doesn’t get supremely worried about anything until sirens go off and lights flash around him. As it often happens, I’m nervously pointing at the fuel indicator that’s edging toward “Empty,” begging him to find a gas station, and he’s telling me to relax, because “we can still go at least 12 miles before we run out.” It’s like fighting about money, sex, or the status of the toilet seat lid—no one wins the argument. Ever.
Although I once won the argument—more than a decade ago, when we actually did run out of gas. We were on the Cross Island Parkway in New York and had my mother in the back seat. Needless to say, she did not enjoy sitting in the car in the middle of winter while Steve hiked two miles to the nearest gas station to retrieve a container of petrol. And even though I briefly got to gloat about the gas running out, I wasn’t too thrilled about sitting in the car for over an hour while my mother went on and on about which of her favorite movie stars were no longer spring chickens. At least this happened at a time when gas attendants still existed, and actually took care of you. They’d listen to your sob story about getting stuck, then send you off with a a pat on the back and a can of “gas to go.” Nowadays, they will not give you the gas unless your car is there with you, so all you’re gonna walk away with is a bag of Fritos and a bottle of Gatorade. Good thing too, because you’ll need plenty of electrolytes to dash back to the car, appease your mother-in-law, and then push your vehicle all the way back to the station for a fuel-up.
But seriously, God bless my husband for not caring if the world caves in around him. He’s extraordinarily responsible when he needs to be—at work, for instance, or while caring for our children (most of the time). In fact, he’s the one who recently insisted on installing a new alarm system in our home. It’s just that he doesn’t worry as much as I do about the smaller stuff, and I admit that I can be pretty neurotic. I suspect it’s because his brain isn’t equipped, like mine is, with an annoying ticker tape of horrifying potential news headlines—you know, the accidents, mishaps and misfortunes that will inevitably strike if we let down our guard for a second.
While Steve is blissfully unaware of these future tragedies, I worry about every one of them. For instance, you’ll never see the tank in my car falling beneath the quarter-tank mark, because I know that if terrorists strike San Francisco I’ll need all the gasoline I can get in order to get out of town as quickly as possible. The news reel in my brain depicts long lines at the gas stations, and the mothers who didn’t have the foresight to fill up their tanks walking along the side of the road with their children on their backs. (Did I mention that everyone’s shoes fly off in this terrorist scenario?)
To give you a little comparison, these are some of the things I’ve worried about this past week:
While driving across the Golden Gate Bridge: If an earthquake hits at this very moment, my car will plunge into the bay, destroying two bags of groceries, my new Lady Gaga CD, and oh yeah, the children and me. And I totally forgot what Oprah said about how to crack open electric-powered car windows under water!
While preparing breakfast: If I don’t wash my hands after handling these eggs, we’ll all be infected with salmonella and for days this meal will be coming out of us from both ends.
Two blocks after driving out of the garage: I surely left the garage door open, and when I come home raccoons will be bunking with the plastic Caucasian Family of Four that resides in my kids’ Fisher-Price Loving Family Dollhouse.
And these are some of the things Steve did not worry about this week, besides the fuel-indicator light:
My 6-year-old son’s stunt-man theatrics at the Dennis the Menace Playground in Monterey: I’ll paint a picture…Steve sits casually on a bench, cleaning his camera lens, while the kid, wearing flip-flops and a devilish grin, bolts and then slides across the tippy top of a life-size replica of a steam engine. I scream. Steve takes snapshots.
The children consuming way too many french fries during our road trip: Every day, twice a day, for five days the kids menu in whatever restaurant we visit offers no sides except those addictive deep-fried potatoes. Since I can almost envision the grease oozing into their little arteries, I scrape salad and broccoli off my plate and onto theirs, and try to persuade them to go rogue and abandon their hot dogs for Mommy’s more sophisticated cioppino. My husband just laughs at me as he shoves handfuls of fries into his own mouth.
My mother told me, right after I got engaged, that Steve would make the perfect life-long companion for me, because he’s so calm he makes the Dali Lama look like Gilbert Gottfried on speed. And she’s right, he keeps me in check and, with an occasional rolling of his eyes, prevents my neurosis from spilling out onto the kids. Still, I’m looking forward to the day when it’ll be his turn to worry more—i.e., when our daughter starts dating. That’s one more scenario I’m good at picturing: Me sitting on the couch, flipping through a magazine, wondering if my teenager has just kissed her boyfriend for the first time. And Steve, propped on a chair by the window with a cocked shotgun in his lap, kinda like Tony Soprano on the night he was sure he was getting bumped.
Payback can be a bitch.
This column originally appeared in Lady and a Red Typewriter in 2011.
