My husband, Brad, and I are pretty good about knowing our strengths and our weaknesses.
I’m not a good singer. At all. You don’t want me singing at your wedding—unless, that is, you want to drive everyone out of the church or ceremony holding their ears and screaming.
Brad is not a fan of public speaking. I joke that he would rather be standing in front of a firing squad than a room full of people.
On the flipside, he’s good at so many things—math, balancing our checkbook, dealing with the little things in life that drive me nuts…
Oh, and doing impressions. He’s really good at mimicking cartoon voices and characters from movies. He’s scarily good at voicing Forrest Gump.
But for a man who is so smart and so logical, I just don’t get one thing: why he feels the need to haul every single bag out of our car after we’ve gone shopping.
All. At. Once.
He does this every single time we go shopping. During much of the pandemic, we got groceries delivered. But now that we’re going back to stores, he’s at it again.
Doesn’t matter if it’s from the grocery store or the mall (his least favorite destination on the planet—next to that room full of people to speak in front of), the hardware store or the warehouse club–Brad wants to make the least number of trips as humanly possible.
I guess on one hand, I can understand his rationale. The more he carries, the fewer trips he makes from the car to the house. But we have a garage. So it’s not like he has to carry all the water for our family across miles and miles of hot, savage desert to keep us from dying.
Nope. All he has to do is take it from the garage into the kitchen, and then we unpack things and take them to wherever they belong in the house.
He has to walk a grand total of about 10 feet, at most.
Yet he will put 27 bags on each arm to drag them all into the house at once. And this is never a good thing.
I married a man, not a pack mule.
It’s also not like I’m sitting inside the house with a whip, ready to beat him into his next chore. Oftentimes, I’m carrying bags into the house too. But only a couple. Why? Because I’ve seen what happens otherwise.
One time, when we lived in a townhome, he was carrying a ton of paper bags in his arms. (This was before we all began using those reusable bags that we all take to the store, then accidentally leave in the trunk, so we now end up using plastic bags more than we want to anyway. Um, not that I do this…ever.) One of the things we had bought was a baguette to have with dinner. Even though it was in its own little bag, it was stuck in the paper bag with all the other groceries and sticking out at the top. You know, like it always is in the movies.
Just as he got near our front door, the bags shifted, and as he tried to grab them all to keep them from falling, the baguette became a projectile and shot like a rocket out of the bag and straight into our garden.
I was coming back out of the house to help. I saw the look on his face. “The five-second rule does NOT apply to bread that landed in the dirt,” I said.
I know him all too well.
And while I’ve told him many times over the years that trying to carry everything at once is not a good thing, he still does it.
Perhaps he is a pack mule. He’s certainly as stubborn as one…
Michele Wojciechowski, who hopes that her husband doesn’t wake up one morning with his arms all stretched out from carrying everything and the kitchen sink all at the same time, writes Wojo’s World® from Baltimore. She’s also the author of the award-winning humor book Next Time I Move, They’ll Carry Me Out in a Box. You can connect with Wojo on Facebook or on Twitter.
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