You'll laugh, you'll cry, you'll relate

  • By Mike Dewey
  • August 14, 2013
  • 364
                        
SUMMARY: It's not every night that a guy battles a maggot infestation, but there he was, doing his very best Corleone impersonation. Mike Dewey's got a confession to make. Every marriage has its division of labor; that is, one partner handles certain things as the other carries additional responsibilities. Between them, the two become one in the sense that they can rely on each other. It’s all very mature. And, trust me on this, sometimes the results are unintentionally hilarious, which leads me to having no choice but to tell you the tale of how I single-handedly massacred an evil infestation of, well ... you’ll soon see. In our home, my wife takes care of all things financial as I do the shopping and the cooking. She’s able to negotiate the tricky world of vacation plans even as I’m making sure the plants and flowers are alive and flourishing. She deals with the bathroom. I clean out gutters and burn dead branches. My wife breaks things that I try to fix and when I make a mess of a particular piece of writing, she’s the one who’ll say something like, “Well, it’s kind of good, but I’m not sure you can play the Cowsills card again.” At its heart, our relationship is and always will be constructed on the rock-solid foundation that we can tell each other anything, no matter how embarrassing, and life will simply move on, with us sharing a secret smile. In other words, what fools these mortals be. Forgive me for playing the Shakespeare card, but there you are. Anyway, among my most vital roles is that of the Trash Man, the Garbage Guy, the Reliable Recycler. Yep, I’m deeply into making an offer junk can’t refuse. Get it? Refuse, as in castoff stuff ... with an echo of Don Corleone? Hmmm. Might be a line my wife would want to excise, but since she’s fast asleep as I race toward a dawn deadline, I’ll let it stand. BUT I DO TAKE PRIDE in my ability to keep the trash parade moving along at a brisk pace and even my wife admits that I’m good at it. Little kitchen bags fit, four at a time, into the big black bag, meaning that once a month, I haul a perfectly packed month’s worth of non-recyclable garbage to the edge of the lawn, carefully affixed with a $2.50 sticker. Yep, they charge residents to pick up garbage down here, so it’s a point of honor with me to use every square inch of available big black bag space before I’m ready to admit that I couldn’t fit even so much as a single strand of dental floss into it. Truly, I am a human trash compactor, using all of my 182 pounds and every inch of my 6-5 frame to squash, squish and otherwise smash junk into submission. Hey, a buck’s a buck, right? So, as my bags look like they could hang from the ceiling of a South Philly boxing gym, neighbors throw out weakling half-filled joke sacks, just pitching money away. But my frugal obsession with not wasting a dime suddenly got KO’d last week when I discovered what I believed to be slimy and squirmy maggots crawling inside the lid of my plastic garbage pail. You have to understand, as I mentioned before, I take this trash stuff seriously and that means No Maggots. Not. One. Not. Ever. And yet, there they were and I was stunned. After 13 years with a clean trash record, how could this have happened? It was as if Mariano Rivera had somehow blown three straight save opportunities which, as you might recall, he’d just done. Damn. Anything WAS possible. So, after I’d confessed to my wife the ugly truth, I set about the task of murdering each and every one of those parasitic enemies. Oh, I was in a true Corleone mood: smart, armed and confident. FIRST, OF COURSE, I began boiling pans of water, big ones, wanting to inflict lots of pain before I stomped them into the nether regions. Then I cleaned out the execution chamber, moving the lid into the driveway, isolating the maggots. After that, I pulled out the big black bag, examined it for additional infestation and, seeing none, set about the task of cleaning the trash can, which was surprisingly pristine. Something should have clicked in my mind but, right then, I had bloodlust bubbling so I went ahead with the massacre. It was so perfect. Nothing could have survived the combination of lethal sprays and the 250-degree bath I splashed all over those maggots. It was brutal and clean, very Corleone. And I left my wife a note so that she’d know I’d held up my Trash Man reputation. As I’ve said, it every marriage has its division of labor and I’d fulfilled my part of the deal and that make me feel very good. It’s easy to mess up, I’m guessing, when you’re dealing with maggots. So I was feeling pretty good about life the next morning, until I read a note my lovely bride had left for me on the kitchen table. It said something about a TV dinner she’d had the night before and some cheese-flavored rice she’d thrown away and the possibility that I’d spent more than an hour – in the middle of the night – killing a side dish. Man. There I was, thinking those little yellowish-green things were maggots, when in actuality, they were truly and honestly, trash. I had spent in excess of 60 minutes poisoning and torturing innocent food. All I could do was laugh at myself. I mean, who else in the world would do something that stupid? A Corleone? Hah. I’m a Clown-eone. Luckily, when I told my wife the story, she couldn’t help laughing, which made me feel instantly better. But I should have known better. No way were maggots infesting my garbage. My trash could win prizes. Isn’t that sad? Still, you take an ego-boost anytime you find one, before the maggots devour it. Mike Dewey can be emailed at CarolinamikeD@aol.corm or snail-mailed at 6211 Cardinal Drive, New Bern, NC 28560. His Facebook page is full of words and wisdom and you’re invited to have some fun there.


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