Memoir: Marc

My husband bought a bidet.

"You just push a button, and it shoots water up your butt," he
said. He was driving me home from a visit with a friend. His eyes were
glowing.

"One thing you should know," he said, sheepishly, "is that I had some
trouble with the pipes. There was a small flood. I had to rejigger
some connections. You might notice that the bathmat is still wet."
And, after a moment: "If all else fails, in my work, I could maybe be
a plumber!"

Later, at a local retirement facility, Marc showed a video to his
father, and to me. It explained the advantages of owning a bidet, a
"Tushy." A small, sassy child addressed the camera: "Almost
every other country uses a bidet. Get with the program, America!"

And: "Using tissue paper means just moving the poop around to new
areas of your butt. It's like sweeping dust from one corner to
another--then saying you've cleaned!"

At this point, the boy addressed a cantankerous older woman, who
seemed to be his sister: "A bidet is great for your UTI!"

And he then dangled a Barbie over the toilet, and the Barbie seemed to
have a small, brown, symbolic smear in the area of her butt. "Watch
how this works!"

My husband has a fondness for retail therapy. Sometimes, there's a
manic look on his face, and I suspect the item he's considering maybe
isn't wise for our budget, but I offer encouragement anyway. It's nice
to have new sources of excitement. Marc wanted an eight-hundred-page
hardcover biography of Frederick Douglass--and though I struggled to
envision us having sober, deep, probing, American-history discussions
by the fireplace, I thought the purchase might nevertheless "spark
joy." It would be a fun bauble, or like an unnecessarily large tub of
cotton candy, or like a new, shiny purse.

Also, Marc felt the need to spend fifty dollars on a small stuffed
reindeer--"Sven," from "Frozen"--and I didn't question this. I
regularly have difficulties in this world. I recently almost succeeded
in burning down an eighth of our kitchen, and I also came very close
to running over our neighbor on a snowy day. Marc handles these
problems with equanimity--and if a bidet, and a stuffed Sven, add to
that equanimity, then so be it.

In the daily women's e-magazine I receive, the columnist says there
are two vital words for any marriage. They aren't: "Love you."
They're: "Thank you." Gratitude is key.

I'm grateful for the bidet I don't use, the stuffed animal, the Tushy
marketing video, and the lunatic next to me, who makes me laugh more
than I would on my own.