The Boy has Got Me Pegged

Allow me to reenact a conversation between Todd and I last Friday night as we drove to Vermont for the weekend. This conversation precisely demonstrates how well this man knows me, and I want to share it with you in honor of tomorrow’s “Beej and Todd’s 5th Wedding Anniversary Extravaganza.”

Todd: Hey, on the way home let’s try that other route that my Mom told us about. I want to see if it’s faster.

Beej: Sure. We’ll have to remember to take exit 10.

Todd: How do you know it’s exit 10?

Beej: Because I am the knower of all things good and evil, that’s why?

Todd: Good and evil? Ha. Try obscure and ambivalent. You are the knower of all things obscure and ambivalent.

Beej: What is that supposed to mean?

Todd: Well, only you would know which exit to take for a route that we’ve never gone on. You know more random tidbits of information than anyone I’ve ever met. I mean, you know how to sing “Itsy Bitsy Spider” in Swedish. It doesn’t get more obscure than that. Hell, I could walk into a store right now and point out a shirt and say “I want to buy that shirt” and you’d say something like “Oh, I saw that shirt at a Sears in Albany, NY in 1992. It was cheaper then,” without batting an eye.

And you know what? He’s absolutely right? I remember the phone number for my Dad’s company, the kicker is that that he sold that company when I was 6 years old. If you put a saxophone in my hands I will still remember how to play, note for note, the solo I played in “Blowin’ the Blues” in sixth grade jazz band.

Over the years Todd has come up with methods for dealing with my penchant for remembering the obscure and ambivalent. You would not believe how many conversations we’ve had that have gone something like this:

Todd: Hey, do you remember when we bought that gum you really liked?

Beej: Yeah, we were in Newport. Man, that was really good gum.

Todd: Well, do you remember the name of the band we saw at the bar the night before?

Beej: Of course I do, it’s blah blah blah…

Now, keep in mind, just because I bought that gum in Newport doesn’t necessarily mean that we saw that band in a bar in Newport. We could have been in an entirely different state. But because he knows that I would associate the great gum I bought in Newport with an entirely unrelated event from the night before he knows the right questions to ask. (Side note: I probably wouldn’t remember the brand name of the really delicious gum if he’d asked me. Maybe if he asked me what the name of the band was, I might remember the gum. My weird associations are not always reciprocal, however.) If he’d asked me, “Hey, do you remember the name of that band we saw that night?” I would probably say “No I don’t remember. How the hell do you expect me to remember that!?”

It’s for this reason that he was able to call me up when I was on a business trip in Saint Paul, MN and ask me “Where is our copy of Pirates of the Caribbean?” and I can answer “It’s on top of the TV upstairs,” and be exactly correct. If I was home and he asked me that, I probably wouldn’t have known.

Tomorrow is our wedding anniversary, we were together for six years before making it legal, and Todd married me anyway knowing full well about my knowledge of the obscure and ambivalent

Happy Anniversary.