Maintenance

I got my windshield replaced earlier this week. Honestly, that's about the best I can say about the week as a whole, and it involves passive verbs. I didn't replace my windshield, I got it replaced, or more accurately, my husband, Grand Master Champion of Little-But-Huge Maintenance and Scheduling Details, got it replaced.

Once, when I was in about the 8th grade, I think (my adolescent timeline is murky with hormone tsumanis), my dad sat me down in our study and asked me gravely, "You know why the Third Reich became so powerful after World War I, don't you?"

"Overpowering evil?" I posited. "Possession of the Ark of the Covenant?" I loved the Indiana Jones movies.

"Maintenance," he said. "They were masters of maintenance. All the little details that make a society run-- the train schedules, the city sanitation, payrolls, all that. They were very organized, and this was powerful and effective for a people who had been economically devastated by years of war, and then by the Treaty of Versailles. The Germans were ready to follow anyone who get things organized and bring life back to normal."

"So... but they were Nazis."

"Yes, but they became very powerful very quickly. And it was through concentrating on organization and maintenance, taking care of business. Those things are important, and can get you places in life."

This was my dad, the history major's, way of making a point about my school work and organization skills. I missed it entirely. Nazis, was all I could think. Nazis are organized! I continued in my pattern: slack, cram, collapse, repeat.

Perhaps my husband would have heard this conversation and taken away from it what was meant. He gets it. He's achieved the zen-like state of organization of finances and tasks that allows him to see far ahead, a mountain view of our situation, while I still muddle around in the valleys, focused on other things and grateful for the budget room to get nice coffee.

This is not to say that I never mastered the skill-- when I was single and on my own, I had a pretty good system going, if maybe a little rudimentary. I treated my one credit card like it was radioactive, and would become more so with each use. I paid it down every month with a secret, defiant glee, never knowing that carrying a bit of a balance actually improves your credit score. And I saved. I piled up my acorns into a single savings account, one without an agenda, and also without a very impressive interest rate. As finances go, I was drawing stick figures on cave walls with the burnt end of a stick, and feeling pretty good about it.

And then my husband came along singing hymns of aggressive growth mutual funds, Roth IRA's, and 529 B's. Plato's Cave Allegory, (the all-purpose Freshman Comp gem), neatly illustrates my reaction: blinding light! Grunts of surprise and protest! Suspicion! And then, finally, tentative questioning, grudging acceptance, and an upright walk into the outside world.

I've delighted in learning about finances, but that's where my enthusiasm for maintenance ends. Bill schedules, oil changes, transmissions flushes, tire rotation, air conditioner filters, water softener drops, flushing out the rain gutters, renewing magazine subscriptions, GOD-- it makes me want to slam my own head in the front door repeatedly. I forget these things with what can only be called an active spite. And when I do remember them, and endeavor to take of them, I do it with the stomping petulance of a four-year-old. I hate that these things never change and never stop needing to be done. It reminds me too much of Sisyphus, and of horrible secretarial jobs I used to have.

I recently had the chance to revisit the Myers-Briggs Personality Type Indicator, and was relieved to see that my type hadn't changed since I'd last taken it in college. You never know. I had this fear that military wifedom would wipe me smooth like a river stone and build a more boring, and more competent, version of me. Happily though, I'm still an ENFP, which explains (but doesn't necessarily excuse) my loathing of all things maintainence. I also got my husband to take the test, and was equally relieved to find that he's not lying when he claims to enjoy taking care of the more mundane tasks of our existence. He really does get some sort of pleasure out of that, thankfully.

Wouldn't it be great if there was someone who absolutely adored sunrises, all kinds, and was always afraid it wasn't going to happen the next morning? And wouldn't it also be great if the sun, (some kind of anthropomorphized sun, like the one that dumps raisins into Raisin Bran), actually enjoyed rising, but also appreciated being appreciated for it?

This is how I feel every time my husband changes the oil in my car, or patiently explains to me for the hundredth time how our IRA's work, or does something like arrange to have my crappy cracked up windshield replaced-- I'm wildly grateful, not only for the actual thing he's done, but for the fact that I don't have to beat myself for forgetting to do it, or scowl my way through doing it myself. And then I can concentrate on bringing the things to our marriage that I'm best at bringing-- like new and complicated pumpkin carving patterns, (we just did a Steve Irwin tribute pumpkin), and new alcoholic drinks*.

*The Floribama, in tribute to our time in the hurricane-ravaged Florida Peninsula: mix equal parts Crush orange soda and cheap lite beer. Voila! It sounds gross, but you'd be surprised how refreshing this is, especially on a hot breathless night sitting with strangers in a parking lot, trying to catch any kind of breeze because there's no electricity.