Open Writing

Life with Gay is, to say the least, interesting. There are times when she reminds me of the story about the elderly couple where the wife is going into the kitchen and the husband calls after her, "While you’re in there, get me a beef burger."

"We don’t have any rice pudding," she shoots back at him.

"I don’t want rice pudding, I asked for a peanut butter and jam sandwich."

She completes her trip into the kitchen and returns half an hour later bearing a plate with scrambled eggs on toast. Her husband looks at the snack and complains; "Hey! I asked for ice cream!"

I am not complaining, you understand. I love my wife and that extends to her eccentricities. One of her eccentricities is believing that she has both heard and understood what I am saying. Thus confident, she embarks on her journey to Phantasy Land and delivers what it is she is positive I want.

I remember Ambrose Bierce’s definition of positive in his Devil’s Dictionary: Positive: To be mistaken at the top of one’s voice.

In our home, this certainty results in nothing more consequential than mild to uncontrollable amusement at worst, and a decision to love each other more than ever at best. All told, it is a creative condition.

However, it is the range of that creativity that amazes me. Not only that, but I get sucked right into my darling’s imagining, as I will explain.

When meal times get close, one of us will feel prompted to "cook the meal." It’s no big deal. It shares the load and fills our tummies for a while, although our approaches to cooking couldn’t be more diverse.

I like to surprise Gay by making concoctions of various kinds with herbs, spices, and mixtures bordering on the exotic. To achieve the element of surprise, I try to keep her out of the kitchen whilst I am creating my masterpieces. This exile also stops her from stirring the pot and putting utensils, dishes, pots, and pans that I have not finished with into the dishwasher.

Gay is more open. "What do you want?" she asks, as she is halfway to the door to the kitchen. "Surprise me." I call as she disappears.

Sometimes, she has something in mind, in which case she announces what she is going to serve as she heads for the kitchen.

One day she announced that she was going to make me a beef paste sandwich. I love beef paste, so I internalised her promise as I continued pounding away on my keyboard, unconscious of the world about me.

After a few minutes, Gay appears by my desk and puts down my beef paste sandwiches and a drink.

When I can spare the finger on my left hand from its typing, I reach for my repast and nibble at the sandwich. Almost at once, I begin thinking that the beef paste doesn’t taste quite right, bit I persist with my typing and eating, eating and typing.
After I have eaten the first half of the sandwich, I get the distinct idea that all is not well with the beef paste.

"This beef paste tastes funny," I think to myself somewhere well below surface consciousness, talking another bite as I type. The second bite tastes as peculiar as the first one did, and my brain starts spinning its cogs in its efforts to compute and match the taste in my mouth to my lingering expectation.

It does not compute, which adds to my gustatory confusion, but I press on, devouring and composing.

Yet, the dissimilarity between what I know I am eating and what its tastes like continues to intrude persistently into consciousness, I have to stop my creative activity to settle the increasingly pressing enigma.

When my complete attention is focused on my lunch, I ascertain beyond doubt that the predicted beef paste is, in fact, peanut butter and jam!

I have come to like peanut butter much better than in earlier days when it seemed to be nothing more exalted than sand in oil. But what really troubles me, is how my mind, expecting a beef paste sandwich, contorted my senses to try to align the ground groundnuts and pectinised fruit into an approximation of beef ground to a paste and adulterated with non-beef fillings to keep it cheap.

Now, I am not so far lost to reality that I do not know the taste of jam. And yet when I was eating the first few mouthfuls, it did not register that it was really America’s National Sandwich.

I concluded that because I had expected beef paste and was prepared for the rapture of its savoury goodness, that what I had anticipated was what my mind was prepared to take notice of, and it did not immediately detect the deceit that was insinuated into its registers in an unexpected way.

From the beef pasts versus peanut butter and jam controversy, it is a small leap to conclude that people often think they are marrying beef paste and end up with a peanut butter and jam sandwich they have never seen before.

That has to say something about expectations colouring our experience and manifests the danger of projecting qualities and characteristics onto something or, more dangerously, onto someone that does not have them, and also shows why it leads to such disappointment once our attention is focused on things as they are and not on what we had hoped for.

It is probably most true when we come to choosing marriage partners, and see beef paste, only to find that we are married to peanut butter and jam. The fault lies, not with the sandwich we didn’t want, but with ourselves for not checking the food on the table against the classification on the menu.

Many a marriage has come to grief because someone has married the image that was projected onto the beloved by the wooer in spite of all signs to the contrary, and that is when the dish is sent back to the kitchen and the cook blamed for the mess, when it is neither the fault of the cook nor of the dish, but of our own closed eyes and minds, and our dominant and overly sanguine expectations married to our uninspired hopes that have led us astray, and made someone else very unhappy in the doing of it

What is equally important is that we also should be mindful of the rashness of presenting ourselves as luxurious savouries when we are really pedestrian, though pleasant, budget peanut butter and jam sandwiches. Honesty is the best policy, especially when looking for a heart to love you forever.

Copyright © 2004
Ronnie Bray
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED