In vino un-veritas

Hello and welcome on our final Sorry Honey It's Thursday post. Let's hope we all get through this SHIT painlessly and with a smile on our faces. So far, if there's been any semblance of a theme this week, I'd have to say it's "travel," even though yesterday didn't touch on that at all. Therefore, I shall attempt to lead into my real story with a forced intro on travel. Let's see what happens.

My lovely wife and I enjoy drinking wine from time to time. We're not enthusiasts or connoisseurs per se, but we like a glass here and there. Our unsophisticated palettes can detect really only two things: we like it or we don't. That hasn't stopped us from visiting wineries and tasting rooms all along this fine state of ours. We've hit several great ones in the Central Coast area, visited Napa and Sonoma many times, and even found cool wineries in Sacramento and the famed town of Lodi.

I may have undersold our tasting prowess a bit. We can tell you why we like or dislike the way a wine tastes as well. It might be a peppery syrah (mmmm) or too sweet of a chardonnay (yuck), for example. What I can't do though, is identify all of the things that the descriptions say we'll find in our sips. However, once we're away from the wineries, I like to pretend I can. I'll take a little sip, swish it around a little, and say something to the effect of, "On the nose, I find a hint of oak, black currant, and the faintest hue of sun-ripened loganberry." My friend Greg does the same thing incidentally, and I seem to recall him throwing "a touch of leather" in there sometimes. Good call.

And so it was this past weekend that my lovely wife and I went on a date. We each had a glass of wine, and after the first sip, I stepped up my game a little. Remembering something that a wine expert had told us in a tasting room years ago, I said, "Ah, I've now created a mental picture of this wine on my palette so I can recognize it with future tastings." Here's where it gets interesting. My poor wife is faced with this question several times a day, every day of her life: "Do I simply smile at that or do I play along?" It's a fine line, because too much playing along and we'd never have any actual conversations. This time, I think she made a wise choice. "What's the picture of?" she asked.

I just went with it. "It's an old man sitting in a canoe," I said. "Where?" she asked. "On a large stretch of gravel, unfortunately." "Why is he there?" "Well, he wanted to throw something overboard to hide it in the water, but he can't now because it would just be sitting there on the gravel next to him," I said. "What is it?" she asked, fully invested in playing along now even though both of our faces were stone serious. "A lava lamp - a real one, with real lava inside." She asked where he got it. "In a grab bag," I said. And then I added a caveat that accidentally complicated things: "He had #1 and chose that gift." "But why would he choose it if he obviously didn't like it?" It was a good and reasonable question, and I need to switch paragraphs to answer it.

"You see, he works as a welder in a lava lamp factory - the plastic kind. His crazy cousin got this real one as a gift and regifted it in the grab bag specifically with him in mind. When someone opened it, everyone said, 'Oh, don't get too comfortable with that,' meaning that he was going to steal it later. So he felt pressured to take it even though he doesn't really like lava lamps at all - real or plastic." She asked about the cousin and what she did for a living. "She's unemployed right now, but she had been working at an old-age home. It turns out that it was actually just a volunteer position but everyone thought she was getting paid the whole time she was there." "How does she have any money then?" Amber asked. "Ya know, a lot of people wonder about that."

She shifted back to our protagonist: "Why can't he just hide it somewhere?" "Since his divorce about ten years ago, he's been in a tiny apartment and he really just doesn't have any room for it. No one visits him there, so he doesn't have to worry about having it on display." "Where does he live?" "Just outside of Cleveland, obviously." "Can't he just wrap it in a trash bag and throw it away?" She then realized the fallacy in her own question: "Oh wait, it's real lava so if it broke, the whole trash would catch on fire." "Exactly," I said.

I continued on. "So he came up with a plan to sign up for a canoe trip and toss it off the side into the water. That way he could dispose of it safely and end the whole ordeal." "What went wrong?" she asked, looking genuinely concerned for a moment. "Well, the company he signed up with was really just a bunch of scam artists. They took his money and then put him on a cheap canoe in a big van. Then they said they'd arrived, and they slid him down a ramp - not into water, but in the middle of a huge gravel lot 45 minutes from his home. The scam artists ran back into their van and sped off before he could get them. He had to be careful not to drop the lava lamp after all." "So what's he going to do?" "They said they'd be back in an hour, but he can't exactly believe them seeing as how they distinctly mentioned 'water' in their description of the trip."

She nodded and then paused for a couple of seconds. "What's his name?" she asked. "I'm not sure, but I'm getting a strong 'Jerry' vibe." She looked confused. "How can you not be sure?" "I don't know any of these people; this is just the mental image I get when I drink this wine," I said. "That's right; that's how this whole thing started," she said smiling, and we both knew that the story was over.

The food came, and both our meals and the rest of our evening were lovely. Neither of us mentioned "Jerry" again that night or since, but I thought I'd share that story with you so you could get a glimpse into what life with Peter is like sometimes. She does a wonderful job balancing the "smile and nod" with the "play along," and I just think it's great. Ok, back to reality. I'll see you back here for a final Follow Up Friday before switching to Friday-only posts. Have a great SHIT, everyone.