Black Feet Stomping

I can't be the first girlfriend in history who, once snagged into marriage, wondered if her new husband had practiced just a little deceptive advertising. When we were dating, Mike would actually dance. This was the days of the New Wave pogo, and Mike was pretty good at it. It almost made up for his lack of cooking ability. While other guys stood drinking, propped against the walls, wandering why they were unable to pull any birds, my future husband showed them what a little prodigious dancing could achieve.

After we married, he not only quit dancing with me, he denied that he had ever danced. Or at least if he had danced, he must have been crazy-mad with the demon drink. And I wouldn't want him to get that drunk again, would I?

And that wasn't the only charming little trait that seemed to dissolve at the altar. During out courtship, he had spent his money freely, a little too freely. I was concerned that I would always have to be the sensible one, the one who insists on dinner at home instead of at the Ritz. After we married, however, I discovered that Mike was half Scots, something else he hadn't freely expanded upon. Which was wise of him. I'd been in London for five years when I met Mike and I knew that signs of Scottishness should raise a red flag with any girl. Scotsmen are known for their miserliness. "Meanness", the Brits call it. Maybe Scots are tight, or maybe they just like to hide income from the English. Either way, it amounts to the same thing.

In any case, I can be forgiven for not figuring all this out while there was still time to get a pre-nuptial agreement. Mike's not entirely a creature of the 18th century croft. He is quite willing to splurge on the horse when the mule is cheaper so long as there's only a few dollars' difference between them. He's willing to buy the house that costs the most per square foot as long as it comes within the total budgetary figure he has in his head. And if someone else is losing on the deal, Mike'll spring for it every time.

After twenty years of marriage, that's water well under the bridge and far out to sea. The sad thing is, I'm not so very different from Mike. And here's the perfect example. As a result of The Diagnosis and Other Stressful Things, I've talked myself into a number of indulgences in the past few months. I bought the digital SLR camera I'd been hankering for (that Nikon D40 is sweet). I increased my Spode collection. And I had plans to take myself to one of Austin's premier hair-stylists and get my coiffure attended to: highlights, cut, lavish massaging of the temples.

And then I got wind of what the pricetag would be should I let Maurice style my hair.

And so to plan B, at least as far as the hair-styling is concerned. Our local salon, Innu, has a wonderfully talented hair-dresser. Thirty bucks for a cut and something under a hundred for highlights. All she needs is a little guidance. To help guide her, I've downloaded software that lets you do a virtual makeover of yourself. You can even try 'styles of the stars'. Trouble is that when I tried the "Jennifer Aniston" style, I got someone who looks like American Indian activist Russell Means.On to Plan C, I think.

Anyway, thinking of Russell Means and the Black Feet of North Dakota, I'm reminded of a more literal example of the tribe, the one I picked up at 2 AM last Monday morning at Kealing Middle School. Yes, our fair princess had returned from the band trip to San Diego, where they allegedly played their instruments, but also visited the beach, the zoo, the amusement park, the boardwalk and other sights. On the trip back, a harrowing 24-hour sit-down on the bus, they stopped at many fast food joints. My kid, never much for shoes at the best of times, said that she could never find her shoes and get herself fed in the miserable amount of time they had to stop and eat. So she went into KFC and MacDonald's and God Knows Where Else barefoot. Barefoot.

I only found this out later the next morning, though I should have wondered why, at 3 AM, she was taking such a long time over her shower. "I'm washing my feet!" she wailed when I complained. The next morning, I found the towel she'd used to get the muck off and it was as black as if it had been rolled in road tar. Which I guess was pretty much what had happened to it.

That was how this blogging week started for me. The end of the week must surely have had Mike wondering why he had married me. We made the offer on Shoe String Harbor more than six weeks ago and applied for a mortgage. Standard stuff. But the news of the economy kept gnawing at us during the long approval process. My worries intensified when a friend told me that he had sold his house twice but in both cases the deal had fallen through because the buyers couldn't get a mortgage. The banks, which had tanked the economy by giving half-million dollar loans to janitors, had suddenly gotten religion and were now suspicious of everyone. I gnawed off several fingers in the wait that would never end.

When we finally did get the mortgage I was intensely relieved but still very keyed up. Upon hearing the news, I got up from the lap-top, my foot neatly hooking into the cable that led to the one object that I could not afford to break, the hard-drive containing all of Mike's genealogical reseach, all the Napster downloads and ITunes library, and the family photos from the last 5 years. The drive crashed like a china teapot. In high anguish, I scooped the bits up into my arms and got into the car, determined to get the drive to the data recovery shop ASAP. Backing out of the driveway of the Wee Rental, I promptly scraped a small ornamental tree. Tree 1, Corolla's fender 0. In five minutes, I'd managed to do $2000 worth of damage to our worldly goods.

This teaches me that when I'm really, really relieved about something that I've been very, very stressed about, I must have a glass of champagne before I do anything.