Sockarooni

A few weeks ago, Rebecca and I started devoting some time each night to packing our things for Ecuador and straightening our own house for our tenant. While packing for a three-plus month trip is pretty daunting in itself, you can probably imagine what eight years and two kids will do to a house. Plus, some of my college fraternity roommates were neater than Rebecca. Suffice it to say, our home had that lived in look.

Rebecca spent many nights packing hers and the kids clothes, formulating a strategy for our checked and carry-on luggage, sorting the hundreds of plastic forks and spoons from our silverware drawer, and whipping-up our dwindling foodstuffs into meals that the kids would not eat. She also had to deal with her clients and organize her case files so that the attorney who is managing her cases this summer could just pick up the file and be off. Not to mention having to juggle two kids (Maya and Jonah) who could go from grown-up, independent, giggly-happy little love-muffins to whining, fighting, hold-me, hold-me monsters in as much time as it takes to blink.

My time was spent organizing our bookshelves so that they held only books; wondering how rocks got into the umbrella stand; sorting and culling toys from the various baskets, drawers, under couches and chairs, where we keep them; organizing the bar one bottle at a time, getting together boxes of stuff for good will; straightening our closets of junk that we can’t bear to part with; and wishing that I had a nickel for every pony-tail holder, barrette, and hair clip of Maya’s that I found. I’d be about forty bucks richer.

Friday, May 9, was my last day at work in anticipation of this past weekend and these last few days being last big push to get things done. On Saturday and Sunday folks kept asking me if it felt good to be done with work for the next few months, and truly, it didn’t. There was still so much to do at home that it wasn’t like we were on vacation – or whatever you want to call this adventure that we are going on. Carpets needed to be shampooed. Refrigerator’s needed to be emptied. Tubs needed to be scrubbed and medicine cabinets emptied. Our master bedroom dressers and closets needed to be emptied so our tenant had some space. The yard needed trimming and straightening. Clothes and sheets needed washing; and all the extra clothes, toys, foodstuffs, etc needed to be packed into boxes and brought to my in-laws house where we are storing them for the summer.

(I’m going to steal a journalistic technique here from Norman Chad, The Couch Slouch, who has a column run every Monday in The Washington Post Sports section; Column Intermission I. When I met Rebecca ten years ago, I was a briefs guy. Tighty-whities, as Rebecca calls them. After the stomach-clenching guffaws and withholding of sex each time I took my pants off in front of her, I was convinced that I really was a boxer-briefs kind of guy. Two weeks after the big change, I was rewarded for being so open-minded as to concede to her wishes. Two children later, I question my choice. Anyway, in emptying my dresser, I found a pair of tighty-whities that I haven’t worn in ten years! What the heck were they doing in there? If I had come across them at another time, I would have put them on for old-times sake and walked around the house wearing them for the rest of the day. But, as an indication of how stressed I am without even knowing it, the thought to put them on never even crossed my mind until I was laying awake in bed at 2 a.m. this morning.)

(Column Intermission II. This doesn’t make much sense to me, but we also brought our safe, which contains our valuables and keepsakes like birth certificates, social security cards, gold jewelry, and the condom from our wedding night, from a house that is going to be occupied all summer – our own – to a house that is going to be empty for most of the summer – my in-laws. Our homeowner’s insurance won’t cover items stolen from our house that we are renting, but will cover them if they are stolen from someone else’s house that is empty. Seems like a sensible way to do business, no?)

Ordinarily, my in-laws would be around to take the kids off our hands while we were doing all this, but they decided to book a three-week cruise to the Mediterranean, where they just did three weeks in November, right smack dab in the middle of our cleaning/packing frenzy rather than sticking around to help out. Now, to be fair, they did book this cruise before we had nailed down the dates of our departure. But, once they knew our date came while they were going to be away, they didn’t even offer to cancel their cruise, eat the deposit, and stick around to help pack, manage the kids, do some minor repairs on our place, and referee mine and Rebecca’s week-long tension with each other. Instead, my Mom came to town from Paramus, NJ to pick up their slack. Did I mention that my in-laws just went on a cruise to the Mediterranean in November? Anyway, it’s been a pleasure having my mom here. First of all, it’s nice to see her. Second of all, Maya and Jonah love her, she’s fearless in what she will undertake with them, and despite my failure to act on her advice, she has some pretty good insights on mine and Rebecca’s running fight. She’s been a big help. Thanks, Mom.

As I write this on Wednesday afternoon, less than 24-hours from our departure, Rebecca is at work trying to finish up some last minute thing that she isn’t telling me anything about except to mention that it is an “audit” (hopefully, not of the IRS variety!), and we are still either ignoring each other or making snappy comments at each other. It’s about a two or three-day running thing covering everything from how to trim the hedges to where to store the linens , but I think it came to a head yesterday evening as we were driving to my in-laws where we were staying for the night. Rebecca had asked me to empty the refrigerator. I grabbed the eggs, milk, yogurt and a few other things and put them in a box and off we went. As she’s driving she asks me if I grabbed the jar of pasta sauce. I remembered seeing it, a jar of Paul Newman’s Sockarooni sauce, half-full. It had a dumb catch-phrase on it, “An intimate companion your pasta will never forget”. Like pasta remembers anything. I left it in the fridge. This really bothered Rebecca. Somehow, it seemed, despite the house being so spotless, minimized and organized that we both mentioned having second thoughts about going to Ecuador because we wanted to live in our house while it was so clean, having a half-empty jar of pasta sauce in the fridge undid it all. Rebecca, being the environmentalist and minimalist that she is, was also worried that our tenant would never use it, even if it did contain pepper, spices and the whole she-bang, and it would be wasted.

In my time-worn style, I made sarcastic comments, intimated that I hoped that our lessor in Ecuador left us a half-empty jar of tomato sauce because I would eat it, and generally made nasty witticisms to the point where there was zero chance that we would make love that night.

And we didn’t. And we aren’t even talking civilly yet. But this morning when I got out of bed and went home to finish tidying the house and emptying the refrigerator, I made sure to grab the Sockarooni. Now, I think even Rebecca will agree that our house clean-up is complete. And, we’re going to have pasta and tomato sauce for dinner.