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Forget Grey’s Anatomy.  No more Desperate Housewives.  We’ve even abandoned PBS.

In fact, apart from the occasional baseball, basketball, football or other game involving men and sweat, the television in our household displays none of the variety implied when we switched to whatever that cable thing is which gives something like 687 television channels.  No, for all the variety available, we might as well go back to the days of the dinosaurs, also known as the big three networks.

For in the Bontempo household, only three television shows reign supreme:  Man vs. Wild, The Deadliest Catch, and Dirty Jobs (none of which, ironically enough, is found on any of the “big three networks”).

As you might imagine, the person watching, or rather, mesmerized by these fascinating tales of men triumphing over messy, yucky stuff is not me.  No, the individual glued to the escapades of these rough and tumble fellas (only when he can’t find the zillionth rerun of any of The Godfather movies, of course) is my husband, Dave.

In a way, I get it.  The lives of our former hunter/gatherers are drastically different from the days of yesteryear, when our guys spent most of their time matching wits with Mother Nature in a daily game of survival.  Way back when, the men really did find themselves locked in a cage match with nature, forced to fight their way through face to face meetings with creatures possessing really big teeth that were just as intent on finding food for the young ‘uns as were the guys.  And in those situations, it really may have been important to know how to avoid detection by lions or how to navigate one’s way out of the perfect storm.

Now, not so much.  My husband really doesn’t need to know how to determine if the dead zebra he’s just come across is fit to eat, nor does he need a lesson in how to skin the poor creature and consume it.  And considering the fact that he’s rarely been dropped in the middle of the Amazon or the plains of the Serengeti and forced to find his way out, it’s also not essential for him to be able to build himself a bed of mud and sticks between two trees over a river, so he can get some sleep before continuing on his he-man journey back to safety and civilization.

Now, he pretty much just needs to remember how to find his car keys and the box of Tastykakes he keeps hidden in the garage for breakfast.  As far as journeys go, the trip from home to office to coaching job (with a stop at the soft pretzel store for rations), isn’t all that arduous.

But I can see how his genetic makeup is screaming for more action.  It doesn’t seem fair that men who are only looking to behave as men are wired to do should be denied the pleasures of some heart stopping guy fun.

To that end, each of the shows mentioned provide websites which, while probably not completely satisfying the male urge to get lost in the wilderness and hunt for something, can bring a guy close with interactive games.  Depending on their choice of adventure, a guy can forge his way through the jungle, captain a crabbing ship on the high seas, or test his knowledge of any number of dirty, filthy jobs, all from the comfort of his favorite blue chair.

This summer, Dave won’t be navigating anything more threatening than the hot sand of a beach, except through television and cyber-space, and that’s fine with me.

I never liked zebra meat anyway.

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            This is a public apology to my husband.

             After twenty-five years of marriage, I did the unthinkable.  I called a locksmith to open our car.

             First, a little background.  I am notoriously particular about keeping track of my things.  (“Particular” being my word, “insanely obsessive” being those of my family.)  I mark my socks with my initials to keep my pilfering offspring from absconding with them.  I guard my hair products with unblinking eyes.  I freak when dishes are not returned to their proper place in the kitchen.  And I never, ever misplace my keys.

             My husband and kids (like most normal people) misplace things regularly.  It’s a given on any day that someone will be frantically looking for something, and I will be recruited for the search.  Most often, calling on a mother’s inner bloodhound, I recover the lost item.  (Along with lots of help from Saint Anthony.  It’s a Catholic thing.)

             These frenzied daily quests have no doubt contributed to my own compulsion to never lose anything—a source of great personal pride and, unfortunately, smugness.

             At any rate, last week, I did misplace—okay, let’s call it what is—lose my car keys.  To make matters worse, my husband, with us at the shore for the weekend, had left his set of car keys home.  (Note to vacationers:  bring two sets of car keys.)

             I picked up my daughter from work the night before, and so was the last one to have the keys.  Usually, immediately after turning off the car, I put my keys in my purse.  I tore my purse apart; we tore the house apart.  We looked for those keys for over two hours.  And boy, did I pray to Saint Anthony, who, probably a little fed up with my formerly self-satisfied attitude, was unusually quiet.

             I concluded that most likely, I had dropped the keys in the car, thinking I had dropped them into my purse.  Thus began the manly undertaking of breaking into our car, a guy’s thing if there ever was one.

             My husband, armed with flashlight, coat hangers, screwdrivers and heaven knows what else, valiantly tried to open the car, attracting the attention of a neighborhood friend in the process.  For some reason, men attack the opening of a locked car with the same intensity they would employ if taking a hill in battle.

             The guys were sweating for another forty minutes, no closer to opening the vehicle, when I committed the wifely faux-pas.

             “Guys, I’m calling a locksmith.  You’re never going to get that door open.”

             My husband looked as though I had all but dressed him in a pink tutu and paraded him down Main Street.  His friend, clearly at one with his brother in manhood, muttered something about locksmiths being really expensive on a Sunday, patted my husband on the shoulder in sympathy, and slunk back home across the street.

             Much to my spouse’s chagrin, the locksmith came and had the door opened within five minutes.  I paid him the fifty bucks and thanked him profusely as Dave stood by, looking like a chastised boy.

             And the keys?  Not in the car.  The locksmith chuckled and said, “They’re in the trash.  Everybody throws their keys in the trash.”

             The keys were in the trash, where I had tossed them the night before.

             Later, I apologized to my husband, both for wasting the day as well as for publicly deriding his manhood.

             “It’s okay, Franny.  Losing the keys kind of made you look human.  It sure gives me a buffer the next time I lose mine.”

            Just when I thought I was approaching perfect, too. 

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        They’ve really gone and done it this time.

         I’ve long been a fan of the television show “20/20.”  With a wide range of news, science and entertainment topics intelligently presented, the program usually informs, enlightens and occasionally pushes the envelope a bit, frequently sparking interesting discussion.

         But this time, they’ve gone too far, and I’m not sure I’ll ever feel the same way again.

         Last Friday, John Stossel helmed a program intended to dispel or confirm, through science, the myths and truths behind the differences between men and women.  Men and women are most definitely different, not only in the obvious ways, and the show set out to prove that those differences are based much more on physiological variations in our brains than on society’s handling of gender.

          I was happily going along for the ride, almost cheering when certain proclamations pointed to at least temporary female superiority in terms of brain development (the female brain has about a two year jump on the male brain, at least until young adulthood) and language usage (females employ about 20,000 words a day, compared to a man’s 7,000—which frankly, most men don’t view as female superiority but rather as a cross they have to bear).

          They had me; I was buying it all, until the appearance of one Dr. Billy Goldberg, a New York emergency medicine physician who, along with a Mark Leyner, has written a book explaining exactly why men do some of the, let’s call them “interesting,” things they do.

          The myth in question was, “Men don’t listen.” 

          “Ha!” I said aloud to the TV, as well as to my husband, safely hidden behind his newspaper.  “Of course men don’t listen!  There’s not a woman in the world who needs some scientist to confirm that!”

          “Well, maybe if you didn’t use 20,000 words a day, it would be a little easier to listen to you,” my husband muttered.

          “What did you say?” I growled.  He, of course, pretended he didn’t hear me and continued reading.

           That’s when Dr. Goldberg stopped me in my tracks.

           “The male brain…actually has a harder time processing the female voice versus the male voice, which is a possible explanation to why we don’t listen when our wives call us,” he declared.

           “Aha!” my husband yelled, dropping his paper and suddenly all ears.  “I told you so.  It’s not that we men don’t listen to you ladies, it’s that we can’t process your voices.”  (A side note:  My husband has been telling me for years that a doctor once told him that Dave can’t hear all of the pitches in the female voice, to which I always sympathetically responded, “Yeah, right.”)

            As if to add insult to injury, the finding was echoed by female neuropsychiatrist Dr. LouAnn Brizendine.  “Boy’s don’t hear the complete tones in the female voice,” Dr. Brizendine added.             

            Ladies, this is catastrophic.  This is a “get out of jail free” card for every man in the world.  From now on, whenever we say anything at all, they’ll simply claim that they couldn’t “process” our voices.  Any number of our intelligently uttered 20,000 words can be dismissed with a simple “Sorry, I couldn’t hear you.”  From now on, we’ll all have to start sounding like John Madden if we even want to be acknowledged.

           Thanks a lot, “20/20.”  From now on, I’m watching the Home Shopping Network on Friday nights.  I’ve had my eye on a nice set of $300 pots and pans.  As for your scientific hooey, how’d you like to bet my husband hears me when I pick up the phone to order those?

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The phone was ringing, as usual, at an inopportune time.

 “Well, how high is it today?”

             I was in the middle of fixing dinner; daughter number one was downstairs cursing the computer and printer, while daughter number two was stomping around upstairs yelling about missing dance shoes.  I was not interested in guessing games.

            “Give me a minute and I’ll see if I can fix it,” I called down to the basement.  Then, “Your dance shoes are in the laundry room,” I barked up the stairs to the second floor. “What are you talking about?” I asked my husband, as I finally turned my attention to the phone.

             “You know, the drama-meter,” he said.  “Sounds like it’s at about a seven.”

             “What in the world is the ‘drama-meter’?” I asked.

             “It’s what I use to decide what time I’m going to leave the office and how much I should talk when I get home.”

             I huffed in frustration.  “Honey, I’m right in the middle of fixing dinner, and the girls are having mini-meltdowns.  I’m not in the mood for riddles at the moment.”

             “That’s exactly what I’m talking about,” he said.  “When I call home at the end of the day, I try and gauge the general mood of the house.  If it sounds like things are relatively calm, the drama-meter reads low, like a two or three.  If I hear yelling from one of the girls, the number goes up to about a five or six.  Both girls yelling takes it up another notch, and crying always rates a nine or ten.  Once I determine how high it is, I decide when to come home and how much to say when I get there.”

             “You know, I don’t think that’s very funny,” I replied.

             “I agree.  It’s not funny at all.  It’s a matter of survival.  Since David is living at school, I’m on my own over there with three women and a female dog.  Sometimes it’s not a safe place for a guy to be.  You have to know how to read the situation and respond appropriately.”

             “I may respond by not speaking to you for the rest of the day,” I snarled.

             “And, no offense, honey, but that would be fine.  If you’ve had a rough day with the girls, just let me know, and I’ll be only too happy to steer clear until the dust settles.  I’ll just sit and eat dinner quietly and read the paper.   What time should I come home?”

             “How about some time next week?” I snapped.  Then, I sighed, struck by the realization that, though I hated to admit it, he had a point.  “Sorry, just a gut reaction.  Dinner will be ready in about a half hour, come home whenever you’re ready.  I’ll try and have the drama-meter turned down to about a two by the time you get here.”

             “As only you can do,” he said.

            Three women and a female dog.  You gotta feel for the guy.

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             I thought it was because they missed me.

             For the first time since we’ve been blessed to have a home at the Jersey shore, I stayed a few extra days this year, as our youngest daughter began her first year in college and for the first time in twenty years, I didn’t have to be home to get someone off to school.

             I visited friends, had my mother down for a few days, and cleaned the entire house, spending hours vacuuming sand from the rugs, beds and furniture and washing towels for days on end. 

 It was only an extra week, but several times during my unusual absence, my husband and son called to find out when I’d be home.

 “Hi, Mom, how are you?” my son asked.  “Um, when are you coming home again?”

 “Hey, Franny, are you enjoying yourself?” my husband said.  “By the way, when are you coming home?”

 “Honey, that’s so sweet,” I said.  “David asked me the same thing when he called yesterday.  I guess he misses me or something,” I said.

 “Well, not to burst your bubble or anything, but I think he’s just trying to gauge how many days we have to get the house cleaned before you come home,” Dave answered.

 “Oh,” I said, appropriately humbled.

 Eventually, I did come home, and they tried, really they did, but all I could repeat to myself over and over was, “What do they do when I’m not here?”

 Before I even left the shore to cross the bridge from New Jersey, my husband called.

 “Are you coming home today?” he asked.

 “Probably.  Why?” I said.

 “If you have an extra roll of toilet paper there, you might want to bring it home,” he said.

 “There’s no toilet paper in the house?” I asked.  “How long…never mind; I don’t want to know,” I said.  I grabbed a roll before getting in the car.

 Then, there are the faucets, which my men appear to have something against.  That’s right, faucets.  You know, the kind that dispense water in the kitchen and bathrooms?  On my one previous trip home during summer, my husband warned me before I entered the house.

“I just want to let you know, the kitchen faucet is broken.”

“What do mean?  What happened?” I asked.

“I don’t know.  We were just trying to turn on the water and all of a sudden it was spraying all over the kitchen.  David’s going to fix it.”

Sure enough, I walked into the kitchen to find a paper towel roll stuck over the faucet handle warning everyone not to use it.  Ah, the decorator touch.

Anyway, when I finally returned home for good, the kitchen faucet was “fixed.”  In other words, it dispensed water.  But for some reason, the hot water side was the cold water side and vice versa.  (Sigh.)  Fortunately, the washing machine worked; I threw in the sheets and towels and set it to “boil.”  But later, when I turned on the faucet in the upstairs bathroom, I was greeted with a clanging and thumping which shook the very walls of the house.

“Oh yeah, I forgot.  There’s something wrong with that one, too,” Dave said. 

And let me just say that whoever coined the phrase, “Man cannot live by bread alone,” never met my two men, who, apparently, live only on bread, if the kitchen cabinets and freezer are any indication.  Bags and bags of bread and rolls.  I stopped counting at seven.

Like I said, “What do they do when I’m not home?”

On second thought, never mind.  I really don’t want to know.

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            We were out of dog food and the only size the store had was the twenty pound bag. 

             “We could buy this one, since you actually save money buying the larger size,” I suggested.

             “Fine by me,” my husband responded, loading the bag into the shopping cart.

             “I’ll just have to find a place to store it.  I can’t keep it on top of the dryer in the laundry room; it’s too big,” I said, half to myself.

             “No problem,” he said.  “I’ll figure something out.”

             And, of course, he did.

             “Has anyone seen the scoop for the dog food?” I asked at feeding time, as I went to retrieve some from the huge bag.

             “Wait, didn’t you see what I bought you?” Dave responded.

             I looked in the laundry room and found a new plastic container, filled with dog food, placed neatly on top of the dryer, the large bag tucked out of sight in the garage.

             “This is great, hon,” I said.  “Where did you get it?”

             “The dollar store,” he smiled in response.

             “What else did you buy?” I asked.

             “Nothing,” he responded, sheepishly.

             “Oh, come on, you know as well as I do that it’s impossible for you to go into the dollar store and only buy one thing,” I said.

             My husband is a master bargain hunter.  With a new dollar store sprouting on every corner, his bi-weekly trips have put him firmly in bargain hunter heaven.

             “Come on, out with it; what else did you buy?” I asked.

             “If you must know, they had these containers in a few different sizes, so I bought some for my nails and screws and stuff.”

             “Is that it?”

             “And I picked up a few pairs of reading glasses.”

             “More reading glasses?  You already have at least eight pair,” I said.

             “Yeah, but they had some different styles this week.”  He grabbed a bag from the closet.  “Look at this.  This pair folds up and fits into this little case.”

             “Amazing.  What else?”

             “Just a few cards for birthdays.  They’re two for a dollar, you know.”

             “And?”

             “I found some small bottles of Gatorade, at least it looks like Gatorade, plus a bag of caramels with the white cream in the center, and they had aluminum foil on sale, two boxes for a dollar.  And my usual two Hershey Bars,” he finished.

             “You seem pretty pleased with yourself,” I said.

             “You should check those stores out; you can get some good deals if you go back often enough.”

             “I think I’ll do that,” I said, watching as he happily unpacked his purchases and spread them on the table.

             Oh, well, I thought, as a mid-life crisis goes, this is pretty mild.  At least he’s not out buying a convertible or dying his hair black. 

             “Hey, Franny, I forgot to show you these socks.  Check this out—three pairs for a dollar!”

             Ten bucks, a dollar store, and a happy husband.  It doesn’t get better than this.

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“I can’t believe this!”

             I jumped at my husband’s exclamation.

             “What?” I asked, twisting around in the front passenger seat of the car.

             “That’s the third couple we passed using MapQuest directions!”

             A little aside, here.  I see nothing when I’m driving apart from the road in front of me.  My mother could jog alongside the car for ten miles and I’d never notice a thing.  Dave, on the other hand, sees what kind of candy the kids in the back of the SUV driving three cars behind us are noshing on.

             “We’ve only been on the road for fifteen minutes and I’ve seen three cars with people using MapQuest directions,” he continued.

             “Why does it bother you that people are using MapQuest directions?” I asked. 

             “Whatever happened to getting lost?  The art of getting lost is disappearing!”

             “Wow.  That was profound,” I said.

             “I’m serious!  No one meanders any more.”

             “No one says, ‘meander’ any more either.”

             “And all of the people holding the MapQuest directions were women.  Women giving directions to their husbands, most likely.”

             “Well, if the women are sitting in the passenger seats, they would be the obvious choice for reading the directions, don’t you think?” I asked.

             “It’s not just that they were the ones reading the directions.  I’ll bet they were the ones who looked up the directions on the computer in the first place,” Dave said.

             “What exactly is wrong with using directions?” I asked.

             “It takes all of the fun out of driving to a new place.  There are no more surprises along the way.  It’s turn left here and continue for 3.6 miles.  Then go right for .08 miles.  Whatever happened to getting in the car and just driving?”

             “So let me get this straight.  Are you telling me that men like to get lost?”

             “Of course we like to get lost.  And it’s a good thing, too.  How do you think Columbus discovered America?  He got lost!  When the pioneers settled this country, they were lost before they even started.  Why do you think men don’t like to stop and ask for directions?  Getting lost gives us the chance to put a little excitement in our lives, a little spontaneity.  It revives our instincts.  We get a chance to use our minds and think on our feet.”

             “Which would explain why the wives are clutching the directions,” I muttered.

             “Every time we’ve ever been lost, we obviously got found again or we wouldn’t be here.  Getting in the car and just driving without knowing exactly where we’re going is something lots of guys enjoy.  And you, of all people, with your English degree should appreciate getting lost.”

             “What does my English degree have to do with getting lost?” I asked.

             “Do you remember “The Road Not Taken”?  Like Robert Frost said, sometimes the road not taken makes all the difference.”

             “Now I’m really impressed.  I wasn’t buying your rant before, but since you put it that way, I suppose getting lost does have some merit,” I said.

  Dave was silent.

 “Honey, what’s the matter?  I’m agreeing with you,” I said.

 “Um, I think we’re lost.  We’re going to be late for the show,” he said sheepishly.

 “I didn’t bring any directions this time,” I said.

 “Wait!  I know!  The new phone I just got has internet access.  We can use it to MapQuest directions!”

 I stared at him.  “What about the adventure of getting lost?” I said.

 “Yeah, but now I can try out my new phone!” he said.

 Sorry, Mr. Frost.  For this man, the road not taken will be the one without the gadget, each and every time.

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            Spring cleaning at my house bears little resemblance to the same enterprise conducted by my mother when we were kids.

             Back then, beds were disassembled and cleaned, walls were dusted, baseboards scrubbed, curtains washed, in short, not a nook or cranny was left untouched until every conceivable surface sparkled.

             My father participated willingly in the task, doing the heavy lifting and lugging for my four-foot eleven mother, who squeezed her way into every corner with her bucket of soapy water.

             My idea of spring cleaning is much less arduous, as I’ve learned to appreciate the particular beauty with which dust bunnies float across the floor.  Generally, if it’s not visible to the general public, I can live with a little dirt.

             For the most part, my husband is more than content to forgo the extremes of the whole enterprise, with one notable exception: he insists on power washing every exposed area on the exterior of the house.

 To those unfamiliar with the joys of power washing, the contraption is basically an adult-sized water gun, capable of flaying the skin off of any hand unfortunate enough to come in contact with its’ super-powered jet stream of water.  Dirt is virtually beaten into submission.

 On power washing day, the revered apparatus is gently retrieved from the back of the garage, dusted off, primed, and readied for battle.  The kids are warned, the dog stashed safely in the basement, and the windows and doors bolted tight, as we prepare for the annual attack.    

  As you can imagine, this power tool is a man’s dream toy.  Every spring, as soon as the cold weather breaks for good, my husband begins mentally compiling his list of items in need of blasting.  Everything able to withstand the pressure is fair game:  the backyard deck, the brick walls of the house, the front walkway, the wooden deck chairs and rockers.

Once a man has used a power washer, he can never return to a simple hose and bucket.  My husband introduced his father and brothers to the wonders of power washing, and all five regularly trade stories of their conquests over mildew, dirt and grime.  And if, for some reason, the device refuses to work, as was the case this spring when my father-in-law prepared to zap his garage doors, their anxiety is almost palpable.

I watched bemused as my husband and his father stood in the driveway bending over the machine as if ministering to a sick child.  They pressed various buttons, plugged in and unplugged the connections and spent endless minutes musing about the possible problems.  When it became clear that the contraption was not going to work despite their best efforts, the pained expressions on their faces mirrored those of any child told his favorite toy had just been demolished.

Their disappointment was short-lived, however, when they realized they could now buy a new power washer, one with even more horsepower.

Nothing like a little spring cleaning to make a man smile.

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            It all happened so gradually that neither of us noticed until the transformation was complete.  After twenty-seven years together, fully believing that I was married to a “Dave,” my husband and I have discovered that he is, in fact, a “George.”

            The first clue came when our new neighbors moved in next door.  A lovely young family with three children, they reminded us of ourselves when we moved into our home sixteen years ago.  Throughout the last year, while doing various yard work, my husband began to find all manner of balls strewn over the lawn.  Despite the fact that we still store every ball they ever played with in our garage, our children haven’t tossed a ball in the yard in years.

            So, each week, Dave would dutifully mow or rake around the balls, stopping every so often to throw them back over the fence. 

            “Franny, I’m beginning to think those kids next door are pitching balls over here on purpose, just to see if I’ll throw them back.  When did I turn into Mr. Wilson?”

            “I don’t know, George, but you missed a tennis ball in the corner,” I smirked.

            Next up were the inevitable calls from my mother, or anyone house-sitting for my mother while she was away.  Usually the burglar alarm went off, requiring my husband to drop whatever he was doing and race to the house, trying to explain to the police that even though he didn’t know the password, he wasn’t a burglar.  Most recently, while Mom was away, my sister called with a plumbing disaster that sent my beleaguered spouse to Home Depot at 9:30 PM armed with a piece of PVC pipe that had to be replicated and then installed, keeping him out until after midnight.

            “I think I’ve become your mother’s personal handyman, just like George Utley, the fix-it guy on the old Bob Newhart show,” he said, resignedly.

            “Just don’t start wearing plaid shirts and overalls, George,” I pleaded.

            “Very funny,” he said.

            And finally, there is George Jetson.  Blessed with a plethora of gadgets at his fingertips, hapless George ran into one problem after another as the technology that was supposed to make his life easier seemed to conspire against him, causing all manner of difficulties and delays as he tried to navigate his way through life.

            A recent call to the office confirmed that George Jetson had indeed come to life in the person of my electronically unlucky husband.

            “Hi, honey, how is your day going?” I asked.

            “Well, the email is down, the back-up for the main computer crashed last night  and my palm pilot just deleted my entire address book,” he sputtered.

            “George, dear, I think you should come home early and have some lemonade on the porch.  I promise I’ll keep Dennis away, and repairs on the inn can wait until later.  I’ll make sure Rosie has your drink waiting when you park the hover-craft.”

            For my man, George, it’s the least I can do. 

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