Saturday afternoon, I arrived home to the sound of someone rummaging through my bakeware cabinet. I look on the kitchen floor and see the still-pajama’ed-rear-end of my husband sticking out from the cabinet. The rest of his body was buried in the cabinet, scurrying through the pans looking for……the needle in the pie pan stack?
Whatever it was, he didn’t find it and the next thing I know I find my husband throwing our bakeware across the house. Cookie sheets and pie pans were flying across the living room making an awful clanging noise as they hit the ground. At one point, I think I heard a bread pan cry.
At the same time, husband was making an animal sound – not quite a grunt and somewhat of a roar – which added to the symphony of irrationality that was coming from the kitchen and flying into the living room at what seemed like 765 miles per hour.
Once he threw what looked like all 5 dozen pans, sheets, and cutting boards out of the cabinet, he sat defeated on the floor.
“We have too many pans,” he announced.
He was obviously frustrated about something, but I wasn’t about to ask what. Oh no. I mean, this show could get a lot better. We have at least a dozen more cabinets filled with cookware and I would love to see if indeed the frying pan could outfly the skillet. Or if the holes in the big colander made it more aerodynamic than the small one. Or how far a dutch man could toss a dutch oven.
Sorry, couldn’t resist that one, Waterstraat.
I decided to make myself a peanut butter sandwich before the rest of the show. It was a new jar of one of those chunky, unsalted natural peanut butters fresh with a one inch layer of oil on top. I feel like I’m being watched, stalked, when Chris appears next to me demanding the jar. Oh I am not falling for that. This peanut butter, oily and opened, will not join the pans on a nonstop flight across the house.
Flight attendant, a little help here….crazy man on board.
All of a sudden he is rummaging through the cabinets again. I use the word ‘rummage’ because to me it sounds like a noisy word; and all of this sifting through kitchen things was making a lot of noise. This time, he was in the cabinets that hold our dishes. Please do not throw the dishes, they tend to break enough on their own which either means we eat way too often or our plates are way too cheap. He obviously doesn’t find what he’s looking for and starts rummaging above the stove. A few minutes later, he stands in the middle of the kitchen with the electric mixer in his hand.
Grown man, bed head, wearing pajamas, middle of the kitchen, electric mixer in hand. See what I mean – this is getting better. Fasten your safety belts.
He stands before me, looking at me, looking for something. Ok, looking for the peanut butter. Which I was really hungry for and had no intentions of giving up. And I especially was not trusting him right now with anything that had potential to fly across the room.
He continued standing there with the electric mixer but wouldn’t get far with whatever he intended to do. You see, it was just the mixer without the whisks. Unless he was going to scare the peanut butter out of the jar by threat of mixer alone, the peanut butter would not move.
He must have realized he had a half built mixer, because the next thing I know the drawers are opening, and utensils are trembling against each other in fear. The can opener, the measuring spoons. He mumbles something about whisks, he is obviously looking for the little wire whisks that attach to the hand mixer. I give him a little help, because again, this is about to get good and I’m really wondering where this is going. I tell him to look in the other drawer and he finds them.
Standing there, hand mixer fully assembled, he asks for the peanut butter jar again, I hold it skeptically, and he explains that he needs to mix something up.
“I need to get something out,” he states with a touch of maniac in his voice. The maniac is about to take over in force as he plugs the mixer in and presses the button to rev the whisk up to full speed.
Some men put their fists through walls, some men drink a lot of beer and get into brawls. My man – well, he prefers to take the mixer into his own hands and mix things up, Martha-Stewart-gone-mad-style.
Again, this was getting good. I handed over the jar.
The next thing I know he is ramming the hand mixer into the jar shouting TAKE THAT…….PEANUT BUTTER…….ARGH!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
I don’t know if I should cry or pee myself, cry because I believe I have married Martha Stewart’s passive aggressive doppelganger or pee myself because this is the funniest thing I’ve seen all week.
After battering the peanut butter for a few minutes, he tossed the whisks in the sink and then he demanded a box. The bizarre turns even more bizarre and just for the sake of pure entertainment value I want to play along. The conversation went something like this:
HIM: I need a box.
ME: I don’t have a box.
HIM: I need a box.
ME: What do you need a box for? This was kind of like when a child approaches you and asks for the scissors. You sense nothing good could come from this.
HIM: To clean up the mess in the basement.
ME: What happened in the basement?
HIM: I threw things all over the floor.
Ah, I see the crazy plane took departed from the basement as well. Domestic flight bound to land of angry pajama-clad basement dwellers in mutiny as they scatter Park Tools across the floor. I knew better to go down the basement to check the situation out. It was the basement, after all. And you know how that goes.
I give up a laundry basket as a peace offering, and soon later he disappears into the darkness of the basement with the basket in hand. A few minutes later, I hear the sound of a thousand bike parts taking flight towards the laundry basket.
I’m not sure what happened in the basement, or the kitchen while I was at work on Saturday but I hope all of his throwing and mixing helped husband to get something out. And the whole incident is proof that you never know what you’ll find in the land of love and marriage as you share your life with another person day to day. You see their best, and their worst, and you agree to witness whatever manifestation the “worst” happens to take day to day.
And trust me, some days this manifestation is more entertaining than others and Saturday literally took the cake. Not to mention the cake pan.
