I Married a Klutz

I have always been a fan of physical comedy.  In my youth, when we first got our television, I loved to see the Laurel and Hardy movies.  While my father adored Charlie Chaplin, I never quite got the Little Tramp.  My mother?  No sense of humor.

As I grew older, I feared I was turning into my mother.  I didn’t find most comedians funny.  Jokes, eh.  A grimace that passed for a smile would do me.  But there were brilliant exceptions.  Where is the likes of Victor Borge now!  Well, okay, we still have Mel Brooks and his brilliant movies and Carl Reiner’s laugh-out-loud “Enter Laughing.”  But really, there would be long stretches before I found something to laugh at.  Perhaps that’s why I married my husband.  He has provided a constant, if perhaps unwitting, source of amusement.

I met him folk dancing.  It was only later I discovered that particular folk had limited ability to dance.  And yet, there was something odd about him, and I like odd people.

He did tell me his tale of woe about folk dancing, held on the Princeton Graduate Commons, where he was receiving his Ph.D-not on the Commons, but in the school of engineering.  It seemed every woman who came to folk dancing would drop out after one date with him.  What a sorry state of affairs, and why did I come back a second time?  Fifty-six years later, I’m still wondering.

I guess I came back because he made me laugh.  His klutz-worthiness I only discovered after we married.

My husband has trouble with rice.  Early in our marriage, he was consulting down in Huntsville, when I finally came to join him.  We got a babysitter, as he had made reservations in this exclusive restaurant where tables were set in alcoves that were totally private.  Huntsville is the South.  One dresses for the occasion.  My husband had his suit cleaned, and I was in my cocktail dress.  The food was delivered.  I have no idea how he did it because really these things always “just” happen to him. All of a sudden, rice was all over him.  All he had to say was, “A whole dollar wasted,” which is what he paid to have his suit cleaned.  I can’t remember the meal, but I do remember laughing my head off.

Fast forward so many years.  By then we had three children, my husband was in charge of finding sites for conventions for his professional organization.  We were in Jerusalem, about to meet the sales representative of a new hotel that wanted my husband’s business.  We were all somehow lined up, and my husband was giving us a lecture on how we had to behave because this was business and it was important.

En famille we made our way to the table, I being as gracious as was possible because it’s not my thing.  The meal came.  Rice again.  Rice all over my husband.  Again.  And I wasn’t supposed to laugh?  Yes, I tried to muffle it, until I spotted the look of horror on my husband’s face.  Who could resist the upcoming guffaw?  That hotel was not chosen. Whether it was them or us, I’m not even going to try to guess.

My husband has many talents I admire.  Despite being a “lofty” professor, he has the ability to get along with everyone, except when someone annoys him.  I lay this trait on the shoulders of his father, who was a plumbing contractor in Iraq before they moved to Israel.  Yes, losing everything in the process.  But because my husband used to help his father with his work in Israel, he learned how to do so much.  He was very handy around the house, replacing toilets, floors, fixing all sorts of issues.  This was before we finally had enough money very late in life so that he could hire someone. He gave up the handyman ghost.  And yet—the ladder.

The house we live in has a flat roof, not good for the gutters.  Do not believe any of those ads about gutter protection. We’ve tried. They don’t work.  So my husband would get out the ladder and climb onto the roof to clear the gutters.  Because he is a klutz, did this worry me?  Well, someone had to do it, and it wasn’t going to be me.

This particular day, when he chose to get out the ladder, my daughter and I were at the Contemporary Art Museum in downtown Chicago.  There we encountered a running video of a man climbing a ladder and falling off, repetitiously.  Did I have a premonition?  Absolutely not.

We come home.  Not finding my husband watching football on the tv, we both headed toward the back of the house.  There was my husband on the ladder, almost at roof level, when down he tumbled.  My daughter and I looked at one another and said, “Just like the video.”  Was my husband a bit put out that we weren’t more concerned?  Yes.  Perhaps we shouldn’t have laughed.  But there he was, art in the making.  In any case, he made it up onto the roof his second try.

My husband’s ability to trip and fall has endeared him to me many times over.  He blames his imbalance on scoliosis, which he only discovered when the army doctors diagnosed it.  He claims this is also why he could never ride a bike.  While living in Haifa, he made the effort with a friend’s bike.  Haifa, like San Francisco, is full of hills.  Too bad my husband or the bike didn’t make it down in one piece.  But, if he can’t ride a bike, he should at least be able to walk, shouldn’t he?

My husband was a great one for hikes, ever upwards.  Yes, I dragged behind but eventually made it.  Would he have noticed if I hadn’t?  No, he was too busy looking at his Garmin GPS, which actually came in handy when we had to retrace our steps over meandering and flowing waters.  But sometimes he was ill-equipped for a hike.  Like the time he joined me straight from a conference, as we took a short hike up a modest path on Mt. Rainier, still covered in snow.  While I was in parka and hiking boots, he was in a Burberry rain coat and his dress shoes.  There he was, standing in the snow, pointing out an interesting feature to me when his feel slipped out from under him and over he went, tobogganing down the hill, finally catching hold of a baby evergreen to stop his slide.  Did I worry if his life insurance was up to date?  No.  He being an engineer, I knew he was precise about things like that.  But I had pity on him and went down the hill, carefully, to help drag him back up.

Fast forward to Rotterdam.  He had the afternoon off from his conference, and we were walking to the boat slip to embark on a trip around the windmills when—all of a sudden down he goes.  Face-planted on the sidewalk, blood everywhere, glasses broken.  Would we make it to the boat on time, I was wondering?  I had my doubts.

Fortunately, we were near a bar.  He went in and found the restroom and tried to clean himself off.  He told me the bartender wasn’t happy to see him.  Out he came and insisted that the sidewalk had cracks and was uneven.

There were no impediments on the sidewalk at all.  It was smooth and even.  He went over every inch trying to prove his point, while I just stood and watched him continue to bleed.

We did make the boat ride.  We were the only Americans, and may I say the only people sober and it was mid-afternoon.

I spent the rest of that conference and the next one that followed upon it applying my make up onto my husband to try to hide his bruises and scabs.  Fortunately, Rotterdam had an excellent optical shop, so at least he could see—himself, tripping over his own feet.

Now his falls are less amusing.  Last year my daughter and I were waiting for him at his assisted living facility.  He was to open the door and come to the patio outside to play cards with us.  He never showed up.  We’re swearing away, wondering where he was.  Finally, we go to his apartment and find two friends with him.  He had fallen, yes, and couldn’t get up.  He had lain on the floor for over twelve hours.

Sad to say, the laughter has died.