mix mix mix

Every night Nipper Knapp makes a smoothie. Every night. Am I opposed to this? No. Do I have a problem with kale, or berries, or the intermingling of soy milk, and frozen peaches? NO. I don't. Don't I want him to be healthy? Don't I want him to live FOREVER?! YES! YES I DO!

But something happened. I dunno when. I can't pinpoint the day. Don't know the last time I was able to tune out the once gentle whir of the blender. The last time, I didn't mind pausing The Daily Show, not once but 3-4 times, so the smoothie would be just right. The day it felt personal. One day, I realized that every time he said "you want a smoothie?" I started silently planning ways to destroy him. At first it was just a chin tuck and an eye roll from the other room. "No thank you". But at some point I became openly hostile. It was volcanic. Not explosive, just the rushing hot magma of marital contempt. "Smoothies?" he would text innocently from Jack's room after he heard me leave Charlie's bedroom to go downstairs. "I'm having wine" I'd write back, but I might as well have said "WHY ARE YOU TRYING TO CRUSH MY SOUL, AND WHY CAN'T WE JUST RUN FREE LIKE WILD PALOMINOS?!" And then imagine me on the stairs doing an elaborate full body, arms raised, "why god why" move. Nipper Knapp would call this a spastic seizure. I call it a tiny fissure.

I don't know much. In fact, I'm pretty sure that there's a chronic leak in the portion of my brain that once held important facts. Stuff like, the inner workings of a bicameral legislature, and how to fix my hair like I did the summer after college. But here's the thing about marriage. It's a marathon, blah blah blah. If you are a trained runner, someone who wants to be in the race, it's not the distance that kills you, it's the tiny blister left untended, or the unusually high temperature with not enough water, or some other banal detail, that can be your undoing. "We could have kept going, but for those fucking smoothies". Right.

One day, after much sighing (me) and much apologizing, and I'm sure eye rolling (Nipper Knapp), we both realized it is a stupid problem, and said it out loud. "You hate my smoothies." he laughed. "I hate the sound." And we came up with a solution. And this my friends is how two people grow old and completely the same kind of crazy together.

Poor Nipper Knapp, look at this face.