Lunch with a forty-something octogenarian Wife

You may remember that a couple of meetings ago, Counselor suggested Wife and I do something to get time together, and I suggested lunch. So we met for lunch today.

OMG what a lunch!

I had picked out a Vietnamese restaurant downtown -- not too big, not too crowded. I'd only ever been there once before, with a friend from work. Got a table, ordered some lemonade and an appetizer, and waited for Wife.

She was about 10-15 minutes late, which was no big deal and which I kind of expected. No sooner did she get to the table, though, than she launched into a sharp speech that Son 2 had called her from school with an asthma attack so she had had to go there with his inhaler before coming downtown. "See, here's his inhaler in my purse. And if you don't believe me you can ask Son 2!"

Good heavens, where did that come from? If it's true, of course I'm concerned for him; although I'm also a little puzzled because such a thing hasn't happened in ... well I can't even remember how long. I can't remember if it has happened before. Can he sometimes still suffer from asthma? Sure. But to call from school over it? Pretty close to unprecedented. So as I say, if it is true then that is definitely cause for worry; if it is false, I assume the point is just to establish that she has a good reason for being late, which hadn't worried me in the first place.

We ate the appetizer (shrimp, but she guessed it as chicken ... must be the sauce) and looked at the menu. What did I recommend? I explained I'd only been here once before but at that time I had had one of the soups and enjoyed it. So she ordered a soup and I ordered a curry.

It was kind of hard finding something to talk about, since I had ruled out the schedule, the kids, and medicine. She explained that Boyfriend 4 was looking forward to visiting while I was gone on my upcoming business trip. [Have I explained this part yet?] I explained that I was planning all the people I need to meet with while I'm gone. She told me Friend is getting whiny and demanding, and summarized some long, pointless soap opera involving him. She told me about her latest conversation with D, and how hard D is working these days. I asked her how far she had ever gotten in Speaker for the Dead, and she said she'd gotten about 70 pages in and then lost the book. But if I could find it for her, she'd be glad to have some more fiction to read. And after a while our food arrived.

Then she started complaining about the food. It was too bland. It had no flavor. It was boring. She tried one of the pepper sauces, to see if that would liven it up ... but no go, that was just pure hotness, still no flavor. Finally she decided she was just going to eat the shrimp out of it, leaving the broth and the noodles. (My lunch was lovely.)

We ate (well, at least I ate) and talked (sort of). When I was done, she offered me the rest of hers, adding "I didn't think it was possible to prepare shrimp in a way that made it tasteless, but they sure managed here." I tasted a couple of bites of her soup, surprised because mine (the last time) had been so good. It was very simple, but tasty; the flavor of the shrimp had combined with the flavor of the light beef broth -- and I think one or two herbs -- to create a subtle and interesting combination. I liked it. I'd already eaten my lunch so I wasn't going to eat all of hers, however, and presently the waitress came by to ask, "Would you like me to pack up your soup to take home?"

"No, don't. I didn't like it here, so I sure don't want to have to take it home."

I almost fell through the floor. The waitress calmly cleared up. When she had left, I asked Wife rather pointedly, "Why did you say that to her? What did she do to you, for you to say something as hurtful as that? All she's doing is waiting tables, trying to make an honest dollar ... and you have to slap her in the face? When she's not even the cook? I mean, that would be like my saying I don't want to eat lunch with you because you have no manners."

"You could say that."

"But I don't!"

Then before she could start in defending herself, I asked, "Do things taste the same as they used to?"

"I think so."

"Well, think now. I usually make the same five things for dinner, week in and week out. So if you say that spaghetti tastes the same as always, maybe you are just dining on the memory of what it used to taste like. But that soup you hated had the kind of flavor which, twenty years ago, you would have loved. So I wonder if something is changing in your taste buds or your sense of smell to make things taste different than they used to?"

We talked about this for a while, and Wife speculated that if such a thing were happening, it might explain why she never wants to eat any more ... because nothing entices her. Fine, maybe there is a connection, and maybe that's something for her doctors to work on. In the meantime, we have another problem. I recommended having lunch together from time to time as a way to find what we still have in common. But if that's not going to work (and there is no way I'll go out with her for lunch after this!) then what can we do instead? What would she enjoy?

There followed a long silence, or talk that meant the same thing as a long silence, and the upshot is that there isn't anything she enjoys. She goes through the motions every day -- "I do whatever is assigned to me" -- but there is nothing that she actually enjoys doing. Nor can she think of anything she would enjoy.

"So you might as well just lock me up and put me away." (At first I thought she was thinking of the Amontillado, which I found horribly gruesome; but in retrospect I guess it was a reference to Mrs. Bertha Rochester.)

"Now you know I'm not going to do that. Besides, our house doesn't have the space."

"Oh we wouldn't need to use our house. Just tell my psychiatrist that I'm a danger to myself and others, and I'm sure he'd be happy to put me away for good. Of course, then our insurance would get billed for it all, and you know how mixed up that would get. Plus when we ran out of insurance coverage we'd have to pay the rest of the charges out of pocket, which would ruin us financially as long as you were still married to me. So I guess you'd have to divorce me, and then you could have me locked away and not have to pay the bills."

I tried to climb down off this scaffolding with her, and get back to the question whether she could think of anything -- anything at all -- that she would enjoy. At first she had all kinds of excuses for saying No: she can't do this because of that, over and over. But I said forget the excuses for a minute. Regardless of whether it is possible for you to do something, do you even enjoy doing it? When she still couldn't think of anything, I finally said, "OK listen. You say you do whatever is assigned to you. Fine, this is an assignment. I am assigning you the task to think of activities you would enjoy, if only they were possible. I don't mean something big like 'teaching,' but little concrete components like 'learning new things,' or 'explaining stuff to other people,' or whatever. Make a big list and report back one week from today. Once you've got a list, then we can figure out which parts we can make possible. But first we need the list."

We'll see how far we get.