There are mornings I wake up and know that the day will be swimming. My socks pulled at random from the drawer will match my pants; my tie’s knot will be good enough to appear at the President’s neck; and my wife, knowing how hard I work and early I rise to work that hard, will be ready with coffee and breakfast to see me off to work. As it turns out, the day I had my Great Idea, was not one of those days.

I woke up late that day to my wife knocking with a broomstick on the ceiling of the kitchen, the knocks echoing up and through the bedroom’s hardwood floor. You wouldn’t know it by looking at her, but my wife has incredible speed. There are times she could give Flash a run for his money. With the echoes of her knocks still bouncing through the room, she appeared at the bedroom door, demanding to know what I was doing, and why I wasn’t heading to work so she could start her day. For the record, her day involved a hair salon appointment at nine thirty, lunch with “the girls” at eleven forty-five, shoe shopping from one to four thirty, and a nap from five to seven. I’m not judging or asking you to judge her. Hell, anyone lucky enough to find herself in such a situation is genius in my book. I’m just setting the facts straight so you’ll understand.

I slept late that morning because the bedroom was freezing. My wife turned off the heat the previous night; it was partly my fault. We ate at a local Italian restaurant, where my wife is on a first-name basis with the waiters. During the dinner conversation, I gingerly brought up the gas bill. I paid over three-hundred dollars to heat our two-bedroom house. It wasn’t as if my wife was using the gas range to cook meals. The furnace ran all day, every day, and the fuel costs were becoming outrageous. My wife was sucking up a string of spaghetti when I started the conversation. The marinara sauce was collecting on both sides of her lips, and she made a terrible slurping sound, which to this day still haunts me.

“I thought we agreed that you’d turn off the furnace when you went out for the day,” I said. The spaghetti she slurped was one, long piece, and she didn’t stop sucking it to answer. I waited as the spaghetti slithered into her mouth, the sauce building a relief around her lips. When her lips looked twice as big and half the spaghettis in the plate were gone, she leaned toward me.

“I tried that before, honey,” my wife said. She has a way of saying ‘honey’ that clues me in when she starts to get mad. She emphasizes the ‘-EY’ by ascending her voice through several registers before letting go of the word. That night, her voice rose into the dolphin range. “But when I returned home to the house, I came down with a terrible cold, of which,” she said, lowering her voice to a whisper, “the cold house was certainly a ‘contributing factor.’”

I should have known to stop there, but I’m pig-headed at times, and I felt I was in the right. I foolishly continued, gesturing with my fork. “I’m not asking you to turn it off, dear. If you could lower it to a balmy seventy degrees, you can be comfortable and save money. You can pump it right back up when you get home.”

My wife has beautiful eyes. When poets compare blue eyes to Caribbean oceans, they’re writing about my wife’s eyes. Her eyes twinkled at me as I finished. “If my health is not a concern for you, then, yes, I will lower the temperature and take whatever fate has in store for me. It is the least I can do to save us money.”

And with that, she effectively ended the conversation. Sure, I tried to continue it, to explain that I did not intend for her to get sick, that I didn’t want her to feel that way or feel that I was trying to do anything to hurt her, and, eventually, that I wanted her never to lower the heat; that I would pay whatever the gas bill was as long as she was happy. But she wanted none of it. She didn’t say a word until I changed the subject.

After my wife left the room, I managed to drag myself out of bed. I skipped showering because of the cold, and washed up and dressed quickly. My wife wore a jacket over her sweater when I found her in the kitchen. I tried to kiss her, but she blocked my kiss by placing the back of her hand over her lips. She pushed me away.

“I’m meeting my mother at the hair salon to thaw out,” my wife said. “I hope the thirty-five cents we’ll save this month is worth it to you.” She wiped her hands on a dishtowel and walked out of the room. As I watched her slam the front door behind her, I began wondering why she was drying her hands. I looked into the sink, but all the dirty dishes were still there. I shrugged it off and breakfasted on warm toast and salmon cream cheese spread and tried to pretend that the cold didn’t bother me. When my hands shook as I tried to bite into the bread, I got up and moved the dial on the thermostat to seventy degrees. The fan kicked on immediately.

…

***

I rewrote the The Next Great Idea to create the above vignette. Thanks to prodding by Chuck, I’m going to try to continue the story this week. My stories have become short, one-sitting affairs. To tell real stories, they have to be much longer.

With so much to say and nothing said, I raised the roof and lowered the asphalt.

I spent much of this evening when I should have been writing working on the website. I made a list of things that needed doing, and I got through most of them (except the biggest one, regrettably). I’m not sure when I’m going to finish it, but I’m hopeful it’ll be soon.

I only made 1k words today. I’m not proud of it, but as I said before, I’m not going to start setting goals. It’s too depressing to break them.