When the wife’s away, cats, dogs and men will play

Published 8/16/05

While watching the news from London’s Heathrow Airport 24 hours before my wife was to return from a lengthy trip abroad, I had this sudden feeling of apprehension.

Oh, no, I wasn’t worried about the British Airways Strike that stranded the airline’s entire fleet and more than 100,000 passengers around the world, thus threatening my wife’s return flight from London. Type A that she is, I knew she could single handedly get catering workers, baggage handlers, bus drivers, ramp workers and check-in staff back on the job in a matter of minutes if she wanted to get home badly enough. It wasn’t her I was worried about.

What I suddenly realized was that the wife and son had now been gone nearly 14 days and, while I had engaged in other kinds of work and, okay, a little play, I hadn’t done 14 minutes of housework.

In Greek theatre, it’s known as an “anagnoresis,” (A-NAG’-NOR-E-SIS) the dramatic point in time where a character realizes a truth to which he or she has been previously and totally clueless.

The most startling part of my own personal anagnoresis was the realization that I had 24 hours to clean, more or less, 2400 squalid square feet.

Of course, as a man, and here I invoke a legitimate gender stereotype, the first thing I wanted to do after discovering the errors of my ways was to blame someone else. So I immediately called an emergency powwow of the housepets. Standing before Mr. Darcy, our new Yorkie, Abigail the Beagle and that cat thing that roams the house, I gaveled the meeting to order and announced that for the next 24 hours there would be no more eating, no more peeing, no more pooping, no more shedding and absolutely no more sleeping. On the furniture, that is.

Anyone who thought this was a zoo, I continued, was sorely mistaken. With any luck, I said, British Airways will go bankrupt and we’ll get the reprieve we need. Feeling that this was one of my better public addresses, I finished with a flourish: “Ask not what your master can do for you, you dogs, but what you can do for your master now that he needs a Merry Maid or two.”

Have you ever had three furry faces look at you like you were stupid when you were trying to make an important announcement? It’s annoying is what it is.

I then sped to my favorite wholesale outlet and told the clerk to give me the Works. Not only did I get the Works, I also got wholesale drums of Lysol, Windex, Spic & Span, Comet, Murphy’s Oil and anything that would remove a multitude of stains. I’d deal with a multitude of sins later. I also bought a tire pump. You know, to inflate the flowers that I had left wilting in two straight weeks of 90-degree heat. It was obviously too late for water.

It’s not that I was in a panic. But in one of my wife’s final international e-mails to me, she said she missed me and when she returned she hoped the house would be “emaculate.” Although she once received an administrative award of excellence from Governor O’Bannon, she’s not obsessive compulsive about spelling and her rendering of the word “immaculate” just looked too much like “emasculate” for me to take any chances.

Well, immaculate is probably overstating it but in the end I got the job done

One of the challenges of doing housework, of course, is living in that same house once it’s clean and then keeping it clean. The night before my family’s return, I had scrubbed the scum out of the bathrooms and had them on Lysol lockdown. I even put some of that blue stuff in the toilet bowls to keep them clean. But in the middle of the night when nature called for Abby and Mr. Darcy and I took them to their respective trees and then nature began to call for me, I kept thinking back to the bathrooms that I wanted to sparkle at any cost. Well, it was dark and everyone was asleep and if it was good enough for the animals…

The things we do just to avoid a Greek tragedy.