Sometimes Things Just Happen

A small stain appeared on the driver side visor of my new car the other day, a spontaneous tan smudge of uncertain origin that no one but my husband would have noticed.

He was at the wheel. 

“Great,” he said, “Brand new car and it’s already starting to look like crap. What got on here?”

“I have no idea,” I said honestly, wondering if perhaps I had sneezed with a mouthful of coffee. But no, that would have been in the old days. In the era of the Brand New Car, I do not eat or drink while driving. I am careful.

“Maybe you had something on your hands when you adjusted the visor,” I ventured, going on the offensive.

This strategy did not work. Monte was clearly convinced already that origin of said stain was, in some form or another, me.

And he was not happy about it.

Tidy Mont

Perhaps I should explain here that my husband is a very fine and reasonable person. He’s just extremely tidy and organized, and he’s a big advocate of maintaining things so that they will hold their value and continue to function as they should, and not look tattered, dirty and messy, either.

I, on the other hand, am a bit more casual with stuff. It’s not that I’m a slob (though he might contest that); I just have a higher threshold for soil and disorder.

My previous car was a good example: a few crumbs and spills, things rattling in the glove box, a chronic smudge on the windshield, sundry goods piled helter-skelter in the rear.

It seemed comfortable and ordinary to me. Monte found it depressing.

And now this brand new stain makes its entrance in a brand new car -- and believe me, we aren’t the sort of folks who routinely buy new cars -- well, he reacted.

But it was such a small, pale mark, I honestly did not understand how it could bother him so much.

He saw it as the beginning of a rapid decline. “Here we go,” he said, “The deterioration has already started. I just can’t understand what you got on there.”

“Sometimes things just happen,” I said, becoming philosophical. “There isn’t always an explanation. It’s like my car has stigmata. It’s kind of a miracle, if you think of it that way.”

I was very pleased with this new angle.

But he was rubbing the stigmata with a damp cloth, succeeding only in spreading it a bit and transforming it from tan to more of a yellow.

And perhaps we should leave us at this junction, because it is a dynamic that will always persist: Monte fixing things, cleaning up, seeking to create some order in the universe...and me, when not oblivious, charmed.

Somehow it works.