Yes, my wife had her odd little quirks, but I suppose I did too, and we seemed to get along like gangbusters. She was beautiful. I guess she found me handsome, or at least reasonably attractive. She used to joke that I was “better looking than the average toad.” The sex was mind-blowing. Literally. I would often wake up the next morning after a night of furious sex feeling dazed and confused and covered in scratches and love bites. I proudly wore those wounds like badges of honor. (I eventually had to start taking vitamin supplements, but that was no big deal.) She never insisted on a girls night out every week, and neither did I need a boys night out. We had our little spats, but nothing major, and of course, the makeup sex was always good.

She did have a group of gal-pals that would meet at our house about once a month for a cooking & canning fest or book reading. They’d usually gather on the back patio and make some exotic stew of the month in a big pot over a grill on our outdoor fire pit, then put it up in small jars and divvy it up amongst themselves. They never offered to share with me, but that’s okay. I got a whiff of one of their creations once. Let’s just say that those women could have benefited from watching a few episodes of Julia or Martha, or even Lidia! Fortunately, the meals my wife made for me were quite tasty and smelled nothing like what they cooked on the patio. Their book reading was not your typical book club stuff either. They just had this one enormous old book that they would take turns reading from, and occasionally writing notes in the margins. I assume is was some anthology of romance novels, or some such.

Every once in a while they asked me to build them a bonfire. Now, I mentioned we had an outdoor fireplace on the patio, and it was a perfectly nice fire pit – the best Home Depot had to offer. But no, that would not do. I had to drag firewood back a half-mile into the woods behind our house. When I protested, my wife said that her gal-pals wanted to get closer to nature, and couldn’t really do that in our back yard – despite our living miles from the nearest neighbor. She nudged me in the ribs and gave me a wink, saying that some of her gal-pals were a little bit New Age-ish and liked to drink a little wine then would get a little silly, getting up and dancing around the fire. They were just too embarrassed to do that around me, she explained. Fine. No big deal. Those evenings allowed me to watch some of my favorite movies my wife hated. I eventually just built a wood rack on site and filled it with firewood for them so I didn’t have to drag firewood all the way back there when they decided it was time for a fire in the woods.

I mentioned that some of my wife’s pals were a little New Age-ish, or just plain old hippies. I guess, in retrospect, my wife was too. She had the house decorated with all sorts of crystals and jade carvings and weird little statues of fantastic creatures. Definitely not a Martha Stewart kind of house. She was easy on the budget as far as her wardrobe choices too, insisting on only wearing natural fabrics – some of which she made herself on her loom. Yes, she had a loom and a spinning wheel too. Real antiques that she said had been in her family for generations.

So, dear reader, you must be wondering what could have led to our breakup. Pets lead to our breakup. Yes, pets. I didn’t mind her Egyptian Hairless cat, even though I’d never seen one with that reddish skin color. My wife said I was being ridiculous when I insisted that I had witnessed the cat using the TV remote to change channels when he thought I was out of the room. No, I could deal with the cat. It was that box of six baby critters she brought home one afternoon that caused it all to come tumbling down. She said she adopted them from our local animal shelter, but I swear that I’ve never seen any thing like them before or since at the shelter, and later, the shelter disavowed any knowledge of it. Well, the little kitten-sized babies were certainly cute, but I started sneezing uncontrollably as soon as I approached their box. My face and throat swelled up and I couldn’t breath. It took two Epi-pens to get me breathing again. I asked my wife to please return them to the shelter, but that’s when the feces hit the rotating air handler. My wife let me know in no uncertain terms that her babies were staying, and if I didn’t like it, I could go! I would have argued with her, but I’d learned over the years that when her irises turned yellow and her pupils started to glow red that there was just no reasoning with her.

Who the hell would have thought I would be violently allergic to Flying Monkey fur?