K is for Kindness and L is for Love


     When you've been with someone for a long time, you begin to appreciate Kindness and know Love.
     Passion and Desire no longer color and cover everything. You begin to realize that he's never going to eat spaghetti. And he begins to accept that you are going to be a little late. The truth is no matter what he says or how loud he says it, you're still going to vote for that idiot. And no matter how reasonable you are he's still going to vote for anybody else.
     Then you have a weekend like we just had.
     Tuesday is the deadline for filing income tax returns in the United States, which is where we live. So last Friday, I loaded the software for this year and started ours. He kissed me and left the room. He did not ask what we were having for lunch or when. I guess he fixed his own lunch and ate when he wanted to. He didn't ask about dinner either. In fact, he didn't bother me about anything until after he signed the State Income Tax forms.
     Sunday he discovered that his aquarium had sprung a leak. His big aquarium. The one with the special fish, the particular gravel, the just-so acidic water, special snail shells sans snails, and the little rocks hand-glued to a plastic grid for a background. That one.
     Now my man is a quiet man. Out in public. And most of the time in private. But when things go wrong at home, it's easy to remember that his favorite movie -- well other than The Blues Brothers which he insists is not a musical -- is Christmas Story. And not because he relates with Ralphie, but because he admires the way the father does battle with their furnace and the Bumpus hounds.
     So, understanding the gravity of the aquarium situation, I made a one-time offer of help. He replied, "No." And I left the room.
     I stayed away until he asked me to come see how his second largest aquarium looked with its new residents. And we agreed that it was lucky he hadn't repopulated it. (It's been sitting and bubbling, all the while bereft of fish, for several months now.)
     The moral of this story is that sometimes leaving someone alone is a great Kindness and knowing when to do that is Love.