Cream Cheese

It's impossible to relay to you how tired I was when I got home Saturday afternoon. I had swum that morning, walked all over Hodge Ski Lodge at mid-day, and taken a run in the heat and hills. As soon as I opened our front door, I got, "There you are! I was just about to text you!"

Suddenly I was an eight-year old who had just got caught by Mom either peeing in the front yard or smoking a cigarette in the back. What the heck? What did I do?

"Somebody . . . ."

Oh no. The dreaded "somebody." That can only mean

a) me
b) me, or
c) me

If you picked c) me, you are the winner. DM me your mailing address, and I will send you your prize.

"Somebody opened my cream cheese."

What?!?!? This is what I'm in trouble for? I don't even know what cream cheese is. I really don't know what cream cheese is. I promise you, I do not know what that is. Did I mention that I don't know what cream cheese is?

I will take a lie detector test, swear on a Bible, and promise to stick a needle in my eye that I don't know what cream cheese is, and I have never to my knowledge laid a single skinny, aged finger on the stuff. But here I am, an eight year old boy, in big trouble.

I'm sixty-three years old. When am I going to stop being treated like a little boy? Haven't I lived through that already? I know, my wife would say: I'll stop treating you like a little boy when you stop acting like one. But I'm innocent. I don't even know what cream cheese is!

Yeah, you're thinking that I came home from a long run one day and was so ravenously hungry that I, like Esau, sold my birthright for a mess of cream cheese. I did not do it. When that happens, when I am starving to death and there are no leftovers in the fridge and no snacks on the table, I eat mayonnaise and crackers. God created mayonnaise and crackers on the fifth day so Adam would always have something to eat, even if Eve was angry with him for something he didn't do. God durn sure didn't create cream cheese. A woman did that, I can tell you.

"So now you have to go to the grocery store and buy me some cream cheese."

I didn't bother to ask why she couldn't go to the store. I already knew the answer to that: she was not dressed for it. Like I was. Soaked in sweat, stinking, and dust caked on my ankles and calves up to the knee. Seriously. I was filthy.

Off I go looking like a homeless man, and more importantly, smelling like one, to buy something that I don't know what it is, what one does with it, or what it looks like even. I'm in a lovely mood, I tell you.

I get inside the store and God smiles on me. I see an old friend, Buddy Whittenmyer, who works there. We chat. I finally work it in. "Where is the cream cheese?" He asks another employee and they give me good intel on where to find the stuff. 

I find it. I buy it. I go home.

I hand the stuff to my sweet wife. 

"You look terrible. Get out of those filthy clothes and take a bath."

I'm still eight years old. I look good enough to go the the grocery store and buy you cream cheese, I screamed in my mind. But with my mouth I said not a word. My poor tongue was terribly wounded from being bitten so hard.

I bathed. I pouted. I got into bed. Then the little runt cat we got off the river, River, comes into the room, jumps up on the bed, and snuggles up to me. All is well. Thank you, Jesus.