Chad went paddling at the Toronto waterfront today. I stayed home. I knew he’d get hungry, so I suggested that he take some leftover pasta casserole with him for lunch. But, because I am inherently selfish, apparently, and wasn’t going on this outing with him, I did not assemble a nutritious lunch for him. Surely thinking, ‘Huh, wife right. I will be hungry soon,’ he dutifully scooped some casserole into a plastic container and packed it with his paddling stuff. Off he went and had a lovely solo paddling excursion.
Later in the evening, I was washing a few dishes, including the plastic container Chad had taken with him. I kind of smirked as I washed it, thinking, Oops, I forgot to tell him to take some sort of utensil to eat it with. I wonder how he ate it. Probably with his hands. How cute.
When I opened the container to scoop out the remaining few pieces of pasta before washing it, there was also a small piece of cardboard in the container. I recognized this piece of cardboard as one we used recently to modify our car bike rack so as not to put undue stress on a few cables. We cut a few of these pieces (rectangles of roughly one inch by three inches) from a case of beer bottle empties that was in the car trunk. Huh, I thought, here’s one of the cardboard pieces. How on earth did it get in with Chad’s lunch? Whatever…
So I’m washing dishes and smirking because I know he forgot to take a fork, and I ask Chad, ‘So, I forgot to tell you to pack a fork to eat your pasta. How did you eat it?’ Chad starts to giggle. ‘Heh heh, you know what I did?’ Oh God, things are coming together in my brain. The cardboard. The cardboard IN the lunch container. The absence of any utensil. ‘Heh heh,’ says Chad. ‘You know those cardboard pieces….’ I drop my dishcloth and back away from the sink and cardboard piece. No, he didn’t, I think. He wouldn’t. But he did. He used the cardboard piece as an improvised spoon, or crude scooping device, anyway, to eat his pasta casserole.
‘What? I washed it off first! What?’ he asserts defensively. So he ‘washed off’ a piece of dirty cardboard in the foul water of Toronto’s harbour. And then he ate off it. A dirty piece of soggy cardboard. Like a hobo. My husband. I hate to repeat myself, but just when you think you know a guy...
