Getting Strung Out on C(au)lors

Being the good husband, I always try to help out my wife whenever I can. I try to pee in the toilet and not on the floor. I hang up my clothes and make the bed. I'm pretty well-trained. Unfortunately when it comes to some things I try to help her with, I work under a major handicap: I'm male.

When she isn't taking care of me and making sure I don't accidentally kill myself and crap like that, my wife's one hobby is sewing baby blankets. In fact she is like a baby blanket machine turning them out one after another. Because of her hobby, each of our grandchildren is assured of never, ever being the least bit cold-our granddaughter has five blankets that take turns as her favorite. My wife also donates many of the blankets to places like St. Jude's Hospital to assure other, less fortunate children can have a little piece of security to cuddle up to. She is a wonderful, good-hearted person. But she does seem to take some kind of perverse pleasure in watching me slowly go insane.

Before completing one blanket, my wife buys another so that she can start right in-no down time for this lady. These blankets come packaged in plastic and are sold at such craft stores as Hobby Lobby. If you've never been to Hobby Lobby, let me sum it up for you in one word: Hell. That is if you are a heterosexual male anyway. If you are at all like my wife, you probably think of Hobby Lobby as an oasis away from your husband's world of "Feed me! Clean me! Do me!"

In each package is a blanket with a printed design on it along with a bag full of variously colored strands of string. And, of course, directions. The bag of string is a tangled mess and part of the preparation ritual involves sorting through the strands of string, separating them by color, counting them and putting them into the separate compartments of her string case. That's where I often help my wife and that's how I now find myself staring down at a pile of hundreds of colored, twisted strands of string.

Today, I am taking on this daunting task alone as my wife sits a few feet away working on finishing her current masterpiece. I swear I can hear them laughing at me-the string and my wife. I look through the list of colors on the page of directions and begin my sorting. After working my way through the first few colors, I ask for guidance.

Me: Taupe? What the hell's taupe?

Wife: It's kind of a darker shade of brown? And it's not "taw-pay"-it's pronounced "tope."

Me: Darker shade of brown, huh? Here's an idea: How about calling it...oh...say...DARK BROWN!? I know what dark brown looks like! It's not quite as light as brown and not nearly as light as light brown!!! (I exclaim a lot when I'm off my meds.)

Wife: Taupe isn't brown!

Me: You just said...

Wife: I said it was a shade of brown.

Me: Oh crap. Now it's telling me to look for "light taupe." Wouldn't that be brown? If taupe is a darker shade of brown, wouldn't light taupe be brown? (In the world of colors, logic is apparently a detriment.)

Wife: (under her breath) What an idiot...

This brings me back to a similar conversation we had twenty years ago when looking for interior colors for our new home. My wife wanted to paint the walls of our family room a color I had never heard of.

Me: Mauve? What's mauve? (Men, beware of so-called colors containing a vowel combination of "au.")

Wife: It's a kind of a pinkish color.

Me: Pink? You want to paint our walls pink? Are you crazy?

Wife: It's not pink-it's a kind of pink! It's darker than pink and blah, blah, blah...

I had tuned her out by then because I knew no matter what she said and no matter what I said, the walls of our family room were going to be mauve-which, by the way, ended up looking an awful lot like pink to me.

But getting back to my colored string sorting nightmare, the color list also includes light brown, brown, dark brown, tan, light tan, dark tan and just about every other shade of brown Michael Jackson's skin had been at some point in his life. Plus there are roughly a thousand different shades of green. And there's even something called-I'm not making this up-"palest blue," which looks to my untrained eye to be white. There are no other shades of blue in the package, so how this color earned the name "palest blue" is beyond me.

Another fun part of this project is making sure the correct number of strands are there for each color. The list of colors includes the number of strands there should be for each color, but each strand is to be cut in half-a little piece of information that is apparently a secret known only in the baby blanket making world. In other words if it says there should be 12 strands of "somewhat light goldish yellowish green," you will find 6 strands. Even though my dear wife let's me in on the little secret, it still causes me problems. I'm good at math, but when I am concentrating on finding colors I've never heard of and then see that the number of strands should be 12, I'm thinking 12-not 6. So now I begin to panic.

Me: There's not enough "ultra light grayish dark ebony black!" There's supposed to be 10 strands but I can only find five.

Wife: Did you cut them in half, stupid?

Me: Oh shit, I forgot. You'd think they could find some unemployed 5-year-olds in a third-world country somewhere who could cut these suckers in half and then sort them before they are packaged so I don't have to do it!

I continue on and all the while I'm sorting the colors and counting the strands and cutting them in half and swearing, I see my wife in the corner of my eye sitting in her rocker, sewing away on her blanket, shaking her head and smiling.

And then it hits me: I know what she's doing! She's thinking up a name right now for another bogus color to submit to the National Women's Think Up Fake Color Names to Drive Men Crazy Association.

God knows what it'll look like and what she'll call it, but whatever it is, I'm sure of one thing:

It'll contain a vowel combination of "au."