The DHL Delivery Man Who Witnessed My Crazy
Yesterday, I was in the kitchen, and I got a stabbing pain through the skin on my right breast. Do you ever get that? I have sensitive skin, so wearing the wrong piece of wardrobe has nearly sent me into insanity.
My husband caught me at that moment, me rubbing the offending spot and muttering about pain and boobs. He just shook his head and said, “Weird.”
I laughed and retorted, “Too bad. You’re the guy who married the weird chick. Now you’re stuck with me.”
I’m perfectly fine that I do weird things at home. Your family is there to tolerate your level of weirdness. That’s the challenge of people who are long-haulers in marriage. We have to adjust to our partners’ idiosyncrasies. Notice how the end of “idiosyncrasy” is just one letter off from “crazy.” We all have one. Some have several. Some have scores.
Well, if you have a good family, they learn to tolerate your level of strangeness, and we feel comfortable enough around them where we can act naturally and not worry about them running away screaming... for the most part. When the family goes out and leaves me at home alone, I do all the weird things I had been dying to do, but I hold it in because it would most likely drive them nuts, like singing in the worst possible loud voice I can.
We don’t act that way in public because people don’t know you. They have no idea what to think. Are you serious, and if you are, are you crazy?
Unfortunately, yesterday, a bit of my crazy seeped out, and there is another person in the world who witnessed it: the DHL delivery man.
We live in a fairly remote area, so we hardly ever have any unexpected guests drive by. We do have some neighbors, but we have to walk several minutes down the road to reach them. There is a furtive, babbling creek running in front of our house across our dirt road, and we are surrounded by the towering, Appalachian mountains.
These mountains demand respect. They confront you with a wall of dirt, rock, and rock formations from tens of thousands of years ago. The trees, hardy individuals, cling by the roots and grow out of the mountains’ sides and up toward the sun. The mountains themselves don’t have cliffs, so to say. They are cliffs with round tops. One wrong step, and you can fall to the earth, the same effect if you jump off the highest building in New York City. Mountain high-rises.
Needless to say, we rarely have any visitor, especially at night.
Last night, though, my family, my daughter, my adult son, and my husband went out to hit a few stores and left me at home to work on my plan to conquer the world. Okay, I stayed home to clean and wash dishes, but really, I was thinking about my plan to conquer the world. The mundane offers opportunities for flights of fancy.
So, when I heard a car in the driveway, a car door slam, footsteps along the back of the house, and a knock at the back door, I swore my family arrived home.
I stopped what I was doing and went to go greet them, wondering why they didn’t just open the back door. I had left it unlocked for them when I suspected they would arrive home, so I figured they simply had their arms full of bags and couldn’t open the door on their own.
“Hold on, the door is stuck,” I explained to a person behind it I thought was my husband and kids. The door jam had come loose. Believe it or not, a bird built its nest above our door and loosened it. Thus, it has a tendency of leaning in too close to the door, so even when you twist the handle to open it, the door jam will still block the door from opening. You have to actually push on the door jam to get it to separate from the door and allow the door to open.
“DHL delivery,” the voice responded.
Yeah, yeah, I thought. Very funny.
At this point, as I struggled with the door, my dogs had gathered at and swarmed my legs, burgeoning to burst through the back door when I opened it, especially a dog we acquired around a year ago. She’s still young and easily led astray by her wonderful, part-hound-dog nose. I couldn’t take the chance of her getting out, so I had to clear her away from the door and put her inside quickly, as I imagined my family burdened with many heavy bags and packages from their shopping trip.
You see, as a puppy, our youngest dog, Roxy, very muscular and strong even from her earliest weeks, had a tendency of being headstrong, so much so, she would drive me bananas. She wasn’t catching onto the concept of “in” very easily, what we use to encourage our dogs to go into their area while we work in the kitchen and not have to worry about stomping all over them and hurting them. When we put them into their area, we don’t have to worry about them bursting through the back door and running off.
One day, in her puppy years, she was really driving me crazy, so I looked at her, and in a muppet-like voice, I said, “Blah blah blah. Blah blah. Blah blah, blah blah blah!” While uttering these strange, foreign sounds, I pointed toward her area.
The reaction I got from the puppy was pleasing and unexpected. She looked at me wide-eyed and ran back to her area. I had discovered the magical formula to get her to listen to me. It wasn’t with words or commands. It sounds like Sesame Street’s Elmo* throwing a wordless tantrum.
Occasionally, I still have to use this tactic when she gets out of control. So, last night, I used it to get her into her area off the kitchen to get her out of the way for who I thought was my family about to enter the house. As expected, she scampered back to her little doggie bed, but remained adamant to greet the visitor at the door, a-woofing a low bark.
Mission accomplished. Now to help my family bring in the packages and bags.
Instead, I opened the door, and there stood a short man with a white mustache wearing a full DHL uniform. He didn’t seem amused at all.
Oh, crap.
“Ma’am, I know it’s late, and I’m sorry to disturb you at this hour. I am from DHL, and I need to deliver a package to you.” His voice hovered between irritation and trepidation.
My mouth hung open. “I thought you were my husband,” I weakly explained.
“Ma’am,” (again with the ma’am), “I already have a wife, and I only need one of them.”
The way his words spurted out, I was under the impression that he thought I was waiting not for my husband, but for any husband to arrive to my door and declare himself as such. I believe his reply was proof that he feared that I was going to declare him as my husband, and that he was in danger of having to fend off a looney.
“I was expecting him home. I thought he was you.”
“Ma’am,” he continued firmly, “what is your name so I can deliver your package?” He reached over and handed me a bridge my son had ordered for his guitar business. His voice hadn’t changed. He didn’t seem any more relaxed. He seemed to just want to get away from the crazy lady as quickly as possible.
Okay, one more attempt to explain the crazy away. I smiled. “It’s the only way to control the dogs so they don’t run out.”
He ignored me, diligently recording my name, declared, “Have a nice day,” and turned and left. At that point, I had to contend with the fact that no matter what I said from that point on, it would not change his impression of me. Maybe his wife was crazy too, and that was why he nearly left my house running and screaming, like he had to deliver a package to the Adam’s Family or the Munsters.
Now, someone else in the world besides my family knows a bit of my crazy. It seeped out of the crevices of my home and landed at the feet of a poor, unsuspecting DHL delivery many simply trying to do his job.
When my actual husband and kids arrived home, I had a new story to share with them, retold exactly as it is here. The kids doubled over in laughter, and the hubby shook his head. “Boy, you really freaked him out,” confirming my suspicions that it was true fear I detected in the poor fellow’s eyes.
It just shows that my family is used to me, so doing this would not have been out of the ordinary. Seriously, if they heard me behind the door doing this with the puppy to control her beastly tendencies, they wouldn’t have batted an eyelash. They have had an entire year to get used to this new little piece of crazy in living with me. The DHL delivery man’s reaction, though, shows how quick we are in judging other people’s behavior.
*Elmo is owned by the Sesame Workshop (https://dev.sesamestreet.org/termsofuse). Just in case you didn’t know.
