The Major’s fears. #CanadaHumour

There are not many things in this life that I am afraid of anymore, I suppose because at my age there is not too much that anyone can do to me. For instance, I cannot be fired from a job as I have been retired for some time now. Nor can I be made to feel badly because I am not invited to large parties full of influential people whose influence I am not interested in.
Our children are long gone and only phone us when they want something, if I am honest. But there was a time when the phone rang, it was more often than not some outraged teacher carefully explaining why he thought that one or more of our children were full-fledged criminals. The phone no longer frightens me.
The one thing that does give me pause is when my wife goes on the warpath. Then I am terrified, because everything that I am and that I have in life revolves around my Kitty. If she turned her back on me, I don’t know how I would cope.
Last week, for example, I stepped on one of her benighted cats, I think it was Pericles, on my way down the stairs. I suddenly found myself in purgatory and not my fault at all. I mean to say what was the blasted cat doing on the stairs in the first place?
Nor did anyone make even the smallest mention of the fact I could well have been killed if I had not with an almost otherworldly dexterity managed to pirouette like Nijinsky in his heyday to avoid breaking my neck. In so doing I stepped on the wretched cat’s ear, which set the beast to caterwauling.
Judge and jury were my wife’s two eyes, and I was guilty before she blinked. I felt like Louis XVI; every time he tried to speak just before he was guillotined, the drums beat harder and no one heard his final words. I had done nothing and suddenly everything was on the line.
I knew the first day she brought those appalling cats home that Pericles and Bertram would be the bane of my life. They had been returned to the Home for Incorrigible Cats no fewer than 12 times and those were the two (because they couldn’t be separated, could they) that my wife fell for? Outrageous. Those two fiends from hell should have been euthanized on principle alone.
My wife is still not speaking to me, which makes for awkward breakfasts. She also has deliberately let my marmalade run out. That is how serious this has become.
My friends at the club have all sorts of problems along those lines. The Very Reverend Mumbles Te Deum was telling us a harrowing tale of a parishioner who deliberately coughs throughout his sermon each and every Sunday. He finally threw his Book of Common Prayer at her after 13 weeks of abuse and knocked her hat off. He was reported to his bishop and has been brought up on ecclesiastic high charges. He is very sorry, of course, but no one is taking his side. He even went to see the woman in question. She kneed him firmly in the groin before he could shake her hand. He had simply wanted to know why she coughed every Sunday.
The Brigadier was wondering whether he should tell his much younger fifth wife Constance that he was revoking her credit cards as she seemed to have lost her mind when it came to shoes.
“Two thousand dollars for the last ones, Major, and there was hardly anything to them.” We all stared at our $100 black oxfords and wondered if he could be possibly telling the truth. I mean to say, $2,000?
Mrs Hynde-Quarters remembered the time she lost her late husband’s medals and was too terrified to tell her spouse, the General. So every time he asked where they were, she fainted, which confused him no end. She finally discovered that the dog Montcalm had buried them in the flower garden, but by then the poor old soldier had passed to his reward, wondering, no doubt, what became of his gongs.
We are, I am afraid, still in fear of a few things as the sands run out, just not the same ones as before and fewer of them. I fear I need one last martini to face my wife when I go home tonight.
Copyright Christopher Dalton 2015