Truth in packaging

The wedding was beautiful. Everyone looked gorgeous. The bridesmaids wore light-olive colored strapless, floor-length sheaths. The guys wore chocolate tuxedoes with light-olive vests. There was not a pimiento in sight. The bride dazzled us all in a dress that her great-grandmother had sewn by hand for the bride’s grandmother’s wedding in 1950. The reception at the country club afterward was, in a word, fabulous.

So now the new bride and groom, Meredith and Neil, are honey-mooning in -- eat your hearts out -- St. Lucia. And Mrs. Rhymeswith-plague and I have returned home from our whirlwind 48-hour trip to Alabama The Beautiful, as the sign says at the border, Bob Riley, Governor. Jethro is back from his brief stay at his favorite doggie-dude ranch. Everything is slowly returning to what passes for normal around these parts.

Normal.

Normal is when you realize at the worst possible moment that all the toilet paper is in the closet in the other bathroom. Normal is when some kid from a couple of blocks away decides to demolish your curbside mailbox, anonymously, of course. (It didn’t happen to me, it happened to our next-door neighbor.) Normal is when you say to your friend at church, “I see you’re going to be a grandpa again,” and the apparently stylish new clothing his married daughter wore that day to church is not a maternity outfit.

Normal. That last example is also an example of my severe “foot-in-mouth” disease. I seem to have been, as Texas Governor Ann Richards once famously said of George Herbert Walker Bush, born with a silver foot in my mouth. In fact, some days the only time I open my mouth is to exchange feet. You want examples?

When Debbie L. came to work wearing a bright yellow jacket and a dark green skirt, I said, “You look like a daffodil.” I meant it in the best possible way. When Ethel B. came to work wearing a deep purple outfit, I told her, “You look like a grape.” She actually got upset. When Katherine H. came to work in a black suit, white blouse, and shiny, black, high-heeled shoes, I thought she looked well-tailored, authoritative, decisive. So I said, “You look like the warden of a women’s prison.” She appeared to be in shock. I will never forget what my friend Tim R. said next. “Katherine,” he said, “don't pay any attention to him. You look stunning!”

Well, it took a long time, years and years, but I have learned my lesson. Never say what you actually think. Say what they want to hear. If you do it enough times, you may even begin to believe it yourself. I can’t count the number of times I have seen someone all gussied up, opened my mouth to make a perfectly natural comment, my life passed before my eyes, and I have caught myself in time and said instead, “So-and-so, you look stunning!”

Let’s try it now. You may be sitting there in front of the computer in your bathrobe and pajamas, with sleep in your eyes, with your hair up in curlers. You may be sitting there in jeans and a torn sweatshirt. You may even have brought something in from the barnyard on your shoes. I don’t care. I really don’t care at all.

If you are female and you are reading my blog, you look stunning!

If you are male and you are reading my blog, I wasn’t talking to you. But a word to the wise should certainly be sufficient.