Beech Tree News Network

One morning last week, I walked into the bedroom to wake Garey for work.  When he rolled over, I noticed a few objects on the sheet that he didn’t ordinarily sleep with.

                “Garey, you slept with your wallet and…fifty…seventy-five…one dollar and eleven cents in change,” I counted out loud.

                “Wait a minute,” he said, “I feel something cold touching my toe.  I think it’s a nickel.”

                Could you sleep with your wallet and one dollar and sixteen cents in change rolling around under the sheets with you?  Yeah, me neither.  There would be thrashing around, lights would come on, covers would be stripped from the bed, and a general uproar would take place until every dime and toe nickel was removed from the entire area.  It didn’t seem to bother Garey, however, he got in his full eight hours with no apparent ill effects.

                A few days later, Garey mentioned that he couldn’t find his pocket knife.  That afternoon, I was looking for something under our bed.  When I placed my hand at the bottom corner of the mattress on my side of the bed, I felt something lumpy.  I threw back the covers and there was his pocket knife.  I hadn’t found it earlier because I’m short and my feet don’t reach that far down.  Luckily, it wasn’t open.  I have pretty much always been the finder of Garey’s missing objects.  That’s sort of my role in our relationship, and it would appear to the untrained eye that I find things by coincidence, but I just about always find a thing within a few days of Garey reporting it missing.

Someone gave me one of those Galileo thermometers with the floating balls.  The thermometer is a glass cylinder containing balls with temperature tags attached.  The directions on the box said the lowest floating ball indicates the current temperature.  I made sure I read all of the directions, because I knew Garey would, and I wanted to make sure I knew what I was talking about in the event that we had a disagreement about how to read the thermometer.

                Garey walked into the kitchen as I was holding the thermometer above my head trying to read the temperature on the lowest ball.

                “What are you doing?” he asked.

                “I’m trying to read the temperature on the lowest ball,” I answered, “That’s what the directions on the box said to do.”

“The directions on the box said the lowest FLOATING ball,” he said.

“All of the balls are in the water, therefore all the balls ARE floating, including the one on the very bottom,” I said.

“If there’s a ship at the bottom of the ocean, it’s in water, but it sure as heck ain’t floating,” Garey said.

“Oh,” I said.   There was nothing else I could say.  He was right.  Garey has always been the voice of reason in our relationship.

Stephen Covey defined synergy as, “The whole is greater than the sum of its parts.  The essence of synergy is to value differences—to respect them, to build on strengths, to compensate for weaknesses.”  Garey and I have been together for over 40 years.  We’ve had a lot of building to do in order to compensate for one another’s differences and weaknesses.  You would think by now we would have reached the point where we didn’t have so many differences, but we haven’t.  I think we have reached the point where we’re more accepting of one another’s differences, and if tolerance is the real lesson you learn from sticking it out together, maybe we’re close to our goal.  (I still refuse to sleep with a wallet and pocket change, however, and I had better never find another pocket knife on my side of the bed.)