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by D.M.Z. TEACHING AN OLD DOG NEW TRICKS From the D ia ry o f a U k ra in ia n H o u s e w ife They say you can’t teach an old dog new tricks but you may want to try to teach an old Ukrainian husband. I did. I started about five years ago after our thirtieth wedding anniversary. The kids had gone, I had more time, and I figured after thirty years of marriage my domestic responsibilities, like a thirty year mortgage, were paid off in full. Now we share. I started slow and easy — with a coffee maker. When our wedding gift coffee maker finally died, I bought a new one. It was not the kind my kids would buy — something that sings a wake-up song, then makes coffee and calls you by name when coffee is ready. My new coffee maker was a twenty dollar 1-2-3 type — pour in water, add coffee, push ON button. The first morning, as for most of the mornings of our mar ried, I made the coffee. My husband, like all men of the generation that grew up in the fifties, Ukrainian or oth erwise, did not do coffee, or windows or anything else in the house. But that morning, he examined the electric wonder and “he thought that it was good”. And the next morning I woke up to the smell of fresh coffee and thought Heaven and Earth be praised. My man had made coffee. It seems that when a man approaches a certain age, his appetite increases and he wanders through the kit chen more often. On one such a trip my husband noticed the microwave. I caught him exploring the mic rowave control panel, so I rushed to guide his finger on the touch buttons. "Amazing,” he said. At first he over heated everything, but then he got the hang of it and began to experiment with everything short of ice cream. Things were going great. I decided it was time for a more challenging program — the laundry. The chal lenge was not in starting the washer or dryer, it was in getting the laundry together. For years, my husband had insisted on kicking the dirty socks under the bed. When I would comment on this, he would prove how neat he was by hanging every shirt, even dirty ones, back in the closet. But he was proud of himself when he did his first load of shirts — and pens, and receipts, and business cards and anything else he carried in his shirt pockets. Having completed courses Laundry I and II, I was going to introduce vacuuming, when an unexpected thing happened. It was one of those coming home from someplace things; we stopped at the supermarket to pick up milk. In the thirty-some years of our marriage, my husband had been in a supermarket maybe twice. He was of the opinion that men who shop with their wives are hen-pecked little wimps. When I would bring the groceries home, he would, of course, in the style of a fine Ukrainian gentleman, unload my car and help unpack the bags while carefully checking the stamped price of each item to make sure that my grocery budget was not too extravagant. Well, this particular time, as we wandered through the supermarket looking for milk, my husband noticed that the store did not stamp items on prices as was done years ago. In order to find the price of something you had to find the little shelf tag that tells you the item’s price per pound and you figure out the rest yourself. ’’How long has this been going on?” he asked. ”Oh, a while now — they say it’s that bar sys tem,” I informed him. My husband’s eyes lit up and out came the pocket calculator. “Let’s see,” he said, “If this is two dollars per pound, then it’s 12.4 cents per ounce and they give you ten ounces.” He went on and on, cal culating and calculating. It turned into a “have calculator, will do shopping” game. He began to ask me if there was anything I needed from the store, and at first, I thought it was wonderful to have that kind of service. Then things began to happen. My husband has always liked cheese or any dish with cheese. In fact, he was the record holder in the all you can eat varenyky extravaganza dinner at our church, as long as they were varenyky with cheese. But now, each time he went to the store with my list, he would return with cheese. ”ln case guests drop by,” he explained. There should always be some cheese to nibble on, Ukrainian hospitality without the “salo” sort of thing. It seemed harmless. Then one day he stopped at the supermarket on his way home from work and as one should have antici pated in this electronic day and age, his calculator bat tery died. He was in the dark, man against the psycho logical wizardry of the free market economy. The packag ing, the lighting, the merchandise at eye level got him. Two hundred dollars later we were sorting all the differ ent types of cheese we would have ”in case guests dropped by”. There are only some four hundred differ ent types of cheese in the world and we had samples of most of them. Was my husband afflicted with cheese- mania and was my project to train him to share house hold chores a bust? I’m just not sure now, but instead of teaching an old dogs new tricks, I have decided from now on to let sleeping dogs lie. 22 ’НАШЕ ЖИТТЯ”, БЕРЕЗЕНЬ 1995 Видання C оюзу Українок A мерики - перевидано в електронному форматі в 2012 році . A рхів C У A - Ню Йорк , Н . Й . C Ш A.
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