I’ve known Howard for most of my life, both as the old man’s pal and mine. He was zeroing in on 90 when we talked last month and he said he was going to tell me something, but only if I agreed to hear it before he started. We’d been pals for decades and the only advice he ever offered was this: be polite to anyone carrying a gun.
The advice was useful in a so-so manner and I decided to listen to him again. “You sure?” he asked. “I tried to give the same advice to your old man and he knocked me off my bar stool. You better be damn sure you’re willing to hear this ’cause I’m not about to go to the floor again.” I told him again that I wanted to hear what he had to say.
“Awright, listen then. You know me and Sugar been married for a long time, right?” I nodded. “Well, yeah, we have. A long time. I know I haven’t learned much in my life, not that anyone’d be interested in, but I do know this one thing. I do believe I love the hell out of Sugar, but that aint the thing I learned. It’s part of the thing. I guess it’s the reason I learned the other thing. You follow me?”
No, as a matter of fact, I did not follow, but this seemed like one of those rare times when a lie was better than hurting someone. “Yeah, Howard, I follow you.”
“Good. When we was married for just a year or maybe more, we got into this fight. It wasn’t about anything at all, just like all married fights. We was just 2 kids wanting our way about everything and if we didn’t get it, pow, here’d come a fight. So, anyhow, we had this fight and I left and stayed with a drinkin’ buddy.
“After a while, I got to missin’ Sugar, everything about her and I hurt a lot inside, so I went back home and sat on the porch and we talked. I told her how I felt and she told me she felt just the same, and I said, then what the hell’s wrong with us. Sugar, I said, I hate the way I feel when there’s trouble between us, and so do you. We got to find a way to stop things from getting so stupid and hurtful to both of us.
“There’s a reason we got married and it wasn’t to have someone to fight with. What’re we gonna do? How we gonna stop a fight before there even is one?
“Sugar was smarter than me in most ways and one of them was being smart enough to talk about things when they needed to be talked about. She told me that she was having a real lousy day when we had the fight and she was sure she said those things because of the day she was having. It wasn’t me that pissed her off. It was the day.
“When I thought about it, it was almost exactly the same for me. Sugar hadn’t done nothin’ to me, but them idiots at work sure had, and I brought them home with me when I picked that fight with her. I wanted to knock some heads and when I couldn’t, I took it out on Sugar. And she done the same thing to me, only she didn’t start the fight. Aint that a kick in the ass?”
I agreed that it was, but I wondered if the advice had got lost somewhere in the telling of the story.
“No. I’m getting’ to that. The thing is, we hurt each other when we fought, but the reason we fought in the first place was to get rid of some things that pissed us off. It’s true that I love Sugar and she loves me, but we still had to be real careful sometimes, or we’d have hurt each other. So this is what we done. When I felt like I was getting’ mad, I’d think real quick about what it was that really was pissin’ me off, and I found it every time. There was always something else, and never Sugar or what she’d done.
“She did the same thing back at me, and she always found something else, too. It wasn’t me pullin’ her levers. We’d do that all the time and then we’d smile and hug and maybe go have a beer and talk about things. But we always talked about those little things first, those ants that bit us when we looked for the rhinos.
“I never did a lot of talking and I know you don’t, either, but you got to start, now that you’re married. Don’t let the ants get you. Think of what’s really botherin’ you and then tell her. She’ll like it and she’ll start doin’ it back. Do it, Shooter. There’s always gonna be things that you look at different and that’s how they oughta be. You’re different people and you know different things. Talk about ‘em, but don’t get mad about ‘em and don’t let something else get you mad.
“That’s it. Talk and listen. I guess that’s the advice.”