No, you can't keep the wagon wheel table*

Gregg and I were chatting in the shower this morning. In the past, showers together were de rigueur and a vrrrrrry nice way to wake up. Now they're rare and more utilitarian and have all the romance of cleaning the kitchen and something of the same dialog.

"Are you sure that's clean?"

"Just scrape it."

"Ack - what's THAT?"

I'd like to say romance isn't dead, but perhaps ready for a stay in the ICU. Now we spend our shower time figuring out who's going to do what — and not in a who's-going-to-do-what-to-whom fun kind of way but more like who's-going-to-take-out-the-trash kind of way. Today's conversation was about where we'd go to buy a sofa, our first-ever piece of furniture together — until now we've had HIS bed, MY chair...no OUR furniture. To me, this was a big step, almost as big as that I Do we managed to croak out just over a year ago. Gregg seemed unaware of the enormity of this task, that if he should choose the Wrong Sofa I would be forced to call into question our ENTIRE RELATIONSHIP. It was not unlike when we were trying to choose baby names and he wrote down "Racquel" and "Veronica." Had he ever actually uttered those names and put them in the final running, he might again be living alone in Sacramento and sitting in a lawn chair in the open garage, drinking a Bud Light and watching the neighbors wash their RV.

After visiting the three stores that surround Levitz like parasitic outliers that wait for the remnants of a beast's meal, we settled on a relatively inexpensive brown leather sofa that is guaranteed to resist the liquids that will most commonly be found near it — urine, milk and beer.

There were only a couple of Racquel moments, one of which included the sofa pictured here and the other a contemporary bar in which Gregg felt compelled to play Tom Cruise in Cocktail with imaginary bottles flying through the air. All straight men have this pained and wistful expression on their faces when they see a bar that they might have in their fantasy Man Pit....the one that doesn't exist YET but just MIGHT be part of the negotiation if denied a sports car or a $5,000 trip to Fantasy Baseball Camp.

Hey — a guy can dream. As long as he keeps those dreams in his head and NOT in my living room. Because, as my friend Hank says of me, I'm a Decider. And I've decided that no, my dear, THAT is not OUR furniture.

*See the classic movie When Harry Met Sally