Last Saturday morning, I woke up to find my husband’s side of the bed empty. My son soon reported that the car was gone, and wondered where his dad had gone. I said to him, “Probably to get newspapers and brötchen,” brötchen being rolls of bread that we Americans commonly use for yummy deli sandwich-making. They might look like Kaiser rolls, or they might look like short baguettes, about four inches long. They might be square with flax seed, sesame seed, pumpkin seed, or sunflower seed. They might be of white flour, wheat flour, dark wheat, or a mix. Either way, they are good. I was looking forward to breakfast.
But an hour came and went, and there was no sign of my husband. I called his cell phone.
“Where are you,” I asked. I had noticed shortly before that, while he was sweet enough to set the table before he left, he did not set a place for himself. Clearly, he did not intent to eat with us, which meant he meant to be gone a while, and might not be bringing breakfast home, after all.
“Ehm… I’m in Stuttgart. Vaihingen.“
„Vaihingen? What are you doing way out there?” Vaihingen is a subdivision of Stuttgart, and where my husband’s previous job was.
“Ehm… Bank stuff.”
I knew better than to press it. If he wasn’t going to volunteer the information, pulling it out of him was worse than pulling a tooth, and often with unpleasant results. I let it go. “When will you be home?”
“Soon. Half-hour.”
And of course, I could interpret that to mean at least an hour. And I was right. He came home behaving very suspiciously. He had something in his hand he didn’t want me to see, and told me to leave the kitchen and go into the living room, making sure the door was closed behind me. When I bent to peek through the keyhole (no, I’m not above such tactics!), his eye suddenly appeared and his voice boomed through the wood door, “No peeking!” Obviously, he had something for me, and it was for my birthday.
After a while, I forgot about it. But when I discovered its hiding place, it was all I could do not to peek. He had hidden it in the kitchen cabinet that houses all of our medicinal items, behind two boxes the held the blood-pressure monitor and the cordless phone. For three days I was good. For three days, I was tempted to peek… and didn’t. Impressed? I am! The flesh, after all, is weak. What impresses me most, is that my five-year-old son knew what the gift was… and kept it secret all that time.
Tuesday afternoon, it occurred to me what that gift might have been, and I knew for certain that if I peeked, I wouldn’t be able to hide that fact from my dear hubby.
Wednesday, I was awakened to three choruses of Happy Birthday from my husband and my little one. My son even soloed. Very cute. Then, like the co-conspirators they were, they ran upstairs to the kitchen, whispering all the way, and came back with the gift. It was exactly the size I had expected it to be, if my suspicion was correct. I tore open the paper with relish, telling myself to not get my hopes up. I’d been asking for one of these for years, and the answer was always the same: we can’t afford it.
When I finally ripped the paper free from the box, I yelled out with delight. “A digital camera! Oh my god! A digital camera!” I couldn’t believe it, even if my suspicion had been proven true. Yes, I know, we’re a little behind the times. We don’t even have a scanner. We only just got broadband a few months ago. And now, we finally have a digital camera. I just couldn’t believe it.
Naturally, I immediately began taking pictures of everything, and especially of the lovely bouquet of varicolored roses my husband had brought home the evening before. “I wanted to get you red, but I decided on these when I saw them. Because love is never the same color,” he said when he handed them to me. How poetic. How come I never think of stuff like that???
The rest of the day was nice. We rented movies, ate chips and dip, even had a champagne breakfast.
