Role reversals are part of retirement

Now that both of us are retired and we have equal time on our hands, I asked my husband, “Why don’t you do the grocery shopping today?”

“OK. Give me the list.”

He buys everything on the list: milk, fruit, lunch meat, etc. I didn’t think I needed to be specific and write one quart of skim milk, red grapes and bananas, one package of deli turkey.

He was gone over an hour and bought a gallon of whole milk, a dozen Florida oranges and a whole ham.

These were enormous, beautiful expensive oranges - the kind my mother could only afford at Christmas time to put in our stockings.

“How much did you pay for those oranges?” I ask.

“I don’t know. They looked really good, so I bought them.”

I flash back to a conversation between my own parents when I was a child. My father complained that my mother spent too much money when she went to the store. Our mother stayed at home to raise six kids on my father’s salary, and she knew how to be frugal. We had to make the bologna last for a week on store-bought bread. Brand names were only seen in commercials on TV.

So my mother challenged him to do the grocery shopping. He came home with most of the usual items but included Keebler chocolate chip cookies, four loaves of Wonder Bread, liverwurst, and seven cans of sardines. They were on sale. He spent twice as much as she did, and I don’t recall him ever going to the store again.

I think my husband and I will be in trouble if we don’t learn how to do the tasks that the other one has always done.

I am wholly dependent on my husband for anything related to the computer. I was contemplating this when he was on a ladder installing a ceiling fan in our master bedroom. I want to ask him if he shut off the electricity but instead I ask, “Do you think you could show me how to pay the bills online?”

“What?”

“If you get electrocuted, I don’t know how to change the printer cartridges either. And are you sure you backed up my novel?”

Like all couples, we have become wholly dependent on one another. On Mother’s Day, I visited a lovely lady named Joan in Cadbury’s rehabilitation facility. Joan lost her husband to cancer last October. “We were married 60 years. Now I have to do things I have never done before,” she said.

When my father died, my mother fell apart. As a newlywed, I couldn’t understand this, but now that my own marriage is entering its 37th year, I understand completely.

I recall a Dear Abby column. A couple had been married for 50 years and the husband was asked, “What’s the secret to a happy marriage?”

He said, “Easy. I make all of the big decisions and she makes all the little ones!”

“Wow!” The interviewer was impressed. “How did that work out?”

“Great!” the husband said. “Thank God there haven’t been any big decisions!”

As I leave Cadbury I watch one man roll his wife in a wheelchair. I call my husband to tell him I am stopping off at the grocery store and could he please look at the recipe for Apple Sharlotka to see if I need to buy a lemon.

“Look in the blue recipe binder,” I say. “It’s filed under desserts.” Long pause.

“Are you sure it’s in the blue binder?”

“Never mind,” I say. “I’ll come home first.”

As I pull in the drive way, he is on a ladder power washing the front porch. I go find the recipe on page four.