"Under Investigation"

One afternoon, when I arrived home from work, I found my husband sitting in a chair in our den, bleeding, bruised, and scraped up from head to toe.

I immediately ran over to him and asked what happened, and was informed that he had been out on our front porch, in his Crocs, watering the ferns and had fallen down the steps....all ten of them, and landed on the concrete walkway at the bottom.

He then informed me that his hip was hurting and he wasn't sure that he could walk. I was very worried about him so I helped him out to the car and drove him to the emergency room at the local hospital.

We were called back to an exam room, not long after our arrival, by a very no nonsense looking nurse. The nurse immediately, with a very minimal amount of words, began taking my husbands vitals, writing down the locations of his wounds, and getting all of the preliminary things done for the doctor before he came in to examine my husband.

Well that was all fine with me. I wasn't there for a deep conversation anyway. I just wanted to make sure that nothing was broken and my husband was going to retain his ability to walk. My husband, however, needs more in the way of conversation and proved this that day when suddenly he looked at the nurse and blurted out "She did this to me".

The room was silent again and all that I could think was seriously??? Did he just actually say that?

I responded in the only way that I could. I looked right at the nurse and I said "Oh no, it wasn't me. I would have done a much better job".

Needless to say, we got no response from nurse Ratched. She just finished her job and left the room.

As soon as she closed the door behind her I looked at my husband and asked him if he was completely insane. I said did you happen to notice that Nurse Ratched was a bit on the serious side? He appeared to be a little to nonchalant about it, so I said What I'm telling you is She'll turn me in for spousal abuse.

He said "I was only joking". I replied with "Well, she wasn't laughing". I told him never to do that again with someone who looks and acts as if they haven't so much as broken a smile in the last two decades.

My husband agreed not to do anything like that again and the doctor came in shortly thereafter. A few x-rays and bandages later we were on our way home.

Fast forward...about one month later...

My husband and I were backing out of the driveway and he stopped to get the mail.
There it was in the mailbox...a letter. The letter was addressed to my husband, and was from an attorney that worked for our health insurance company. Not only was he an attorney for them, he was of the investigative sort. The letter stated that my husband was to call him immediately upon receipt of this letter.

He just couln't imagine what they wanted, but he pulled his cell phone out of his pocked and dialed the number..

Oh Yes.......Nurse Ratched had hooked me up.

He had the speaker on so I could hear his conversation. A woman answered, and when my husband identified himself, she transferred the call in to the attorney. This time a very serious sounding man answered and said that he had a question for my husband about the "incident" in which he had fallen down the stairs.

My husband told him to go ahead with his question and the attorney said..."Mr. Foster, was there a second party involved with your fall?"

My husband with a smirk on his face explained how he had fallen and said that there had not been a second party involved.

Then..it was my turn to blurt out..before I could contain myself I heard my voice saying very loudly, "No there wasn't a second party involvement that day but if he gets hurt again in the very near future you might want to investigate".

My husband quickly got off the phone with the man and I shot him a look that said go ahead..laugh...please laugh....and you will find yourself in the middle of next week as my grandmother would say.

He is a fairly intelligent man so, as you may have guessed, he did not laugh. He began instead to apologize profusely .... I just looked at him and I said Oh you've got jokes...you are a funny funny man...but here's a tip for you...just for safety's sake, and I am talking about yours.... why don't you just err on the side of caution, and not be so funny that I wind up incarcerated.....

He said okay very quickly, and the look on my face was so serious I feel pretty confident that we now have ourselves an understanding...

"A Man And His Shoes"

I have written many times before about the fact that as far as fashion statements go my husband is a hot mess. He is a man with a style all his own, and his unique fashion sense carries itself all the way down to his feet. This man loves himself some shoes...

When I met my husband he was the proud owner of a pair of patchwork boots. Over the course of the two years that we were friends I saw him wear those boots several times.

It wasn't until a couple of years later, when we were dating that I found the words to gently tell him that I thought those boots were the most horrible looking shoes I had ever seen. He seemed extremely shocked, but on the upside I never saw those boots again.

I felt a huge sense of relief when he stopped wearing them because I will tell you that when we went out, they were real attention getters. My relief was short lived, however, because as time went by, and we were married, I began to realize that my husband has an "out of the box" fashion sense especially when it comes to shoes.

Over the years I have seen this manifest itself in the form of everything from the patchwork boots to bowling shoes.

That's right, bowling shoes. This man once wore bowling shoes that he had gotten from somewhere, complete with numbers on the back of the heel to the Superbowl of motor cross in Atlanta. I know that motor cross is not exactly a formal affair, but bowling shoes? Seriously??

The best part is he not only wears them, but "he wears them proud", as my Granny would have said. For example, the night he had the bowling shoes on he noticed a woman in the elevator with him staring at his shoes. He looked right at her and said "ma'am if you'll press 2 for me I'll tell you where you can get a pair of these shoes". I am sure that poor woman was mortified.

Since the bowling shoes there have been many other pairs of shoes that fall into the category of "attention getters". About a year ago he bought himself some Ed Hardy tennis shoes. For those of you who may not have seen these they look like massive tattoos on canvas. Those had to be retired one day, when he came home and declared the market saturated with the Ed Hardy name.

His closet holds many great choices in footwear and he has rocked them all at one time or the other including his shiny patent leather police shoes that were recently brought out of retirement, and worn with black dress socks and shorts to dinner on Thanksgiving day.

Please..just save yourself the effort...don't even try to compile a visual. Without him standing before you it's simply not possible.

I know that my husband is going to continue to have a bit of flair for the "different" when it comes to his shoe choices, and after 27 years of marriage I am finally making an attempt to come to terms with that.

I still don't think that it makes me a bad person if I admit that I have also decided to begin to pray that Heaven will be a barefoot paradise........