Russia, Part 1: Packing

"The trouble with you," says my wife, "is that you don't plan ahead."

This is where she and I disagree. Let me give you an example.

I leave for Moscow in six days. That means I have roughly five and a half days before I need to pack. To me, this is self-evident, an a priori conclusion. It's a simple syllogism:

1) packing consists of tossing clothes and stuff in a bag
2) it will take me roughly ten minutes to put my clothes and stuff in a bag.
3) I don't leave for six more days
4) Therefore, I don't even need to think about packing until Friday afternoon (from 1, 2, and 3) and if I want to watch A-Team reruns all afternoon I will be perfectly justified in doing so.

Of course, the irrefutable nature of my logic does not move my wife. She shakes her head, giving me the same look she usually reserves for incompetent waiters and the Bush administration.

"The problem with your 'logic'," she says, making those little sarcastic quotation marks with her fingers, "is that it's based on a set of false premises."

I try to interrupt, mostly out a sense of self-preservation, but she holds up a finger and I stop, mostly out of a greater sense of self-preservation.

"In the first place, packing consists of so much more than 'tossing clothes and stuff in a bag.' Seriously, were you raised by wolves? Packing is an art, a transcendent activity. A well-packed bag speaks of the frailty and the nobility of the human condition. To toss some clothes in a bag and call it 'packing' is like tossing notes on a page and calling it 'music.'"

"That's me," I say, slowly backing out of range, "the Schoenberg of the suitcase."

She glares at me. "You can call yourself the Pollack of the Purse for all I care. It doesn't change the fact that you don't know how to pack."

She then goes on to assail my my second premise, claiming that although I can, indeed, throw random clothes into a bag in under ten minutes, I have utterly failed to account for the estimated two hours it takes to unpack those clothes, find the clothes I should have packed in the first place, wash them, iron them, and then repack the bag. I point out that since she is actually the one who does the unpacking, finding, washing, ironing, and repacking, it does only take me, in the most literal sense, ten minutes to pack.

This is not a wise thing to say.

There's no backtracking, so we both go our separate ways to cool down for a bit. She goes outside and tends to her garden. I stare in the bathroom mirror and wonder when my stubble began turning gray. I owe her an apology. I don't mean to take her for granted. When she comes back inside I'll tell her so. And in the end I will choose quality over speed, beauty over pragmatism. I will allow my wife to sculpt my luggage as she sculpts me, grinding down the rough edges and smoothing out the stupid parts. Because the simple fact is that she's really good at packing and I'm not, just like I'm really good at killing spiders and she's really good at standing on the dining room table and screaming. We each have our gifts. Neither of us can do it by ourselves. Learning this is one of the keys to a long, happy marriage.

So, you see, I am planning ahead, after all.