The Great Post-Christmas Griddle Debacle of 2011

In advance of this blog, I’d like to point out that writing it is my punishment. It’s the recompense my other half, Mickey, demands in light of some rather heinous behavior on my part. All over a griddle. A stupid $12 griddle.

It began innocuously enough. I came home from work, kicked out of my shoes, caught up a little on Facebook, then headed to the kitchen to make dinner. Grilled cheese sandwiches and soup. Mmmmmmm. I took the griddle out of the lower cupboard and placed it on the stove top. Then I turned and got four slices of bread, and placed them on the cutting board. Then I went to the refrigerator to fetch the cheese, the butter (I Can’t Believe It’s Not Butter, actually), and a slice of ham for Mickey’s sandwich. He still refuses to give up meat. He and the dogs will apparently cling to the death to their decomposing pieces of flesh hacked from the corpses of tortured livestock animals. Not that I harp about it. Much.

Anyway, I emptied two cans of soup into a larger bowl and placed it in the microwave before preparing the sandwiches. Then I opened the lower cupboard to get the griddle. It wasn’t there.

“Honey,” I said, “I can’t find the griddle.”

“It’s in the cupboard,” Honey responded.

I dug deeper. “Sweetheart, I can’t find it.” That’s what I thought I said, but if we had a security camera with sound in the kitchen it might have come out more along the lines of, “The fucking thing isn’t down here.”

“I know I put it down there,” Mickey said.

I don’t know about the rest of you tall folks – anyone over, say, 5’2″ – but I despise lower cupboards. They’re useless and awkward. The only reason for their existence is to hold up the sink and the countertop. They shouldn’t even have doors on them, that’s how useless lower cupboards are. But I digress. I started pulling pans out of the cupboard. Two cookie sheets, a large skillet, a muffin tin that I didn’t even know we owned, a couple of glass lids, a second surprise muffin tin. Still no griddle.

“It’s not down here,” I snapped.

“It has to be.”

By that time I was on my knees on the dog-hairy, cold kitchen linoleum. “Don’t fucking tell me that, I’m not blind. It’s not fucking here.” I’m sure my tone sounded accusatory. How could it escape sounding so? In my mind, I was accusatory. In my mind I was castigating Mickey for his careless misplacement of our one and only griddle. He works from home, he’s here all day, and he can’t keep track of a fucking griddle? These are the things that were going through my mind.

Mickey came into the kitchen at that point. “Oh, you’re right,” he said. “It’s not down there.”

“Ah ha!” I exclaimed. I jumped to my feet, basking in the self-righteous glow of my angry triumph.

“It’s not down there,” he continued, “because you already put it on the stove.”

Oh. Oops.

Mickey Mills, writer extraordinaire, software god, technical genius, and all-around long-suffering partner of mine with, thankfully, the best sense of humor ever, I am so sorry. I’m so sorry that even the dogs are sorry vicariously, although they have no clue why.

Mea culpa, darling.