On being totally honest

ummm, maybe its time to have a little bit less cake

Two full years of living with dogs, eating the cake, and just trying to get through it. It will soften your body for sure and maybe even your comedy.

It’s Saturday morning and I’m shuffling through the house barefoot looking for my phone and the cord to my laptop. On my third pass by my spouse Janyce, who is sitting and working at the kitchen table, she looks up.

“What are you doing?” she says.

“I’m trying to find my laptop cord— oh wait, I see it,” I say, nodding in its direction peeking out from under the ottoman, plugged into the outlet by the couch. I walk over, stopping to crouch down to pet my dog all curled up in a ball on the overstuffed chair by the window.

“Why did you come running in to jump on me at 6:30 if all you wanted to do was go back to sleep?” I say to her, with both my hands wrapped on either side of her face and her cold nose touching mine. “Huh, swirly girly?”

“Is there coffee?” I say.

“Have we met?” says Janyce.

Last night, I left Janyce alone to join some friends in the city for dinner and a comedy show at the the Emerson Colonial. “What’s Janyce doing tonight?” said my friend Dawn as we were ordering appetizers at our outdoor table, the sun not yet ducking behind the skyscrapers in the financial district and hitting us right in the eyes. “Oh, she’s happy without me. Probably having a steak and watching one of her foreign crime dramas,” I said.

We chatted about dogs and work while waiting for our other friend to join us, relaxing back in our chairs, and soaking in the sounds of the city street just steps away from our sidewalk table. For a moment, it felt good to be out. Almost like before.

Janyce is talking to me from the other room as I pour my coffee in the kitchen. I walk back over to the dining table holding my mug.

“This is how I know for sure you lived in Scotland in another life. Look at this,” she says, lifting the laptop up off the table and pointing it in my direction.

“A cake fridge in Shetland. That’s cake, Kris. In a fridge. By the side of the road. You are just driving along these winding roads and there is nothing but cliffs and water and all the green and then, FREE CAKE.”

“Let me see that. You realize that this is our next trip, right?” I say. “We’re going to the Shetland Islands.”

And sure enough, I google the phenomenon and it’s a whole thing. Called an honesty box. Not so unlike those quaint, wooden, free library boxes erected outside of people’s houses in the suburbs. Except here in the middle of stark nowhere, some of them are even actual glass front refrigerators.

“How was the comedy show last night?” says Janyce, back to looking at a spreadsheet on her computer.

“She was great,” I say.

Truth is, though, I was uncomfortable wearing a mask and trying to sit in that tiny seat. She was way down there, on that stage, with minimal props, wearing a boot and walking with a cane and was a good twenty pounds heavier, like most of the world, so her movements were few. And all I could really think about, looking around the ornate theater at the crowd, before the lights were dimmed and the stage was lit, was that everyone looked so heavy. I mean, the world is truly changed now. Two years of pandemic life— going on three— and we're all still trying to get back out there, stuffing ourselves into ill-fitting clothing, and breathing hotly behind a mask in a crowded theater. I’m not sure eating all the cake has done many of us much good.

A friend of mine sent me a text a couple weeks back. “You should try my gym,” she said. “It will definitely help. It got me out of my two-year Covid rut. And my depression.”

“I work with a lot of younger people who correct me every time I say I’m fat,” I said. “But the truth is, I’m not body positive. I’m unhappy,” I said.

“Just do it,” she said.

Hannah Gadsby, the Australian comedian we watched last night, has made her career out of telling the hard truth. I think I remember watching her first comedy special called “Nanette” on Netflix. Critics called it “a scream of visceral soul-baring, with Gadsby venting her rage and pain about being a woman, being gay, and about homophobia,” But like most things pre-pandemic, I can’t totally remember it. Now she is back touring the country with happier material— she’s newly married, she’s survived being shut in for two years, and she’s getting back out there again, but more lightly. Does her audience not have the stomach for the tough material that made her famous? I don’t know about that. I think, honestly, this is just what is real for her at the moment. Two full years of living with dogs, eating the cake, and just trying to get through it. It will soften your body for sure and maybe even your comedy. Still, I thought she was good. She knows how to tell a story. And like a good stand-up routine, she ties it all together in the end.

“You almost ready?” says Janyce, appearing in the doorway. My dog comes bounding in behind her, and jumps onto the bed poking her nose around my laptop.

“Yeah, give me a minute here,” I say, while pushing the dog away from the computer.

“You ready, swirly girly? We going for a walk?” I say in high-pitched voice to the dog while scrunching up her ears.

I’m staring into the picture of the honesty box and eyeing the muffins and scones, listening to my empty belly growling. Oh, how I want a free piece of cake with sugar frosting plucked from this box to go with a third cup of hot coffee right now.

But it’s mid April, summer is looming, and despite the ongoing pandemic, everyone is just getting out there again. We’re walking the dog, we’re going to the gym, and we’re putting on the tighter clothes— and making the best of it. Truth.