People often ask me the same question:

What is it like to live with Melodee?

That’s a pretty big and deep subject, and there isn’t an easy answer. Like the old saying goes, it’s complicated.

But I’m going to try to tell you a little about what Life With Melodee is like in a series of postings here on Melodee’s blog.

Part Four
Random Recollections

As I sat here planning what to write about next, it dawned on me that I have left out a lot of strange things that happened over the years between when I met Melodee and when we admitted that we were in free fall for each other. In an effort to correct this, I offer the following random comments and thoughts.

June Cleaver She Ain’t

Not even close. In fact, Melodee is a horrible housekeeper, and a worse cook. I don’t think Melodee even knows why she is so bad at these domestic activities, so she usually just says that she never learned how to do them. But let’s be honest here…using a broom, putting an empty glass in the sink, doing the dishes, and even running a vacuum aren’t really skills that have a steep learning curve. Even cooking isn’t all that tough if you can read (and Melodee can read very well, even if at blinding speed that makes me dizzy to watch her flip the pages) and follow directions. I think that cooking and cleaning offer nothing to hold her attention. She would rather do something interesting, and since she has no inhibitions of any kind, Melodee pretty much does what she wants to do when she wants to do it. Maria (Melodee’s long-time housekeeper and cook) forbids Melodee from even going in the kitchen unsupervised. Yes, she has nearly burned the house down more than once. The girl could screw up Cup-O-Soup!

Speaking Of Inhibitions

Melodee has none. Not a one. And I am not just talking about sexual inhibitions here. She will say anything that is on her mind to anyone. Just as one example, I saw her tell a now former President of the United States that he was a “dumb-fuck” and that he should “grow a pair of balls or put on a dress”. And this was at a White House reception with maybe 2000 of our closest friends around. On the sexual side, she can be a little hard to swallow sometimes, no pun intended. When “in the mood”, she will do just about any thing in just about any place. She has gotten us tossed out of a few of those places. Take the time that she used liquid latex to paint on her “clothes”. She was totally nude, except for her shoes, and had painted on a shirt and pair of jeans. She strolled right through the lobby of a major hotel and into the bar like she owned the place. And then there is her habit of playing “dress-up” on a regular basis. She likes the schoolgirl look. And the nurse. And the policewoman. But I think her favorite is to dress up like a cat. Sometimes Melodee likes the big cats, particularly tigers and cheetahs. Other times, she goes for the house cat look. And it can get a lot more, well, complicated. Not that I’m complaining.

Gun Play

Melodee grew up in the country, and like most country folks, she knows how to hunt and how to handle a firearm. She’s a fair shot with a rifle, and she won’t kill herself with a handgun…probably. At one point, I decided that, for security reasons, Melodee needed to be armed. She explained to me that she would not carry a gun. She gave up hunting long ago, and didn’t want to have a gun in her purse. I can, and did, respect that, so I convinced her to carry a can of pepper spray. She put it on her key ring and had it in her purse. One evening, a bunch of us from the company were having a dinner meeting at Melodee’s house, and she decided she needed some gum. She walked to the side table where she had tossed her purse when we came home earlier that day, and reached inside. After a moment of fumbling around, the pepper spray went off. I still don’t know how it happened, but it did, and she effectively maced everyone in the room. I decided that maybe the pepper spray wasn’t as good of an idea as I had thought, so I got her a stun-gun. Again, it went in her purse. For those men smart enough to avoid a woman’s purse, you can’t believe the amount of stuff in there. Most of it we men prefer not to imagine. We were at a book signing in Chicago and Melodee reached into her purse for something. Next thing I knew, she was on the floor flopping around like a fish out of water. Somehow, she had armed and triggered the stun gun with one hand in her purse. After that, I carry the weapons and just stay close to Melodee.

Economic Stimulus

Melodee is a shop-a-holic. I think she even has a union card to prove it. She has a particular addiction to high-end jewelry. The staff at Tiffany’s knows her by name and on sight. And I mean the shop in New York. She spends a lot of money on clothes and shoes as well as jewelry. For a long time, I wondered about the clothes and shoes part, but I found out what was going on after we were married. She buys a lot more clothes and shoes than she has in her closets. At the rate she shops, she would fill the house up in a matter of months, and I never saw any Goodwill or Salvation Army trucks around the place. It turns out that she donates most of the “excess” to a local charity. Some they sell, some they give to women to wear to job interviews or to work. The transactions are very low profile. The real downside is that both of our daughters are catching the shopping addiction from their mom now.

Attention Junkie and Pusher

Melodee likes to be the center of attention. See above for more. I think that a huge part of her lack of inhibitions goes right back to this fact. By being flirtatious, outspoken, and all the rest, she gets the attention that she craves. But it’s a two-way street with her when it comes to attention. I shower a lot of attention on Melodee, and I’ll even admit that I spoil her. Usually not with “things”, because she’s pretty well got all of that, but with a touch or a word. I mentioned in Part 3 that I had, without thinking, picked a little wildflower for her, and she sort of melted. Well, I still pick flowers for Melodee. Mostly for exercise, I walk the perimeter of our property every day. That’s about 4 miles. Along the way, pretty much all year round, I can find a few little wildflowers to pick and bring home for her. She loves the attention, but she gives it back to me. Melodee is my second wife, though I really believe that she is my first true love. But that doesn’t mean that I haven’t dated in the past. I have never had a woman as in-tune with my mood and needs as Melodee is. I don’t know what a “soul mate” is, but maybe being so connected is part of that, but I think it’s also possible that the giving is just a part of Melodee. It’s who she is.

Baggage

Melodee has a good deal of baggage. I won’t go into the details of her childhood other than to say that through a rather nasty chain of events, she was addicted to drugs at a very young age. This addiction has, as it does with all addicts, stayed with her for all these many years. Over all, I think she’s done well for herself despite being in various states of recovery since her pre-teen years and being deaf. There was even a period when she worked as a hooker to pay for her fixes. Since I have known Melodee, she has had one relapse to the drugs, and I mentioned that in an earlier part of this series. But, since we have been “together”, she has stayed clean and says she has no desire to use again. I believe her.

Hell Hath No Fury

Some people who know Melodee only casually have the opinion that she angers easily. The reality is that she is more of a “slow boil” person. She will sit and stew until she finally has had enough, then she blows up. The reason for the confusion, at least as I see it, is because Melodee is so outspoken. She will tell you (or anyone else) exactly how she feels, and she lacks anything even close to tact. If she thinks an idea is stupid, she will say so, usually in close to those words with a few of the infamous deleted expletives tossed in. If a person keeps harping about something that Melodee has already identified as a stupid idea, she will, usually, tell them to just shut the fuck up and go the fuck away. Her harsh words and course manner can easily be seen by some people as being angry. I get that. But those people have never seen Melodee really angry. I have. Several times. Maybe Melodee is atypical, because she doesn’t get angry like most women I have known over the years. She doesn’t cry or get sullen. Melodee doesn’t throw things. When I think about it, Melodee’s anger is more like that I have seen from many men. Melodee yells, cusses like a sailor (actually, I am a sailor, and she uses words I never would in public!), and she will punch someone if they are too close. She paces a lot, too. I have never seen her hit a wall or other immovable object, but I think she just might under the right conditions. Trust me…you do not want to be on the wrong side of her anger.

The Inner Mommy

Shortly after we were married, Melodee legally adopted my two daughters, Amanda and Debbie. The girls already loved her as “Aunt Melodee” and the transition to “Mom” or “Mommy” was easy for all three of them. On April 26, 2008 Melodee gave birth to our son, Jack, Jr., or JJ. There were some concerns, mostly by Melodee, that JJ might be born deaf as she was, but everything is just fine with him. Interestingly, he learned to sign before he learned to speak. Now, he does both, and the simple truth is that he is much better at sign than either the girls or I. He is the only one in the house who can keep up with Melodee when she is signing at top speed. Well, other than our dog Tripper. He’s really good at sign, too. I know the trip of being a Mommy hasn’t been easy for Melodee. She will sometimes fret about never hearing JJ cry and missing his first words. She gets equally down because she can’t hear the girls call her “Mom” or tell her that they love her. But she manages. A good friend and colleague of ours is a ham radio operator, and he’s a wizard with electronics and radio, and he put together a little system using old pagers. The kids and I all have a little box with a button on it that we can press. That sends a signal to a pager that Melodee carries, and it vibrates to alert her, and the display tells her who is calling for her. JJ was able to use his to call his Mommy by the time he was a year old. There is an old saying that I heard once that any woman with normal biology can be a mother, but it takes someone special to be a Mommy. Melodee is a great Mommy.

Fantasy Island

I guess this mostly for the men reading, and that’s alright. I know I’ll catch hell from the women reading, but I always had the opinion that men had a larger sexual appetite than women. I don’t know if that’s valid opinion or not, and it doesn’t matter. In my experience, I was always the one who was ready to have sex anytime, anyplace. I had to talk my woman into the idea. Well, I learned something about Melodee very early, even before we were “together”, and that is that she has a healthy and strong sex drive. She enjoys sex, is creative, and very open. Once we started really “dating”, I thought that was wonderful and that, maybe, I had died and gone to heaven. A bit later, I found out that there is such a thing as too much of a good thing. Simple biology is that men are not multi-orgasmic, at least not in the long term. And then there is Melodee’s “30 Second Rule”. One day she bet me that she could take me from nothing to climax in under 30 seconds. I admit that I don’t have the staying power of a porn star, but 30 seconds seemed a little fast to me, so I took the bet. Nothing happened the rest of the day, just normal routine things around the house. About 6pm, Maria took the kids to her place for the evening to watch some TV and play some games. About 6:30pm, Melodee pretty well jumped me on the couch. The bad news is that I lost the bet. The good news is that the loser had to get on top for the rest of the session. Melodee’s philosophy on sex seems to be that she’ll try anything once, twice if she likes it. I haven’t found anything that she has done only once.

Well, that’s about all I have for now.

Jack