Repotia (re-po’-ti-a): 1. The repetition of a phrase with slight differences in style, diction, tone, etc. 2. A discourse celebrating a wedding feast.
Time was running out. Actually time was dripping out. The water clock on my mantel was slightly clogged, keeping it from pouring down the time-drain. In about 160 drips, I was going to get married. I was about to become a “forever man.” My wild days had hit a brick wall when in met Chlarine. She was at the mall giving out free cheese samples on toothpicks. The toothpicks were sharp and she stuck me in the butt with a skewered piece of aged cheddar. She giggled and said, “It’s made in New York like a bunch of other great things—mostly tall buildings on Manhattan Island. I’m here to please with cubes of cheese: cheddar, Swiss, Brie, Camembert, Blue, Gorgonzola, and Never-Never Land.
I’d never heard of Never-Never Land cheese before. I associated Never-Never Land with Peter Pan’s island.
I ate a cube and sat by the mall’s fountain. I felt like my perception of reality was being run through a painless blender. It was being mixed up. I felt myself diminishing. I was like a puddle evaporating in the sun. Then, I disappeared. I reappeared wearing a tuxedo checking the time in my living room. Chlarine called me to make sure everything was set for our wedding. I assured her it was. I looked at the calendar hanging in the kitchen and noted that a year had elapsed since I had eaten the cheese. The year was a blank to me, but I wasn’t going to let that slow me down! I loved Chlarine. I couldn’t wait to be pronounced “husband and wife.”
Everything went well. At the reception feast, I gave this speech:
“Dogs run free why not we?” The great poet songwriter sang Bob Dylan this, strumming his guitar and blowing on a harmonica. It is a rhetorical question, but I’ll answer it anyway—I’ve always been something of a misbehaviorist.
We don’t run free because we have relationships with other people, unlike packs of dogs, we maintain our unique identities. They’re based on our unique trajectories through life. These trajectories differ from everybody else’s’s and pose the prospect of conflict. In marriage, it’s even worse than friendship. You’re locked in legal cage that is costly to be freed from. The key can cost you everything. So, you stay.
But, you discover that marriage is like aged cheddar. It gets better with time.
I look forward to the vexations of time, when Chlarine pokes me in the butt with a toothpick, letting the good times roll in our king-sized bed.
The Daily Trope 