Pillow Talk: Noun — private conversation, endearments, or confidences exchanged in bed or in intimate circumstances between spouses or lovers. dictionary.com.
I was under the covers, freshly showered and engrossed in my book. I had suffered through 300 pages of marginal writing just to get to the point where I would learn if the swashbuckling secret agent was going to be able to diffuse the dirty bomb that had been left in the White House chained to the toilet in the janitor’s bathroom.
I was hopeful that the book’s hero Dirk Hammer would succeed. After all, he had killed enemy agents with his bare hands, shot down a low flying helicopter with a hand gun and seduced the brilliant, beautiful nuclear physicist, Crystal Luscious, who coincidentally was chained to the bomb that was chained to the toilet.
My mate reclined next to me reading nonfiction with larger words. Her boredom made her more inclined to engage in the above mentioned pillow talk.
She signaled her desire for my attention by closing her book and elbowing me in the ribs. She whispered, “I need you to do something for me.” I tore myself away from Dirk and the toilet and looked at her with both hope and impatience.
Any optimism was dispelled when she added, “I need you to sew the jaw bone back on the moose head in our front yard.”
I will go out on a limb by saying, on that night, nowhere else in America, were those words repeated in any other bedroom.
At this point in my story I need to go back a year in time.
Ellie and I were descending off the summit of a peak when we came upon an entire moose carcass. The dead creature had a huge rack and was lying on its side as if running. The fur had rotted off and the bones were bleached by the sun.
I got a very bad feeling which was affirmed when Ellie said, “Let’s take that moose home with us.”
I was afraid of that. “Are you serious? Do you want us to carry that entire moose skeleton the several miles back to our truck?”
“No! Are you crazy?” she said. “Just the head.”
We strapped the bleached skull and antlers to our packs and hiked back to our vehicle. If you ever want to have a trail to yourself, strap an animal head to your pack. Everyone we passed gave us a wide berth.
Since that day the intact moose head and rack has occupied a prominent spot nestled amongst our other yard art — toilet planter (painted blue), cast iron flamingos, cabbage patch dolls hanging in aspens and ghost bike mounted in a pine tree. All was well until some critters (neighborhood dog, fox or perhaps even child?) began stealing the jaw bone from the head and leaving it elsewhere in the yard.
Having an incomplete moose head in our yard has been a source of embarrassment for my mate. Whenever she notices the mandible-less moose head, she searches the yard for the missing parts and lovingly reassembles the skull.
So, having provided the background, let us return to present day with my wife and me lying in bed and my response to her requesting I attach moose jaw to moose head.
I closed my book — Dirk and Luscious could wait. “You want me to sew the jaw to the moose head?”
“Yes,” she said. “It will only be a matter of time before some animal takes it away and I won’t be able to find it.”
Now granted, I never was a fan of the moose head in our yard and moreover I thought that the head lost none of its curb appeal being jawless. But following the adage as to what makes a successful marriage: “When you are wrong admit it, and when you are right, shut up.” I said, “OK.”
The next morning found me in the front yard with a moose head in my lap, using bailing wire and a drill to perform dental surgery. The moose head is now anatomically correct which delights my mate and I’m sure our neighbors as well. I can only guess what that has done to improve our property values.
I would prefer pillow talk with more romance and less about missing skeleton parts. But marriage is about compromise. To quote the old slogan popularized by Marx, “From each according to their abilities, to each according to their needs.”
One of my “abilities” is to satisfy my bride’s moose head needs.
Now those are words you would be unlikely to find in any pre nuptial —other than ours.
Jeffrey Bergeron, under the alias of Biff America, can be read in several newspapers and magazines. He can be reached at biffbreck@yahoo.com. Biff’s new book “Mind, Body, Soul.” is available at local shops and bookstores. He arrived in Breckenridge when there was no stop lights and plenty of parking.