What you need to know is that my wife isn’t great at directions. If you ask, she won’t be able to name roads or estimate distances. If you’re lucky, she’ll gesture vaguely one way or another before just giving up. And yet—and this yet has taken me many years of marriage to fully appreciate—she is always to be trusted when you’re turned around on an empty road in Podunk anywhere. “Turn left,” she’ll say at a stop sign, her only rationale that it feels right. Naturally, I spent years turning right, trusting my testosterone-powered internal compass, and always getting us more lost.
But now I listen. I’ve gone bald and we’ve been married for sixteen years, so when something feels right, I say, okay, and off we go. She’s not led me astray yet.
This is why I locked. We had no business adopting a dog. We had two small boys, taxing jobs, a never-ending renovation project. We couldn’t fold our laundry, so, no, we shouldn’t drive four hours to the coast to fetch a dog in the middle of the week.
