Ritual Rules

Ritual Rules

I guess you could say that I am ruled by rituals. I do not change how I regularly do things, even regarding some of the smallest aspects of my life. I get up at exactly six o’clock every morning, even if I awaken a little earlier and I feel like I have to go for a pee. I mean when I really have to go pee, and I force myself to crouch in the bed until I see that the minute hand is on the twelve and the hour hand is on the six (in that order). I always put my left sock on first, my right one second. I have a somewhat logical reason for doing that, my kind of logic anyway. One time I hastily put my right sock on first, and then, when I began to walk I fell down the stairs. I haven’t fallen down those same stairs since. And I have lived in this house for 28 years now, with my parents and my sister Cathy. I don’t call that just luck.

When Cathy sees me performing one of my ritual behviours, she will walk up to me like she has to go pee really badly, and points to her butt. Her point is made. She says that the reason that I am still not married at 28 or even have a girlfriend is because of how I do not stray from my rituals. Of course, I could say a few things about why she isn’t married at 26, but I do not. I don’t criticize her to her face. That is kind of a ritual in itself. For when I get angered by something negative that she says about me, I say nothing, but later I write my criticisms down on paper, later to tear the paper up as soon as I get up (at six o’clock of course) so that there will be no way in which she ever finds out what I think, no matter how much she has angered me.

A couple of years ago I felt very strongly that I should have a partner in my life, so I went across town to the ‘public dance’ held in the local hockey arena on Saturday night. It is referred to in town as a ‘pickup party,’ as it often was where relationships began

I am not very familiar with that part of town, so on my way to the arena I made one wrong left turn down Pearl Street, which ‘Lady Google’ helped me correct after a few minutes of getting and feeling lost. When I arrived at the arena, I was very nervous about what I should do. How was I going to ‘pick up’ a woman at the dance.  Fortunately, as I walked towards the entrance a woman getting out of her car rather hurriedly and awkwardly had her hat fall off of her head just as I approached her car. I believe in being a gentleman, so I picked it up and handed it to her.

She replied with, “I don’t encounter many gentlemen these days”, followed by “I usually take my hat off before I go out of my car. I don’t know what I was thinking.” We started talking about the change in manners these days, and walked into the arena together. After we both paid for our entrance, the band started playing, and I asked her to dance. She said “yes” followed by her saying that she felt it would have been too forward of her to ask me, although she wanted to. I could tell that we were well matched. We danced throughout the night. Before each song, I asked her to dance with me.

From that night forward, Dorothy and I had a relationship. We soon established our own ritualistic behaviour, which suited me well. We would go out on a date every Saturday night, our lucky night. We regularly went to the arena to dance, never anywhere else.  And I would call her, almost never the other way around. Sometimes I would not answer the phone when she called.

 On our third date we began to have regular sex at her place.  We could never go to my house for that purpose, as my family is there. I hate to think what my sister would say if we spent the night there. 

But I never stayed the whole night at Dorothy’s place. My getting up at six o’clock ritual was never violated in that way. She said that she was okay with that, but eventually I began to wonder how true that was.

After several months of this being the nature of our relationship, I started to get a sense that she was getting bored with the constant sameness of our time together: same place to dance, same restaurant to eat (which was very close to the arena), same night to go out, same parting company at night, not the next morning. I began to get a feeling that she might just end it suddenly, and I would be devastated 

Sister Cathy had called me on it one Friday morning. She pointed out several times that a ‘normal woman’ could not long term abide a ‘boring ritualistic’ relationship, even though I could. In her words, “You will have to shake things up a bit if you want to keep her as your girl friend.  Don’t blow it brother.  This is the best relationship you have ever had, maybe the only one you will ever have. You don’t want to lose her with your ‘boringness’. I said nothing in reply, as was my custom.

That evening, I watched a movie on television, as I always do on a Friday night, I heard one of the actors speak the line “It takes a thief to catch a thief”. It gave me a great idea, truly new in my experience

Later that night, as I began to write down my anger at what my sister had said, as was my nightly custom, I began to think that maybe she might be right this time. I tore up the paper before I even finished with my writing. That was a first for me.

Saturday afternoon I called Dorothy, and told her that she should ‘prepare herself for a surprise.’ When she asked me what it was about, I replied with the cryptic words, “All will be revealed in the course of the night.”

Driving to the arena that night, I applied my newfound thought. Instead of going straight to my destination, I took a deliberately wrong turn left at Pearl Street. My thinking was that ‘just as it takes a thief to catch a thief, so it should take a ritual to eliminate another ritual.’ I made a u-turn and the drove straight to the arena, just as I had on the lucky night that I first met Dorothy. After the dancing I spent the whole night with her at her place, no worries. The ritual of the wrong turn in the drive to the arena had overruled the ritual of the six o’clock wakeup and get up. And when we were getting ready to go out for breakfast, I was so stunned by the whole experience of not getting up at six o’clock that I put my right sock on before the left. Then Dorothy came up behind me and gave me the hug of my life. Another ritual is overruled.