I gave my wife a dozen roses for Valentine’s Day. She told me they were beautiful and proceeded to plant a big kiss on my lips.
That smooch confirmed that those roses were an excellent choice.
Last year, I made the mistake of buying her artificial flowers. They were gorgeous orchids that looked real, were in a lovely ceramic pot, and cost three times as much as those roses.
But she didn’t care for them.
Turns out, she doesn’t like anything artificial. She prides herself on her insistence to have nothing to do with anything considered counterfeit, although she often claims to be married to a dummy.
Nevertheless, I still got a kiss for those artificial flowers, but it just wasn’t the same as the one I got for the roses. I can tell the difference between a kiss that says “I love you,” and one that’s similar to the kiss Michael Corleone gave to Fredo in “The Godfather Part II.”
Fortunately, I didn’t wind up sleeping with the fishes.
Unlike my wife’s distaste for anything simulated, I tend to take advantage of the many excellent substitutes available today.
And taking into the high-calorie foods, fats and cholesterol found in a typical diet, I argue that the stand-ins make a lot of sense.
That plant-based meat alternative for example, even bleeds. Hats off to the chemists who were able to produce a bacon cheeseburger with no bacon, no cheese and no burger.
“And no taste,” my wife interjects.
She prefers a genuine, unadulterated, steak to any of those synthetic foods.
Unfortunately, those finer cuts of beef aren’t exactly in our budget. A visit to Costco recently revealed a single steak priced at $100. It was wagyu beef imported from Japan, where a heifer costs more than a Honda.
I’ll keep that steak in mind for next Valentine’s Day, but I’ll probably stick to roses knowing how much she liked them. Plus they’re $90 cheaper.
I should have learned my lesson about her aversion to anything imitation when I purchased that fake grass. Its looks real and covers the entire yard. Now, instead of having the gardener show up each week to mow the lawn, I just vacuum it.
That artificial turf was rather pricey, but I’m certain it will save us money in the long run.
Unfortunately, my wife decided, as she often does, to perform an evaluation. So she made a side-by-side comparison contrasting the cost of the lawn service to the fake grass.
It was a complicated calculation taking into the mowing charges, the cost of fertilizers, irrigation and other maintenance fees, as opposed to a brand-new beautiful, if not bogus, lawn. She was finally able to compute we’d be ahead with the cost of the fake grass on the condition we lived 10 years past our life expectancy.
Erdos is a freelance humor columnist. him at [email protected].
