This morning Doug appeared in our kitchen covered head to toe in camouflage.

“What are you wearing?” I asked, although I wasn’t much surprised.  Lately his favorite new pastime has been sitting in the woods, stalking deer and becoming one with nature.  (At least, that’s his version.  My version is that he’s finding escape from the simultaneous screaming of three unruly children.)

“It’s Realtree,” he said proudly.  “This stuff is the best.  I can sit right there in the woods, and no one will ever see me!”

“Maybe that’s a blessing,” I said, but he didn’t pick up on my fashion critique.  He was too eager to catch a glimpse of the “rutting,” where bucks lock horns over their desired doe.  Evidently, this mating ritual was scheduled to take place right in our backyard.

There was one bit of truth to what he said—it was now next to impossible to find him in the woods.  At one point, he reported, I was looking right at him while calling him from the deck for about ten minutes.  I didn’t find this nearly as amusing as he did.

Later in the day, he presented me with an outdoors magazine opened up to a page with camouflage furniture.  “If you’re looking for something to get me for Christmas, this is my chair,” he announced.  He even jotted down the item number for me.

“Easy there, Davy Crockett.  I thought we agreed, no new furniture until the last kid is potty-trained.  Anyway, aren’t you getting a little too old to be writing lists for Santa?”

But then, I bit my tongue.  Every father deserves a nice easy chair—one that’s not covered with permanent marker and five years of spit-up and cookie crumbs under the cushion.  I thought about how in the past hour, I’d asked him to do something every ten minutes.  “Doug, can you pick up Eva’s prescription?  Doug, can you help me find Tyler/Eva/Anna’s other sock/shoe/barrette/mitten? Quick, Doug, Anna’s headed right up the stairs! ”

I looked at him, still camo-clad, then looked at the picture of that chair.  I thought of how easily he blended in with the woods when I went out looking for him.  I looked from him to that chair again.  If he sat in it, he’d virtually disappear.  And suddenly, his motive became clear.

“Wait a minute.  Are you trying to hide from me?” I demanded.

“Will you listen to that?  I think I hear antlers rubbing against a tree!”  And with that, he faded back into the great outdoors.

Some gifts are thoughtful.  As it turns out, others are downright premeditated.

I could almost hear the urgency behind the ringing of the phone yesterday evening before I picked it up. It was Doug, who had gone to the package store and said he’d be back by five.

“Don’t bother making dinner,” he announced with the triumph of a native who just took down a buffalo.

I checked the clock as the kids dangled their spaghetti over each other heads. It was well past 5:30.

“Where are you?” I asked.

He was standing in line at Chipotles, as they were opening in the Kohl’s plaza in Canton. The staff was in training for opening night, and as a one-time deal, they were giving away all the food you could eat.

“I just ordered five burritos bigger than my arm,” he announced. “And they’re free!”
I can’t think of a single occasion in our eight years of marriage that I saw him this excited.

“That’s great…but I didn’t know you were such a fan of Mexican.”

“I’m not,” he said. “But I wanted to know what if felt like to stand in the welfare line, and I tell you, it feels damn good.”

To get the full effect, he was pondering complaining about his free burritos to management on his way out. Thankfully, I was able to talk him out of it.

Suddenly I recalled there was one other time he was that excited. It was September of this year, when Michigan passed its radical new welfare reform act, which placed a four-year limit on cash assistance benefits for welfare recipients. Since then, he has been giddy at the thought of welfare laws tightening all the way across the country.

I’m not sure why this is such good news. At the rate we’ve been going all through 2011, I assumed we’d soon become recipients rather than contributors. America, the time has come to stop sucking the system…just as long as I get a crack at it first.

A conversation on the way to our Thanksgiving feast:

Doug:  Have you ever had duck?
Me:     No, but I was once deceived into eating pheasant. I was told they were chicken nuggets.
Doug:  Well you should try deep-fried duck. It’s the bomb.
Me:     Sorry.  I only eat things that live on farms.
Doug:  Ducks live on farms.
Me:     Yes, but chickens are raised to become nuggets.  It’s their destiny.
Doug:  So where do you think chickens come from?
Me:     Probably an egg that was laid on a farm.
Doug:  Ahhh…but where did the FIRST chicken come from?

Later that day, a quick search revealed that although no one knows the origin of the chicken for certain, it is believed they were first domesticated in India—for cockfighting.

Old McDonald had a…steroid-pumped, prize-winning gamecock?

And with that, the rationale behind my first literal chicken-and-egg argument flew the coop.