Gary's Corner: I Found The Receipt

The drawer in the kitchen, the one beside the refrigerator, is where we keep what my wife calls the receipts and what I, after forty-one years of marriage, have come to think of as the archive. There is no order to it. There is no system. Receipts go in. Receipts do not come out. I have not opened the drawer with intent since 2019.

I opened it on Sunday because I needed a rubber band.

I did not find a rubber band. What I found, near the top of the pile, on top of a takeout menu from a restaurant that has been closed for at least two years, was a receipt from a sporting goods store dated April. It was for a pickleball paddle. It was for $312.

I am not going to name the brand of the paddle. I am not in the business of naming brands. I will say only that I have been told, by my wife, that we currently own seven pickleball paddles. I have, on multiple occasions, asked why a person who plays one sport at one community recreation center needs seven pickleball paddles. The answers I have received have ranged from technical (“they all have different cores”) to philosophical (“I’m finding what works for me”) to, on one occasion, a long silence followed by my wife leaving the room.

The receipt in my hand was for an eighth paddle.

I stood in the kitchen for some time. I looked at the receipt. I did not put it back in the drawer. I did not show it to my wife. I did not, as I might have done in an earlier marriage, raise the question of household financial transparency or the principle of joint decision-making on purchases over a certain dollar threshold. I have learned, over the years, that these conversations do not produce the outcomes they once promised.

I folded the receipt. I put it in the pocket of my cardigan. I made a cup of coffee.

I have been thinking about the receipt for two days now. I have not mentioned it. I do not intend to. I am writing about it here because I have, recently, been encouraged by the editorial staff of this publication to file copy more regularly, and this is what I have to file.

The eighth paddle is, presumably, somewhere in the house. I have not seen it. I have not been looking for it. I expect that if I were to begin looking, I would find it in a place that would, in retrospect, seem obvious. The garage, perhaps. The closet near the front door. The room my wife has begun referring to as “the office,” which is the room where the treadmill used to be, before she sold the treadmill in November.

I did not know we sold the treadmill in November.

I am okay. I want to be clear about that. The editors of this publication have, in past weeks, asked me directly whether I am okay, and I have answered, truthfully, that I am. I am a man in late retirement, in a comfortable house, with a wife who has found, in her sixties, a sport that has given her joy, community, and a degree of competitive engagement that she did not previously have access to. I am happy for her. I want to be on the record about that.

I am also, however, increasingly aware that the eighth paddle exists, and that I did not know it existed, and that the receipt is now in the pocket of my cardigan, where I expect it will remain.

The drawer is closed. The coffee is gone. It is Sunday afternoon. Through the window, I can hear, faintly, the sound of a pickleball striking the inside of the garage door at a tempo I have come to recognize as drilling.

— Gary