Sweet and Sour

Yesterday, I sat across from my daughter in Starbucks, offering up moral support while she struggled to complete the thesis she must turn in later this week. I assured her it would be a beautiful shared intellectual moment, with her writing the best academic piece ever written on Mafia economics and me writing, well, something. I was content to savor the sweetness of the moments together.

I couldn't be absolutely certain that she was adhering to our plan better than I was, although her periodic questions about citation or whether certain Italian words are translatable into English suggested that she was at least being somewhat productive. I, on the other hand, was wiling away the hours enjoying the sweetness, to be sure, but in the back of my mind pondering my husband's recent emphatic reminder that I discarded him. Frankly, I think feeling discarded would be a step up from how I felt for years: dismissed, irrelevant, never cherished enough in the first place to be tossed away.

We're getting along these days, but the wounds run deep. There's certainly some validity to the way each of us feels. There's also probably a good deal of self involvement and distortion on both sides. There are two things I know to be true: we both -- legitimately -- felt wronged, and whatever wrongs each of us perpetrated upon the other, they don't cancel each other out. Never will.

The old adage is correct: two wrongs do not make a right. Well, it's usually correct, or so I thought, until I tasted Starbucks' new salty caramel sweet squares. I am not a big fan of salt, and I pretty much despise caramel. The combination struck me as absolutely vile, a mix of two of the most wrong ingredients my palate has ever encountered, except for oysters. But, being the polite and wildly adventurous person I am, I recently allowed someone to talk me into trying one. If you want to visit heaven before you die, check these things out. Proof that two wrongs can, on rare occasions, indeed make a right, and that there is a heaven on earth and you can even find it in deep dark suburbia.

As my taste buds would see it, my husband gave me more than my share of caramel and I, in turn, threw salt on his wounds. We were both wrong. But, as I've told him countless times, I am willing to accept fifty per cent of the blame for the break down of our marriage -- no more, no less. I may have discarded him and he very well may have dismissed me in the first place, but those two wrongs certainly didn't make us even. We may make things right one day, but stirring up different versions of nastiness in one pot isn't the way we're going to do it.

There are exceptions to every rule, though, which is why I'm going to have a salted caramel sweet square with my coffee this morning. At least for the time it takes me to savor the two and a half bites, all will be right with the world.