GETTING A LEG UP

My wife walks faster than I do. If I hadn’t broken into a full gallop down the aisle the day we got married, she’d have beaten me to the justice of the peace by a nose. I’ve mentioned this before in this column, but things have gotten much worse and far more embarrassing

When we take a walk around the block, Mary Ellen has to turn around every three or four minutes and walk back around me so that she doesn’t get too far ahead.

As embarrassing as this is, I demand that she do it because a 79-year-old man should not be yelling to his wife, “Wait up!,” an expression that I thought I had stopped using in junior high school.

What makes this more humiliating is that I have always been a good athlete. I played center field on my high school baseball team and even ran track. My wife is not an athlete. When my wife tries to run, she doesn’t bend her legs at the knees and she ends up looking like a soldier doing a goose step on too much coffee.

No, she can’t run. But boy, can she walk.

And I can’t figure out why she walks faster. Let’s see…her legs are longer than mine. And she moves them back and forth faster than I do. Okay, I just figured it out.

The great irony in this is that one of the reasons I was attracted to my wife almost 48 years ago was her long, slender legs. This is exactly how men get themselves in trouble. When I saw those lovely limbs, my mind turned to romance, but I should have realized that she’d be walking faster than me for the next 50 years. I knew I was going to marry a woman who was smarter. But faster? That was never the plan.

In fact, during high school and college, I never dated girls who were fast. (My mother approved of that.)

Now, I must admit that when I used to walk my dog, Barney, he also walked faster than I did. Barney was 88 in dog years, 10 pounds overweight, and had arthritis. But the difference between Barney and my wife is that Barney actually turned around every few minutes to make sure I hadn’t had a heart attack. Back then, I considered using a leash, but neither Mary Ellen nor Barney would wear one.

Sometimes, just to feel loved and wanted, I would hide behind a tree to see if my wife would look for me. Out on a hiking trail, this is okay, but in a residential neighborhood, men behind trees are frowned upon. When you are telling your story to a police officer and he keeps using the word “lurking,” you have a great deal of explaining to do.

Now, when we walk around our new neighborhood, she feels like I slow her down, and the sight of her circling me every few minutes has the neighbors talking. Instead, when my wife and I want to walk, we go in different directions around our neighborhood circle. No matter how leisurely I walk, we pass each other at exactly the same time.

I know that was an incredibly stupid thing to say. But don’t try to explain it to me. You know how slow I am.