the bigger man

I think it’s fair to say we’ve all been of two minds about something at one time or another. So it was with Dennis.

Perhaps in a different way though.

It started when he decided to do a load of laundry. It had piled up on his floor and he could no longer ignore it. The problem was that the last load still sat in his hamper; he’d just not gotten around to folding it and putting it away. It didn’t seem fair that the morning version of him would be responsible for both folding the old load and then also washing the new load. The evening version of him could have folded them on a number of occasions and chose not to.

He dumped the old load onto his bed for Evening Dennis to deal with and then loaded the new dirty clothes into the hamper and headed to the laundry room.

The evening version of him was not amused. Exhausted after a long day of nothing much at all, he entered his bedroom to see the clean albeit not folded clothes piled on his bed. “What the fuck?” muttered Evening Dennis. “Fucking Morning Dennis.”

He marched downstairs to the dryer, removed the clean clothes, threw them into the hamper, marched back upstairs (no, he did not come from a military family) and then placed the new clean clothes on top of the old clean clothes in the hamper, tossed the now-heaping hamper by the side of the bed and called it a night.

His first words the next morning, upon seeing the hamper, were “What the fuck? Fucking Evening Dennis. If he thinks I’m folding shit he’s wrong.” With that he got up, got dressed and left the bedroom without looking back.

Fourteen hours later Evening Dennis arrived back in the room and was not amused. Not amused and certainly not willing to fold the clothes and put them away.

This continued for three more days.

Finally Afternoon Dennis, sick to death of both the morning and evening versions of himself, decided to be the bigger man and went upstairs and folded all the clothes. Then he, after some quick reorganizing of the drawers and closets, put them away neatly. After that, entirely unprovoked, he tidied up a bit more and brought down to the sink a few cups and plates that had somehow accumulated on the nightstand over the past few weeks.

Later on Evening Dennis walked into the bedroom, sat on the bed and wrestled with what exactly it meant for the afternoon version of himself to be the ‘bigger man.’ “What the fuck does that mean? He’s me.”

The next morning Morning Dennis sat on the exact same spot on the bed and wrestled with the exact same quandary. “How could he a bigger man than I am if he’s me?”

This pleased Afternoon Dennis a great deal.