Closer to God...and My Husband

By Julie Garmon, Monroe, Georgia

As appeared in

I've always hated the question, "Do you have any hobbies?" My usual response is to shrug my shoulders and mumble, "Reading. That's about it." Not so my husband, Rick. He can't sit still long enough to read a book. We've been married for more than 25 years and he's always had hobbies. He keeps coming up with more and more of them, and they get quirkier every time.

There were the chickens he raised in the backyard, then the parakeets—60 of them—that he adopted. He had to repair a gazebo for them that he'd been given, and that took months. There were the old motorcycles he restored and the slot cars he raced in the basement. The track was still there. If it wasn't one thing, it was another. Why would a grown man need hobbies? I asked myself. Rick works long days at his automotive shop. Why in heaven's name would he want to come home and work on something like repairing a gazebo? Wouldn't he rather just sit next to me and read?

"I want to build a koi pond," he announced to me one night after dinner. I nodded, and went right back to reading my book. Rick might as well have said that he was going to fly to the moon. And what the heck was a koi pond anyway?

By Saturday morning I had forgotten all about it. Then a neighbor showed up with a backhoe and started to dig two gaping holes in the yard. I downed my second cup of coffee and watched warily from the deck. "What's he doing that for?" I asked.

"For the koi pond." Oh, that. Rick draped his arm over my shoulder. "Can't you just picture it?" He pointed to a small hill. "That's where the upper pond will be, with the lower pond down here and a waterfall connecting the two. It should be really beautiful. Don't you love the sound of running water?"

"Yes," I said hesitantly. Maybe it would be beautiful, but I didn't see why he wanted to do all this work. "Remember when you were fixing up the gazebo?" I asked. "Remember how you sweated in the summer heat and got aggravated over the instructions? You seemed relieved when it was all done. Why would you want to take on another project?"

He looked at me like a kid. "Because it's fun!" he declared.

Rick checked out different designs on the web and ordered a pump that came in the mail. He studied rocks and waterfalls and figured out all of the dimensions. I wondered if he was going out of his mind. Was this some midlife crisis? Lord, I prayed, help me to understand my husband. What was a wife supposed to do?

The next Saturday he asked me excitedly, "Wanna help me pick out some river rocks?"

I put down the newspaper. "River rocks?" I asked.

"For the koi pond. We'll go to the pet store first—I need a white male parakeet for the gazebo—then we can go buy river rocks," he said.

No, I thought, there's other stuff I'd rather do. Anything. Didn't I need to do some shopping? Then I remembered my prayer. "Okay," I said, and went to get my purse (I had to squelch the temptation to include a book in case I got bored). Rick put on his baseball cap and we got in his big red truck.

We dropped by the pet store and stood in front of a glass cage of parakeets. "Look at them. Aren't they beautiful?" Rick exclaimed. I had to agree that the blues and greens of their feathers were amazing, like a jungle that could fly. And they made a wonderful chirping noise.

"What's going to happen to them when it gets cold?" I asked the pet-store owner. "How will the parakeets survive outside in the winter?"