Please Complete to the Best of Your Ability

     I keep waiting for it to happen, and I expect that one of these days it will. There’ll be a knock at my door, and when I open it there’ll be two men standing there in dark suits and sunglasses.
     “Mr. Helker?”
     “Yes?”
     “We’ve come to remove your Adult status. You’ve been faking it for years, and we finally tracked you down.”
     I feel like I’ve been posing as an adult for, well, all of my adult life, despite the job, and the bills, and the hairline which passed “receding” some years back. But lately I’ve been thinking that I belong, if not firmly in the adult camp, then at least in a neighboring site. Why? Because life insurance is starting to make sense to me. “You know that new spinning rig you’ve been wanting? Forget it; you can make do with the old one. Instead, we’d like you to pay a sum out of each paycheck to an office somewhere. You won’t receive any tangible benefits for a long, long time, or at least hopefully not, in your case. We’ll increase the amount you pay out of each paycheck as the likelihood of you actually realizing your benefit increases, and when we finally do pay on our end, well, too bad for you, but you’re dead.” When I was younger, my reaction to such an argument would have been, “What! Are you insane?” But now, I’m thinking, “Sweet! Sounds too good to be true, but I’d better look into it.”
     I know, I know, life insurance isn’t for the people who die, it’s for the people who live. And in the event of my demise, I would like to keep my wife Lori comfortable in the lifestyle to which she’s become accustomed, although I expect there’s more than enough money in the change jar for that. Please bear with me as I fill out some forms.

Do you exercise routinely?
If I’m frightened on a regular basis, well, then, yes. My most frenetic workout came along the Tomorrow River in Portage County, when I was spotted by a bull as I crossed a pasture while taking a shortcut between pools. I haven’t seen chest waders specifically marketed as a weight-loss device, but I figure I must have expended the calorical equivalent of fifty Big Macs before I reached the safety of the river.

Do you have children?
Not currently, but the topic does frequently come up between my wife and I, particularly during cocktail hour when we’re sitting on our porch in the early-evening sun, listening to our resident cardinal sing from its telephone-wire perch.
Lori, thinking to herself:  “Boy, I love that man of mine. I can’t wait until we start a family so we can really begin our life together. He’s pretty quiet; I’ll bet he’s thinking the same thing.”
Me, thinking to myself:  “Man, that guy across the street’s had his sprinkler on for a couple of hours now. I’ll have to go and pick nightcrawlers when it gets dark.”

Do you have elevated cholesterol?
Well, last time I had it checked, yeah, it was pretty high, and all of it can be traced to nine days in November. Like a lot of deer camps, ours tends to suspend dietary restrictions for the duration of the season. We have bacon for breakfast, bacon for lunch, and bacon for dinner. Visitors to our camp are issued a pound apiece, and if we could wear bacon, we would.

Do you consider yourself to be a healthy eater?
Sure, apart from the above. I do 90% of the cooking in our household, which allows me to watch what I eat. I also do 90% of the eating, which reflects less on my gluttonous nature than it does on Lori’s keen instinct for self-preservation. My “man’s kitchen” has expanded somewhat from my bachelor days, when I had a pot and a few plates and that’s about it. Now I have all of the cast-iron cookware an outdoorsman could want, along with the gadgets my wife brings home from “Spoiled Skilleteer” parties. Those—and their equivalents the Candle Party and the Lingerie Party—are a uniquely feminine phenomenon whereby women use “friend” status to “guilt” each other into buying stuff. Think of it as domestic mutually-assured destruction. Makes me glad I’m a man, too, and that we don’t do those types of things:  “Hey, Bob, coming to my Crankbait Party Saturday night? You’d better—I went to your Plastic Worms of the World thing in April.”

Have you ever been treated in a hospital?
What do you mean, “have I ever”? When I was a boy, my mail was permanently forwarded to the Emergency Room. I recall one after-school fishing trip to the Menasha Dam. I had my orange kapok life vest and my black eyeglasses with the elastic strap—I was walking birth-control in those days—and I had my spincast outfit loaded with heavy line. I used heavy line because I didn’t have a lot of lures, and I wanted to keep the few I had. And, in any case, I had already stolen and lost all of my brother Scott’s. I chucked my spoon out into the current, and promptly got a snag. I tried all of the little tricks for getting a snag out to no effect, and finally resorted to that old standby:  brute force. I shall never forget the Zzzzzzzzzt!  sound—like a major-league fastball—that the spoon made before it embedded itself in my ear. I’m more upset about the incident now than I was then, because I don’t believe I ever got that spoon back from the doctor. It was a nickel-and-blue Cleo, if I remember correctly, and I could use it to tempt brown trout off of the piers in spring.

Are you experiencing reproductive organ problems?
No sirrEEE. Everything good there. Couldn’t be better. Just peachy, really. Yep. Ahem. Next question.

And finally, are you currently pregnant?
At last, a “no” answer. That’ll bring my premiums down. Get ready, Lori, to live the lifestyle of your dreams: You’ll be rich, and I’ll be dead. Man, I hate being an adult.