I say this because there's a BIG ONE waiting for you down the road, my friend, and when you slam into it, you're going to need all the understanding you can find.

Years ago, my wife of one week, The Lovely Marianne, and I woke to the sweet silence of our first apartment. She offered to make the coffee.

Most everything was still in boxes, including the new electric percolator someone had given her at the shower. She opened it, tossed the directions in the garbage and filled the pot with coffee and water. She carried it to the gas range, placed it on the back burner, and turned it on high.

This didn't seem quite right to me so I asked if she knew what she was doing. (Her folks had an electric stove.) She smiled and said, "Of course!"

Now this particular electric percolator had a see-through glass part for the coffee and a black-plastic bottom. It occurred to me that it had no business being on the back burner of a gas range turned too high, but what the heck did I know? In my house, coffee had always been Mom's job.

"Isn't that an electric coffee pot?" I asked.

"It works both ways," she said.

"Oh."

Then she scurried around the apartment, reveling in things domestic while I stared at the coffeepot. I stood there like the village idiot and watched the pot list to starboard as molten globs of black plastic dripped into the flames.

"Hon," I said, "can you come here for a minute? I think you should see this."

Another time, just a few weeks after we'd finished scraping plastic out of the burner, The Lovely Marianne sat on our living room rug and hemmed the new drapes while I sat, king-like, reading the paper in my new Lay-Z-Boy. I remember it was very quiet. Marianne stitched slowly and deliberately. Every now and then I glanced over the top of the paper and smiled at my bride. She smiled back.

An hour went by. She got up, left the room and returned with something hidden against her thigh. I kept reading, letting a few minutes pass before I peeked over the top of the sports section to catch her using her secreted scissors to clip the drapes fee of the shag carpeting.

Coming dead on the heels of the business with the coffeepot, this was too much for me to bear. I let loose a giggle from behind the newspaper. The Lovely Marianne walked from the room, saying nothing.

Now, I knew very little of life or women back then so I told everyone I met about the Great Coffeepot Melt-Down and The Hemming of the Shag Rug.

All in all, she took it pretty well. It became, after a few years of telling and retelling, a better and better story - part of Holohan family folklore. I'd bring it up to new friends as our lives cycled through phases of new neighbors and new neighborhoods. Every time I told THE STORY, it grew a few more details, finally making the subtle leap from bent-truth to legend.

And all the while I was sculpting my tale, weaving in more and more fabricated detail, The Lovely Marianne smiled sweetly and said nothing.

She was waiting.

Years passed. One day I decided to do some concrete work in the backyard. It was just a small project, nothing I hadn't tackled before.

I went to the lumberyard to get three, 80-pound bags of Sandmix. The price was higher than it was at the home center, but I wouldn't have to lug the stuff to my car a quarter-mile away. I went to the counter and ordered the cement, paid for it, and went out to back to "See the yardman," who pointed me toward a pile of brown sacks.

Once home, I grappled the three bags into the backyard, got myself a bucket and a hose and started mixing with great enthusiasm. I troweled, smoothed and leaned back with satisfaction.

I called The Lovely Marianne and the kids out to see what I'd done. She smiled; so did the kids. Then I had a beer.

Night fell. My concrete wasn't hardening as it should and The Lovely Marianne was the first to notice. She mentioned it to me.

I took a long look at the concrete, probed it with a cautious finger, and told her not to worry; it would be fine in the morning.

"You know," she said, "it looks like sand to me."

"Don't be silly," I said. "It always looks like that before it sets up."

But it did look an awful lot like sand.

Days passed. I kept sticking my finger in my "concrete" while The Lovely Marianne smiled. She had a vicious gleam in her eyes, but she said nothing.

A week later, my "concrete" walk still had the consistency of Jones Beach.

It turns out I'd paid $15 for 240 pounds of sand. The same stuff you can get for free at any Long Island beach. I'd bought it, lugged it, mixed it, troweled it, smoothed it, stood back and looked at it, drank a few beers to it, stuck my finger in it. I did this for a week. And never once did I read the bag. The bag read, "SAND" in six-inch-high red letters.