Home for the holidays in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, on a quiet Christmastide morning, a young man rises early to make sticky buns. He makes a triple batch with extra pecans. He likes sticky buns that way. This is before the man had children and learned that children do not like nuts on stuff, even on sticky buns.

But this story takes place years ago. These sticky buns were made before the kids were made. These buns were the kind that make your mouth water. The man’s mother and father and his brother and sisters, his wife, they would all enjoy them with breakfast.

The man’s father gets up to take another sticky bun. He wants to melt the dab of butter he’s put on top of it. And there, at the Amana Radar Range, he makes the kind of mistake a man makes when he has forgotten himself. Enjoying his family, the father forgets himself, forgets his wife’s instructions on how he is to use the microwave. And he is detected.

The mother says, “Oh Bud, that’s not how you do that!”
The father’s countenance falls. “Oh Ann” he pleads, “this is too how I do it. And what difference does it make?”

[The mother takes the cup of coffee out of the microwave, places a napkin over the cup, sets a saucer beneath the cup, and puts it back in the oven.]
“The difference,” she says, pointing her finger, “is that I’m a perfectionist and you’re not!”
“You’re right, Ann. You’re a perfectionist and I’m not. And that’s why I married you and you married me!”

This is as quick-witted as any repartee between Cary Grant and Katharine Hepburn in Bringing Up Baby or in Holiday. His father’s retort sounded like something Mr. Grant might have said to Irene Dunne in The Awful Truth.

“That’s why I married you and you married me!” the father said, hopping an inch up in the air as he said it. He put the exclamation point on the sentence not the way you do when you are angry. He put the exclamation point on his sentence the way you do when you tell the punch line of a joke.

The father tries to wrap his arms around his wife. He tries to kiss her. She is vexed, not ready to quit a fight she knows she cannot win. She gives up in his arms and gives in to his kisses. And the young man who did not yet have children laughs so hard he spills his coffee.