A Taxing Endeavor

     The Lieutenant Colonel is a wiz at many things, the filing of income taxes being among them.

     He  devours  tax forms, schedules and work sheets by the bushel and spits out the seeds,

...and he can whip his weight in pre-taxable, taxable and non-taxable entities, gross vs. net incomes,   deductions, refundable credits, non-refundable credits, and applicable percentages derived by multiplying the light of the moon by  a puppy dog's tail then dividing by your shoe size.
​      The Lieutenant Colonel's wife, not so much.

     I've had no trouble learning Latin, French, German, Russian, Spanish, or a few words of Hungarian.

     But Taxese is one language I swear I'll never conquer. 

​     The aptitude for that sort of thing must reside on the side of my brain where nobody's home.

     Every year around this time Tom and I sit down together at the dining room table for the purpose of doing  the taxes.

     Or rather, for the purpose of  him  doing  the taxes and me trying  figure out what he's doing.
​       To this end I always take voluminous notes, 

...as I did once again this year. 
    "But those are the same notes you took last year and the year before that and the year before that," said Tom, glancing at my notebook as I scribbled away, "why do go to the trouble of writing down the same things year after year?"
    "Repetition is the key to learning," I replied, though that kind of thinking might just be more of a piano-teacher thing.

     I do my best, though, to help fill in the forms with Tom's patient mentoring.
​      "Now, how do you fill in this line?"  he asks me.
     "You fill it in with 'ABC,' " I reply, jubilant that I've finally cracked the code of a single  line item.

   "No, you fill it in with "XYZ," he corrects me.
   "What?"  I cry in dismay, "how do you figure that?"
   "Well, see," he says pointing to the instruction booklet,  "it's right here on page 37,  number 11, letter C, subject 6-e."  As if it were as clear as the nose on my face.

    Anyway, it never seems to me that we rake in or hand out enough cash annually to merit such a long and tedious tax-paying process.
​      I mean, I'm quite sure our yearly income for the past decade wouldn't cover a down-payment for the  cost  of Melania's 25-carat rock,

...not to mention the half-a-million dollars a day of my tax money and yours that it takes to keep Donald Trump's family  living in Trump Tower in the style to which they are accustomed instead of in the far less opulent First Family's wing of the White House.
​      But then at least I know where a portion of our hard-earned  money goes.

     Even if I could never in a million  years figure out  how to get it there.