From time to time the moon phases, the planets align, or molecules collide--something happens that causes an ordinarily routine and mundane life to unravel. One such moment occurred in our household late yesterday afternoon.
Earlier in the day we had spent a couple hours at Borders Books. In the interest of good citizenry, I switched my phone to vibrate. When we got home from the bookstore, I put the phone on the kitchen counter and never gave it another thought.
As I was preparing dinner, I noticed an odd sound coming from the air conditioner. I looked up, but couldn’t see anything that seemed out of place. Since cold air was spewing forth and the strange noise had stopped, I went on about my business and promptly forgot the incident.
After dinner, Gene and I were watching the end of a news program and that odd noise again interrupted our thoughts. This time he heard it and I explained about it’s previous occurrence and offered the opinion that apparently there was something wrong with the air conditioner. He checked out the air conditioner much in the same manner as I had. Still, cold air was spewing out, nothing seemed to be out of place, and the noise had stopped.
Occasionally, thoughts just flow from my mind. That doesn’t happen so often any more. It’s like a domino effect triggered by a single thought. The air conditioner incidents led to thoughts of our service appointment scheduled for this morning which led to the idea that I really should check to be sure the sofa bed worked. We have one of those new sofa beds which unfolds from the back of the sofa rather than from the inside. It has an attached inflatable air mattress which already has the pump connected and plugged in. All you have to do is flip the switch. We needed it to work since my folks are coming for a visit next month. We would not have another time as convenient as this to have it fixed if it didn’t work. These thoughts led to the realization that this would also be the last large town with a Wal-Mart and Target so convenient for sheets, if the ones I used on the old sofa didn’t fit this one.
We unfolded the sofa bed and flipped the switch. It worked great and it is far more comfortable that the old one. I went up to the bedroom to get a sheet for testing. As I walked past the kitchen counter, the phone buzzed.
The call was from our good friends, Tony and Diana, who are making their way to Washington and we are anxiously awaiting the time when we can spend a few days together. Tony was on the other end of the line, but he quickly switched to speaker phone to include Diana in the conversation. I wanted to do the same for Gene. When I looked down at the screen I noticed I had missed 2 calls. I pressed the little speaker symbol, but the screen just toggled between “listen” and “later”. I was flustered, but I had to get back to the conversation. I had already missed too many words to participate intelligently. It suddenly occurred to my feeble brain that I didn’t have an air conditioner problem at all, it was the phone making that odd noise. That resolved, I desperately tried to get back to the situation at hand. I didn’t want our friends to think I didn’t want to include Gene in the conversation so I tried again to turn on the speaker--again with the same results--no luck with the speaker, more words of the conversation lost and another crazy response to a comment not fully understood. I would be best served by just passing the phone to Gene, I decided. That way they would at least know he was alive and well and that we were still together. This move worked pretty well and hopefully, Tony and Diana haven’t wondered too much about my mental stability.
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