Last night I was sitting on our bed playing “Tetris” on my old useless cell phone that I keep around so T can have his own phone when he visits, or when I need something completely mindless to occupy my thinking. Even playing “Tetris,” though, occasionally the thoughts creep in, and suddenly I was thinking about an entry our daughter had made in a recent blog post wherein she mentioned that she was having trouble finding her “funny.” I remember thinking at the time, “Us, too, honey. Us, too.”
I looked over at Bob, sitting on the other side of the bed, examining his recently surgicized right foot. When he examines a wound, he examines it. He's a wannabe veterinarian, and I'm a wannabe dictionarian. (I like to make up words like surgicized and dictionarian.) Anyway, that foot has been one of the few things that continues to give him grief from his motorcycle accident a couple of years ago. I thoughtfully observed him unwrapping the bandage in preparation for the foot's nightly soaking in a bucket of Epsom Salts, followed by the re-dressing and the re-wrap. "Kinda hurts," he mumbled.
Suddenly, the whole process, the intensity of his face while performing this ritual, inexplicably awakened my funny. "I’ll raise your foot by two knees,” I suddenly blurted out rather loudly. He looked at me a bit oddly, but, quick on the trigger like he is, he replied, “Well, I’ll swap your two knees straight across for five broken ribs!”
“Ribs? Hah!” I replied. “I’ll raise you by two herniated discs!” And finally, tentatively, came the “Bob smile” I haven’t seen often in the last year. Grinning, he yelled, “ I’ll see your dang double discs and raise you an entire left leg!”
After a momentary pause, while I marveled at the great alliterative catch he had just made, I started calculating, and I realized that there wasn’t any way at all that I was going to win this game. Especially if he pulled out the three litres of pure . . . um . . . pus incident. And I knew he would. I knew it. And that would be a royal flush. So as tough as it was, I finally said, “Oh, nuts. I fold.” And we were off--for a brief spot of laughter.
But, darn it, I don’t fold. I won’t. There have been a few times in the last year that I felt it coming, but double-disc-three-litre-dang it, I refuse to fold.
And, sweet daughter, you won’t fold either. You will find your “funny” again. That’s a promise.
