I was messing around in the kitchen the other morning, making myself some breakfast. Meanwhile Special K was still in bed in the next room so I was trying to be quiet. Of course when you are deaf like I am, quiet is somewhat of a relative term. When I think I am not making a lot of noise, it can probably come across pretty loud to someone with normal ears.
This wasn’t going on in the early hours of the day – in fact, it was mid-morning. But like ears, time can be relative too. If, like Special K, you hadn’t gone to bed until 3 in the morning, then waking up early might mean she was shooting for early afternoon.
As the morning progressed the temperature had warmed up quite a bit so I snuck into the bedroom to turn on the AC for her. Meanwhile back in the kitchen the microwave timer did it’s little done beep.
I was standing there in the dark trying to adjust the air conditioner dials by touch when all of a sudden Special K yelled, “Honey! There’s something beeping.”
I yelled and jumped somewhere near the vicinity of the ceiling, which of course woke her up. She said she’d yelled a couple of other times too. But I hadn’t heard her.
Nor had she heard me when I came into the bedroom – and she was yelling really loud to make sure I heard her yell that last time. It scared the dickens out of me!
I decided it was time to show how cute I am and I was getting ready to tell her I’d heard her earlier but was ignoring her.
But before I could get that out she rolled over and told me she’d been yelling to tell me I shouldn’t worry about washing the dirty dishes – that she would get them when she got up.
I shut my trap pretty fast there. If I’d gone ahead and said that I had been purposefully ignoring her I would have been volunteering to do the dishes myself.
***
I started reading a new book last week. I’d picked it up off the bookshelf because it was smaller than the two books that I was already in the middle of. I wanted something both light and lightweight so I could read it in bed – though the fact is I seldom get more than a page or two read before I am asleep.
The books I already had on the go were both collections of short stories. They were heavy and somewhat cumbersome for reading in bed.
I was also worried if I fell asleep while reading and it might slip off the bed and bean one of the cats or something.
So I was into this new book – by Alice Munro. Now I am not such a artsy guy that I’d be able to tell you much about Alice Munro or list the things she’s written, but I knew I’d heard the name several times on CBC radio so she must be pretty good.
It turns out she is a very good writer. By the time I finished the first chapter I was hooked.
When I got into chapter two though things went sideways.
I was having trouble understanding how the characters she’d introduced in the new chapter related to the chapter one folks.
And the plotline didn’t seem to connect too well either.
After reading about 15 pages into the second chapter it dawned on me that I should check the title page. There was my explanation – I was reading another book of short stories.