Deafer than a Doorbell

I recently read both E.M. Delafield's Diary of a Provincial Lady and George and Weedon Grossmith's Diary of a Nobody and was inspired to keep a journal. It reminded me of how entertaining ordinary happenings can be. I also began to feel that as I continue to live with my aging (and sometimes hilarious) parents, I should record some of these events for the sake of my brothers and for my niece and nephews. If I can manage to keep up the habit, I should have plenty of blogging fodder. Below is an excerpt.




August 31, 2017

In the evening, I heard Mom in the kitchen frantically calling out for help. I got myself unloaded from underneath my laptop and came down to her. She was making a chicken and biscuits recipe for the Instant Pot and needed me to whisk the sauce in the pot while she was cutting chicken. She was nervous about neglecting her sauce while she did that task. I got to work on that. Later, she called for Dad too and got really frustrated that she couldn't make him hear her, announcing he was “deafer than a doorbell,” probably imagining him upstairs at his computer with his headphones on. At that expression, I burst into laughter and made Mom laugh just as vigorously, and soon, we were both laughing so hard we could barely function.

I thought of the famous opening paragraphs from Dickens' A Christmas Carol.

“Marley was dead: to begin with. There is no doubt whatever about that. The register of his burial was signed by the clergyman, the clerk, the undertaker and the chief mourner. Scrooge signed it: and Scrooges' name was good upon 'Change, for anything he chose to put his hand to. Old Marley was as dead as a doornail.

Mind! I don't mean to say that I know, of my own knowledge, what there is particularly dead about a door-nail. I might have been inclined, myself, to regard a coffin-nail as the deadest piece of ironmongery in the trade.”

I don't know what makes a doorbell particularly deaf either. Does that mean it can not hear its own sound? If a doorbell rings, and it can not hear itself, does it still make a sound?

At some point, we both left the kitchen. I left to go to my bedroom and Mom to her bathroom. The phone rang. I answered it. It was Dad … calling from his cell phone … from the parking lot at the T-Mobile store. I remembered then that he had told us he was going to the store before he left the house. Both Mom and I had completely forgotten he had even gone. I had to repeat to him Mom's mixed up expression. Dad answered, “I guess I should have rolled the car windows down so I could hear her from the highway.”

I found Mom later at her bathroom sink and informed her how Dad had called from T-Mobile. “I guess that's why he was deafer than a doorbell.”

“That would explain it,” she said and burst into laughter again.

© Susan Joy Clark 2017

Give Yourself Time

Give yourself time, time to relax.
Breath in some of that fresh air. Your mind and soul needs you too.

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This fabulous photo was taken, in the neighbouring area where our cousin lives, in AucklandNZ. Magical evening as the sun went down, to leave us for another day. Lets make more spare time for ourselves to enjoy the simple things in life, like just a walk on the beach, you maybe missing a perfect moment out there.

Parents are Funny People

Parents are funny people. I laugh at my mother all the time, not always when she's actually intending to be funny.

Listening to myself speak recently on a recording of an interview with my client's daughter, I realize how often I pause when I speak, likely because I'm always searching for the perfect words. My mother does not pause often and sometimes speaks before she has the perfect words or changes her mind midstream in her speech, resulting in some funny expressions sometimes.

There are her strangely reworked cliche expressions like, "Kill two chickens with one hatchet." Well, "killing two birds with one stone" is fairly violent, but this version is much, uh, gorier. Can you tell she grew up on a farm in rural Nebraska?

Another time, she was angry at my father and declared that he was a "disaster on wheels!" This might have made a little bit of sense if my father had been driving at the time. He wasn't. I'm not exactly sure what she had in mind. Maybe she had conjured up some mental image of the Looney Tunes Tasmanian Devil scooting through on a skateboard. Maybe disaster is that much more destructive when it's on wheels. I couldn't seem to help myself but to laugh at her expression at that time.

Thankfully, my laughter was contagious. Dad notices me laughing, and his lips curl up one side. Then he is laughing softly before getting a little bolder and laughing with more energy. Pretty soon, Mom has joined us, forgetting to be in a bad mood. It was a pretty wonderful moment.

Lately, Mom seems to be mishearing me when I speak and coming up with some pretty colorful and sometimes illogical conclusions as to what I said. In a recent funny moment, I was trying to share some news with her about our family friend named Travis Skinner. Mom was upstairs in another room as I'm trying to convey this message. She walks downstairs, saying, "What, cabbage dinner?" It sounds like some sort of contrived sitcom dialogue, but this is actually what happened, and, no, apart from St. Patrick's Day once a year, we don't often have a "cabbage dinner."

There were some other misheard words recently, and this one also involves food ... actual food. Mom tells me that she and Dad would like to go out to lunch, adding that I was probably not hungry yet since I'd had breakfast late. I said, "Oh, I might be hungry. All I had was some leftover French bread." My breakfast that day consisted of the end bit of a French baguette that had been fresh and wonderful the previous day and now required a bit of sawing with a serrated knife.

"What?" Mom says. "Crunch bread?"

"Well," I answered honestly. "It might have been crunch bread."

Maybe, she is losing some hearing, I'm not sure, but I'm assured that she doesn't have Alzheimer's. It really is a terrible disease, and I have an uncle affected by it right now. One day, Mom and Dad were in line at our local pharmacy and were looking over some brochures at the counter about various health conditions. Mom had picked up one on Alzheimer's and announced happily -- and rather loudly -- "I don't have Alzheimer's! I know how to use the microwave!" Nearby shoppers turn to look. The brochure apparently advised that forgetting how to use appliances like the microwave was a sign of Alzheimer's.

I'm not sure we'll be able to tell if Dad -- God forbid! -- gets Alzheimer's, as he's always had one of those quirky absent-minded scientist sort of personalities, even when he was young and long before I entered the picture. Mom tells this story from when they were first married, before any of the kids were born, and still living in a one-room apartment. Apparently, one morning, Dad stared into the refrigerator for a considerable length of time before announcing,"Where in the world are my socks?"

Trina Maybe Back!

Hello there my beautiful people, have you missed me?, maybe not but I've missed you guys.

Thought I better clock in after soooooooo long, you know, just in case there is a very small number that has wondered where and what I've been up too. well......

I've been pretty busy understanding my new adventure, that's is... buying a business!, that courier business I mention a few months ago. Slowly getting my head around it and still super busy meeting my customers and there needs. Didn't realize the full impact it was going to make on me, taking every inch of energy from me, as I only wish to please, to keep the courier running the same or better.

In the mean time as you can see, on my down time, I get to enjoy the summer, now that it's finally here and life is pretty good.