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Saturday, January 21, 2012

Echoes from the Past - NO RUNNING IN THE HOUSE!!!!!

It's been a while since I showed up here. In fact, it's been a while since I've written anything. I had been so busy editing The Lost Letters for publication, I more or less forgot about writing for a while. Then the business of Attawatiskap came up and I was so incensed at the bungling of the government at it's handling, I had to shoot my mouth off. So I burned up my keyboard with as scathing a critque as I could muster, put it up on Youtube and sent it to my member of parliament. It's called "Rear View Mirror" in case you want to look it up.

Well, the upshot was that while I didn't much like to broach such a serious subject without my boxing gloves on, I did miss writing my little amusing stories. They give me much more pleasure. So I did a couple of them. Here's one I'd like to share with you. I hope you enjoy.

Echoes from the Past

“NO RUNNING IN THE HOUSE!” echoed through my septuagenarian brain the other day. It was as though a voice from seventy years ago pierced right through the ages - directly at me – as though I was hearing it for the first time. I stopped dead in my tracks for a second.

Actually, I was running – in the house. Picture this: If I get up out of my chair at my computer desk, take two steps into the hallway and turn left, seven steps gets me into the kitchen. Then I do a hard left at the freezer and bolt right through the kitchen into the dining room. Passing the dining room table, I do a looping left again around the coffee table in the living room and squeeze in between the couch and the TV. The path leads directly to my desk.

My calculator tells me that if I do that one hundred times, it should amount to about a mile. HOLY CRAP! I’VE GOT A BUILT IN INDOOR TRACK – RIGHT IN MY APARTMENT! All the other old farts walk up and down the hallways, stopping to say “good morning” to their fellow hall walkers, and of course, socializing and wasting good exercising time, while I, in the privacy of my own apartment, can whiz around the house in total concentration, counting laps. Cool!

So I start: one, two, three – oh – was that three or was it already four? Uh oh. Damnation, I can’t even count anymore. Well, you don’t defeat me that easy. I go into my penny stash and haul out a fistful of pennies and stick them in my pocket. Every time I pass my desk, I’ll drop a penny on my chair. That’ll do it! When I get finished, I’ll just count pennies and know how many laps I ran.

I start again: one, two, three – wait a minute, I already did three laps and I’m not wasting them. So I throw three more pennies on to the chair. Well, my stupid game leg is already starting to act up and I need all the mileage I can muster up. Seven, eight, nine – “NO RUNNING IN THE HOUSE!”

I never even noticed the wife lying on the couch, trying to watch TV while I’m looping around the living room. I can tell she’s annoyed. We’re at cross-purposes here. She’s lounging around watching Anderson Cooper interviewing his mother while I am grinding out my workout regimen, trying to stay fit and healthy for both our benefits.

Ten. “ALRIGHT!” I froze in my tracks, as I already said.

Wait, that wasn’t from seventy years ago. That was from right now! It wasn’t my mother either, it was my wife, for god’s sakes!

“And,” she opined, as if reading my thoughts, “if you really want to stay fit and healthy, wait ‘til I go down to the pool later and then grab the vacuum cleaner. Then you can run around the whole house and get even more exercise. That will benefit both of us.”

Don’t you just hate it when they come up with this strange kind of logic?