Text message counter (7)

I keep getting texts from my wife.

She always gets mad when I fail to read them. But my cell phone gets used so infrequently that I often leave it in the briefcase, or in the car. I admit it—I am a member of the pre-smartphone generation. I haven’t been trained to keep my eyes glued to a cell phone screen every moment.

When I grew up, you often had to wait hours to call someone, particularly if you didn’t have quarters for the pay phones. It’s true. And I probably sent my first email some time around..1985? Plus or minus. We wrote real letters, on paper! Stamps. Post office.

So I got an entire series of rapid-fire text messages from my wife. She assumed (correctly) that I wouldn’t have my phone anywhere I could hear it:

“Soooo, I could be dying and you would not know.”

“The funeral director is calling you now.”

“It’s my funeral, are you attending, at least send flowers.”

“One month anniversary.”

“Now I’m going to haunt you.”

“Haunt!”

And the last one:

“Panda Express coming up.”

Now the smell of fast-food Chinese fills the apartment, and there’s a pounding at the front door.

I won’t open it.

My wife sent those text messages more than a year ago, before the accident.

(Annie’s fine. She actually did bring home noms, so plus two points. No accident, thank goodness–but the rest is based on real-life text events.)

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Tub-thumper

Do you have a good friend or close relative with whom you disagree on a major issue (political, personal, cultural)? What’s the issue, and how do you make the relationship work?

Actually, when I look over the Facebook page, it appears that I have several of those, both political and religious.

I’ve got a buddy from the college days who has turned into a political tub-thumper. Everything, and I mean everything, is all about a) his chosen party or b) the other one. His heroes and his villains.

He drips with re-blogs and mail-forwards and cartoon-spam. Plus other annoying habits.

Ok, fine, we all get that you are {insert party here} and everyone from {other party} is a knuckle-dragging drooling criminal. We get it. You’ve told us twenty thousand times. Oop, new day, twenty thousand and fifty. This is how you spend your online hours, thumping the same tub repeatedly.

All politics and no play makes Jack a dull (and annoying) boy, indeed.

People who explain how and why ‘unfriend’ became a thing.

***

I’ve a much more empathy for the religious variety. After all, they’re supposed to be doing it, spreading the word and all.

But remember that scene from Airplane where the airport preachers where handing out the free gifts to Robert Stack?

Brilliant scene. Some days, Facebook is just like that.

***

At the same time, I suppose that I’ll display my individual brand of hypocrisy today by forwarding along another blog post or two.

My own personal brand of tub-thumping, I suppose.

Apologies to all I may have annoyed. Try not to flip me on my head, okay?

I bruise easily.

Chumbawamba?

Pingbacks. Broken again.™

Blooms in the courtyard

Leaving my seclusion is difficult.

She lives across the empty courtyard between our buildings, the courtyard where she grows flowers. I’ve seen her come and go dozens of times, tending her flower pots. But we didn’t meet until last month.

As a child, she was called Meliboea, but now she goes by Chloris. Which means “the pale one”—she became permanently pale because she was so frightened by her sibling’s deaths.

Tonight I meet her parents. I’ve learned it’s an unspoken requirement to meet the parents in Greek families.

I’m feeling faint myself. I hope I don’t turn too pale.

In response to this week’s Friday Fictioneers prompt.

PHOTO PROMPT – Copyright – Jan Wayne Fields