The window to my office is open and I just heard the sound of tinkling water. You know, water that isn’t running, but is doing more than dripping. I took a quick peek and saw that said water was tinkling into a bucket we keep for rainwater runoff out by the front door.
“Honey, take a look at this.”
“What is it?”
“It’s a strange phenomena. You have to see it.”
David and I walk out front, where I present him with the tinkling almost proudly, palm to the air, fingers in the direction of the tinkling water . His expression does not change.
“You see? Water is tinkling into the bucket, and yet it isn’t raining.”
“I can see that.”
“It’s obviously coming from the roof. There’s nothing up there, and yet it doesn’t stop.”
He raises his palms and face to the sky. “Well, let’s take a look,” he says.
I am of course eager to have my phenomena proven to be an actual, true phenomena, but become less interested when I see the outline of my husband’s head silhouetted against the night sky at the peak of our roof.
“Honey, come down,” I say, by now realizing that it has been raining.
“Ok.”
“But really, sweetie, its still kind of weird because, I mean, even though the concrete is wet over here…. It isn’t wet over here.”
He shrugs, by now quite used to weathering my hunt for the truly inexplicable. He hears, “but, I mean, isn’t that weird? Don’t you think that’s weird? I mean, I don’t mean to sound weird but…” as often as once a day or as little as once a week. His nonchalance about the strange-but-true has become quite a challenge to me; a challenge in much the same way a greyhound might view a rabbit on a stick, for instance, or a horse a carrot on a stick. Some day, I will begin a sentence with “Honey, I know this sounds unbelievable, but…” and the conversation will end with a look of incredulity on my husband’s face, and he will turn his palms and face to the sky before looking back at me and saying, “Oh. My. God.” And then he will believe every story I tell him. It will all be very entertaining, and is how I plan (in part) to spend the rest of my life with him.
But this particular evening he just shrugged again. Which means nothing, I tell you.
“Honey, I’ve been writing funny stuff!” I exclaim, eager to claim his attention now that I have left my office.
“Good!”
“Want to read it? I mean, I want you to read it. I mean, I think it’s funny. I mean, I think it’s pretty good.”
“Sure, of course. There was a Law & Order Special Victims Unit that was just on while you were in there that was pretty good,” he continues, excitedly, and then proceeds to tell me the plot line, ending his retelling with, “And I thought that was a really clever story idea, I mean, a really clever twist,” he says, and looks off into the distance, that place he looks when he can see the creative horizon and it is blue and clear and very, very clever.
We discuss the merits of various Law & Order casts.
“So I’ve been writing funny stuff!,” I exclaim.
“Good!” he says. “Oh, right! So, ya want to read it to me?”
“Ok!” and I stand up to go to my office.
“Oh, you want to read it to me in your office?”
“Well, actually, it’s not really ‘ha ha wow that’s really funny’, it’s more, ‘wow, that was cute.’ I don’t think it would be funny if I read it to you. I want you to read it and tell me if you think it sounds Rachel-y (but of course I actually want him to turn his palms and face to the sky and say ‘Oh. My. God.’).”
“Ok.”
So he sits down in my chair. I grab the mouse and my computer screen clicks to life. “There,” I say, “it starts right there.”
He reads as I attempt to read along over his shoulder. Suddenly, he grabs the computer mouse and begins shuffling through the menu in my word processor.
“What are you doing?” I ask him, trying not to sound irritated.
“Nothing,” he answers, and continues his hunt through menu options.
“If you want to make it bigger you can just zoom…”
“Nope.”
I am quiet for a moment, but can stand it no longer.
“But if you would just tell me what you want to do I could help you,” I offer (ignoring for the moment the fact that my husband is a top-level tech person for the company that made my computer).
He sighs deeply, tantalizingly. “It’s just that the spacing is off in between the words,” he says, and I imagine him thinking to himself, ‘if only the spacing weren’t off, I would read the rest of what Rachel has written. If only.’
I grab the mouse back, highlight everything I’ve written, click, Format and click Font and click Character Spacing.
“Click Kerning,” he says, so I do. He takes the mouse back and sets the zoom to 150%.
Sweet relief, he is reading again. But wait. He is reading far too fast. He couldn’t possibly be reading that fast, could he? Is that how fast people with PhD’s read? I mean, I wrote it and I can’t read it that fast. Even at 150% zoom.
“Very Rachely,” he says approvingly. He smiles at me and gives me a quick kiss as he stands and attempts to leave the room. I take my chair back.
“Really?” I ask, delighted, “You think it’s good?”
“Very Rachely, very,” he says. “I like that much more than ‘The Rachel Mood’. That’s the Good Rachel. That’s how I like to think of Rachel.”
I must look confused. But I am just listening, basking in the glow of my fevered Rachel-yness.
“Do you understand what I mean?” he asks.
“I think so.”
“I mean, like when you said you were having a Rachel Mood the other night. I don’t want to associate Rachel with a bad mood. I want to associate Rachel with Rachelieness.”
“Ok.” I smile and blow him a kiss.
I turn back to my chair and quickly type up this story, unplug my computer and carry it back in to the den where he is sitting.
I place the computer in his lap, “I’ve finally done it! I just wrote one of our conversations.”
“You mean The Interestingokay Conversation?”
“What? No, I don’t even remember that one. I wrote what we just said to each other.”
“Read it,” I order him.
He does. I catch him snickering, or laughing, or perhaps even giggling in a whispery way and feel completely satisfied in a way many wives only feel on date night. He uses the built-in mouse to scroll through it again, obviously enjoying it even more the second time around.
“Even more Rachely,” he confirms.
When I return to my desk to re-read my night’s work and bask in my glory I stumble upon evidence that he was doing more than reading. For there in the midst of my Racheliness in a single correction: ‘Rachel-y’ it reads. There are other sneaky corrections in other places but still, it does not ruin my vindication because it made him snicker or something while he smiled in a very David-y way, very. And to me, that means good.
Popularity: 1%