Our conversation as I drove Matthew to school this morning:

Matthew: “A kid at school owes me five bucks”.

Me: “Why does he owe you five bucks”.

Matthew: “He never stops talking and it drives me crazy. So I bet him five dollars he couldn’t go one day without talking. He couldn’t last even part of the day”.

This from the most verbose person I know. Needless to say I squashed the bet. But it got me thinking, if $5.00 is the going rate for people to stop talking, perhaps I’ll wage the same thing with the one and only Matt R.

La Rad

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In the seasonal late fall rush, I went to our local tire dealer to get our winter tires put on our car and was standing in line with quite a few others. At one point the lone, harried but composed woman behind the counter jokingly offered employment to those of us waiting for her, noting the company’s good benefits package. And as happened several times while I waited, when it came my turn she also took a call while multitasking my keys and paperwork.

“Hello, Sullivan Tire, can you hold?”

Pause.

Then forcefully she said, “No!” and pushed the hold button, returning to my processing.

Sensing the question in the eyes of those of us waiting, who couldn’t hear the other side, she looked up with a smile in her eyes and said, “He asked if he had a choice … ”

El Kib

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The road to Albuquerque was long and straight. Gopal, our driver, loved fast roads. He had driven the Bombay-Delhi road often in the monsoon and the hot seasons before he came to the states to work at the university. In India the traffic was heavy and slow, but this road had only occasional trucks and rental cars racing home for dinner across the desert.

We talked about mundane things while Gopal drove the straight road and passed cars every now and then. I was drousing in the rear seat when he turned across the yellow lines to pass a sedan, and I saw over his shoulder that the gauge hovered on 100.

But the road ahead was not clear. A van ahead bore down on us. Behind, in the right lane,
a third car had driven close to the sedan, getting ready to pass after us. There was no time and no space for us to pull ahead of the sedan, and the sedan could not slow down because the third car was close behind.

The oncoming van did not slow in its approach. There was no time for any of us to say anything. I screamed in my mind. A fatal head-on collision seemed to be inevitable. At the last second, Gopal yanked the steering wheel left to pull off the road into a stretch of gravel. We slowed to a stop. The oncoming van continued its high speed on past us, and the sedan and third car sped on towards Albuquerque.

It was several minutes before Gopal pulled back onto the highway. None of us said a word. There was nothing any of us could say. In my mind, in some alternate world, the Albuquerque Journal headline read, “Four car collision on route 25 kills 12. Road closed for 24 hours”.

–rakkity

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“Diane, you know those radio shows I plug into my head before I fall asleep?”

“Please stop.”

“Don’t panic, this isn’t about plot lines. I can now answer that great riddle – how long does it take me to fall asleep? All I have to do is time how much of it I remember the next day. I did it this morning.”

“And? “

“Four minutes.”

Michael

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At dinner one night, Michael mumbles something incoherently, and I say, as I often do, “What?”

“You are deaf as a doorbell,” Michael says gallantly. “I thought you just had your doctor clean out your ears with a fire hose.”

“Da-ad,” says Matthew.
“It’s not that Mom is deaf; it’s that You are dumb.”

Diane