Sunday, December 4, 2016

Impatient Zero


Hick has been sick with a cold. It started on Monday morning, when, at 5:20 a.m., I heard him hacking and spitting and snorting. It’s bad enough that I have to breathe the sickness droplets in my sleep that his breather sprays over me like arcs of water from a NY Harbor tugboat. I also have to resist rubbing my eyes (or picking my nose--not that a lady such as I would do that, of course) after touching the remote. Then there are the faucet handles and door handles and FRIG II's handle. You may (unreasonably) think I am being a germaphobe, but Hick sounds like he’s about to expel fragments of lung. I feel sorry for him...and I, like The Pony, am not really one known for empathy.

Hick says he caught this cold from The Pony. I defended my former little beast of burden, him having had his cough for five days before he drove mostly-home for the holiday, and surely not contagious any more during the time he was here. I figure Hick picked up his illness while at the pharmacy on Saturday, refilling medicine and not using the Germ-X after punching in his PIN on the debit card scanner. Pharmacies are full of sick people, you know. I'd sooner dine at Typhoid Mary's buffet than use a pharmacy keypad and not cleanse my fingertips immediately.

Tuesday night, Hick was underfoot when he got home. The minute I got out of the La-Z-Boy after my evening walk, and went to the kitchen to check on the leftovers I was warming, he grabbed the remote to switch the TV from Seinfeld to Andy Griffith. Well. So much for that. Kind of like I advised a certain blog buddy concerning his kitchen strainer, our remote now needs to be encased in lead and buried deep inside a salt mine.

Hick's distractions wreaked havoc with my supper plans. I went down to my dark basement lair to dine in more healthy air, and forgot my cell phone. Of course I am addicted to it (“YAY!” Says the government, who developed cell phones to track us, “We know her whereabouts, that conspiratorial ne’er-do-well!”), so I hollered up the stairs for Hick to bring it to me. He was puttering around the kitchen, or should I say stumping around, the sound of his footless ankles with their tibia and fibula distal medial and lateral malleoli pounding the floor with, ironically, excessive FOOT-pounds of energy being converted to sound.

“Hey, can you grab an oven mitt and bring me my phone to the steps? It’s on the counter.”

“Okay.”

Next thing I know, here he comes, stumping across the carpet, partway down the stairs, holding out my phone that is GRIPPED IN HIS BARE FREAKIN’ HAND! I swear, I wanted to dip it in the toilet to cleanse it! When I asked about the absence of the oven mitt, Hick declared that he never heard me mention an oven mitt. Selective hearing, a side effect of this virus.

And THEN I realized that I had also forgotten a mini bag of Lays Original chips to go with the Hidden Valley Ranch Dip that I had put in a ramekin to accompany my ham slice and green olives and 7-layer salad.

“Hey, can you grab a bag of Lays chips and drop them down? Sorry. I forgot them too. They’re on the third shelf of the pantry. All the way to the left.”

I waited. And waited. And didn’t hear the THUMPTY THUMP of footless ankles.

“Are you getting them?”

“I can’t find no chips in here.”

“YELLOW BAG. It’s a six pack. On the left, by the wall.”

“Wellllll. I don’t see any chips.”

By that time I was upstairs. Hick must have been delirious, because right there glowing like a rising sun on the third shelf of the pantry was the yellow Lays pack of six individual chip bags. I have no idea how he could miss them, unless his sickness has a symptom of special color blindness that blocks bright school-bus yellow from his retinal cones. At least he didn’t touch my chips, so I didn't have to debate over whether to disinfect them in the toilet.

So far, I have not succumbed to the one-man epidemic. But let the record show that I did sneeze twice while typing this.

16 comments:

  1. This made me laugh pretty hard. Hope you manage (magically, perhaps) to avoid getting sick.

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    1. So far I am virus-free. Trying hard to stay that way! Even if it means shunning Impatient Zero.

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  2. Maybe you two can be sick together...

    How delightful. He can tend to you and you can tend to him.

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    1. NO! NO! NO! He took today off from work!!!

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  3. Have you considered ACCIDENTALLY spilling an entire bottle of hand sanitizer on HicK?

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    1. That would be a waste of good hand sanitizer. I prefer closing him off in the bedroom to sleep it off and regain his strength. He has fallen for it so far...

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  4. Every woman knows whatever their guy can't find is always right in front of him.

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    1. Ain't THAT the truth! It's a wonder they don't need to carry pocket anti-venom, what with all the snakes that coulda bit 'em.

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  5. Are you sure those chips were not under a towel?

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    Replies
    1. If they were under a towel, Hick surely would have found them!

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  6. Sick men are worse than sick children! I am sorry for you!!

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    1. He came back home from work by 8:30 a.m., and got in bed, and at noon, after I returned from the Walmart shopping and carried everything in and put it away...complained to ME that the phone rang four separate times, and he didn't get much rest.

      I guess I should have stayed home to answer it.

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  7. If it's not on the top shelf or in front I can't ever find it.

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    1. It was on the third shelf, Hick's eye level, at the edge, where I told him it would be.

      It's not like I was trying to hide it for myself! If it was a pack of 6-month-old hot dogs, he could have found it if it was encased in lead and buried deep in a salt mine!

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