Life Aboard the Titanic

The older I get, the less control I have over my odd musings and any inclination to suppress them. Also, my hearing is terrible. The good news is my husband Sam shares these deficits.  We spend our together time barking “what?” at each other and trying to decipher the other’s blather, which is indistinct and from an adjoining room and invariably me talking to myself or Sam talking to Charlie or me talking to Charlie or Sam talking to himself.

At first this situation struck me as alarming. Were we losing our minds? (Well, duh, but I mean precipitously, and in a way requiring a gerontologist’s intervention?).  Then, I reframed our garbled blahblahblahs and attendant how’s thats? as petty annoyances before working my way through acceptance and settling on something akin to affection.

We read the billboards aloud when we’re traveling along the highway, just as my father used to do, and my grandmother before that. Sam might respond to my “Are you talking to me?” with “No, I was just singing something. Did you ever notice how every Gordon Lightfoot song sounds the same, except for The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald?” and I might answer with something his cousin Larry famously said to his Uncle Jack in 1978 and before you know it, we’re laughing like idiots. 

I like to think of us as quirky sea co-captains who’ve decided they have the best ship in the world and they’re going down with it. Don’t get me wrong, we’re still totally into the voyage- more than ever, in fact- but the day the band starts playing “Nearer My God to Thee” I’ll ask, “wait, is that what I think it is?” and he’ll say “what?” And I’ll ask again, only more distinctly, and he’ll chuckle and say, “that’s what she said.” And even though it’s a challenge because we’re ancient and the ship is at a crazy angle, we’ll dance.