Endless

My sister and I took the kids for a walk last night, like we have most evenings in the last couple of years, weather permitting. We usually make a big lap around town, sometimes stopping to do a quick errand along the way.

So last night we stopped at the library and horsed around there for a while. By the time we rounded everyone up and moved on down the street to Dairy Mart, I was pretty sure we’d been walking for about five hours.

We ran into a very nice older gentleman we know at DM; I was in line behind him for about three hours while some tattoo-neck bought $800 worth of Pick Three tickets…I’m pretty sure he played every possible combination of numbers in the universe.

I started telling Sis a story when we were still about fifty miles from home that got interrupted probably forty thousand times by picking flowers and answering questions and soothing the baby and talking to neighbors and retrieving fallen flip-flops.

As we trudged uphill toward home I realized that I hadn’t finished my story. But I couldn’t remember what in the heck I’d been talking about. “I know I was in the middle of a story, but what was it about?” I asked her.

“I don’t know,” she said. “I can’t seem to remember.” We thought about it for a while. “Was it something about work?” she asked.

“No, I’m pretty sure it wasn’t about work.” We thought about it some more. Still nothing.

“Jesus Christ,” I said, “How painfully boring must a story be when neither the person telling it nor the person listening to it can even frickin' remember it?”

Then we thought about that for a while.

“What time is it, anyway?” I asked.

“Midnight?” she guessed.