Laughing While Bathing

This morning as he trimmed his beard in the shower, Head Chef buckled forward just a bit and made a loud, “Oh!” sound. Razor in hand with his back to me, I couldn’t tell if he’d cut himself, had an epiphany, or been punched in the stomach.

When I realized that I had not punched him and no one else was there, I narrowed the options to cutting or epiphany.

“Are you OK?” I asked. He started to chuckle.

“Oh, my god, yes. I just remembered that I talked to my mother yesterday,” he said with a smile in his voice.

I didn’t know why his sudden remembrance of a conversation with his mother would cause such a confusing pain-like sound. From my perspective, she's just a wonderful in-law. About as good as one could hope for, certainly. And she says some funny, funny things. When she walks around something, she’s walking the parameter, not the perimeter. She warshes her dishes in the zinc. Other people are specific, but she’s very Pacific. And, according to her, the native Australians are Aberneeshuns.

“I was talking to Mom,” he continued, “and … oh, I don’t remember what we were talking about, but I said - Oh, I remember now, we were talking about the new cabinets, and the holes at the top that we have to fill before we can cover them – and I said that they were ‘pukas’ without even thinking about it.”

A puka, in local parlance, is a hole. Any sort of hole – in a boat, in the ground, in the top of a cabinet.

“And so,” he said, “she starts giving me crap about saying ‘puka’ ‘cause she doesn’t know what it is. So when I told her, she’s all, ‘Oh, what, so you’re so local you’re speaking Chicken now?’”

Standing there in the shower, we both burst into laughter. Through his own laughs and over mine, he exclaimed, “So I said, ‘Mom! It’s not Chicken! It’s Pidgin!’” And we laughed some more.

Hell

When I came to work today I must have gotten off the elevator at Hell instead of floor 21.

In this conservative and stuffy financial office, there are children. Two, I believe, though it's hard to tell since they move so quickly and make so much noise relative to their size. They are running, screaming, and throwing things.

I was on the phone with a client, and one of them crash-landed itself noisily under my desk. Trying very hard to focus on what the person on the other end of the line was saying, I plugged my finger into my other ear and trained my brain on his words. But the shrieks of evil laughter and glee from under my desk would not be ignored. Another adult - perhaps the one responsible for delivering these little devils to our quiet workplace - appeared behind me pleading "come out, he's on the phone" in hushed tones. She had to say it more than twice. I never looked at her, for I could not have looked kindly.

This is not my work. It looks like work, but it's been inhabited by child-sized demons and we do not have those at my work. They would exist in Hell, but not here.

I think I may get my things and go back to the elevator.