Three Beeps

I nuked something this morning in the microwave. When it announced, “Done”, with five beeps, I responded by pressing the cancel button three times.

Thinking back with a smile, I remembered how I developed that habit. Those ‘three beeps’ are supposed to be for good luck. I first did it in the 1980s when we lived on Okinawa when we bought our first microwave. I started to nuke something but canceled it, inadvertently pressing the button three times.

Later, I had a good day. When I remembered that the next morning, I thought, I’m going to keep doing this, because maybe those three beeps brought me luck.

It’s all fiction. I did hit the cancel button three times today and smiled, wondering if it would bring me good luck, and then I made up the rest.

It’s Tuesday

Coffee smells landed. I breathed it in.

The barista greeted me from the counter, “Hey, Michael.”

“Hi, Natalie.” I slid my payment over as she wrote up my order.

“How’s it going?” she asked.

An espresso machine hissed. I shrugged. “It’s Tuesday, isn’t it.”

She nodded. Natalie loves shouting with a big, lovely grin, “It’s Tuesday, innit?”

Today, she said, “Just two days in and it’s already a burden.”

I smiled. “Too true.”

Natalie began entering the order into the register.

“You have my Co-op number?” I asked.

Her emerald eyes widened. “Five nine nine six?”

Classic rock spilled out of the speakers.

“Bingo,” I shouted.

Natalie and I laughed like maniacs.

“It’s Tuesday, innit?” I asked.

Natalie bent over in laughter. “It’s Tuesday, innit?”

The Distance

This is a playing around piece. Over on Linda G. Hill’s blog via Laura’s WTFAIOA site, we’re all invited to write a non-edited stream of consciousness thing prompted by ‘distance’. So here we are. It was fun.

The distance doesn’t start or end, it’s just there with a space between us as we flash down the road, close and far apart as ever, going again to a place we were before hoping it’s the same place even while we seek something different. We travel the same distance when we talk about her mother and my mom and people we’ve known and what was done when. The drive ends as it began with a sense of wonder what’s going on and an expectation that somehow, this changes things. Sometimes it does but mostly, we are here again, pacing the distance, measuring it for curtains, prowling it at night.

The New Music

The exercise instructor had used new music for the class. Beginning the cool down session, she asked her students, “What did you think of that music?”

An older woman in the front row yelled, “More cowbell.”

The class lost it.

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