my Mike

After I told my friend Lydia about the time Mike devised his own salad spinner (wash lettuce, wrap it tightly in clean dish towel, go outside and swing the whole business in circles above your head. Clever, but I think we scare the neighbors enough as is), she told me I should really start a whole new category of posts devoted to Mike's...idiosyncrasies. Among his many and diverse talents, he's a very intelligent creative thinker that has an odd sense of humor and problems with authority. This leads to interesting and, very frequently, funny situations chez Fallacy.

Today, I called up the stairs to figure out why Mike hadn't left for his walk yet. He said, "Oh, I'm having a wrestle with the kitten."

I headed up to the bedroom to see what was going on.

I found Mike, not kitten wrestling, but laying on his stomach on the bed, clutching a pillow. "Are you okay?" I asked.

He answered nonchalantly. "Yeah, sure. I'm just laying here."

Mmmhmm. Laying there, acting really weird. "But, are you okay?" I asked again.

"Yep," he said, still not moving.

I stood in the doorway, staring at him still not moving. He continued to clutch the pillow beneath him.

Mike's lips tend to go white when he's in pain, a dead giveaway. I asked again, patiently. "Are you okay?"

He 'fessed up. "I hurt my back."

Ah-ha.

The most extreme example of this Mike behavior was the time before we were married that he turned white as a sheet, was asked if he was okay (he said yes, naturally) and then proceeded to drive himself to the hospital to be treated for what turned out to be a kidney stone. He didn't call me until the next afternoon and promptly caught hell. He has gotten a lot better since then but we have agreed, just today, after almost 9 years of marriage, that from now on I will ask, all in one breath, "Areyouokay?Areyouokay?Areyouokay?" (3 seems to be the required number of inquiries) and he will then produce an honest answer to save me the worry.