What a Mess

      Okay, today it's definitely about one problem with Being Old.  Day started well, Sunday paper (read in bed of course) carries a cryptogram, a simple substitution crypt that provides one of the most pleasant five or ten minutes of the week.  And I’d slept well, which otoh makes walking particularly difficult, so I decided to postpone breakfast until after a hot bath.  Put up half a dozen eggs to boil, off to the tub where the book rack on the bath tray held a half-finished new novel about Alma (Mahler Gropius Werfel).  What followed is partly the fault of  Being Old, but also attributable to a concentration problem I remember from when I was Young – it particularly disturbed my mother that when reading, I heard nothing, not even someone calling my name.  I have even used reading as an anesthetic upon occasion, specifically during childbirth. 

      So I’m reading and relaxing and nothing hurts, when I hear a loud thump.  One part of my mind wanders off into how the house makes odd noises, but they’re only scary at night, and promptly back to Alma’s amorous adventures with the geniuses.  (genii?)  A few minutes later, another thump.  Maybe they’re doing something outside?  But – as Jane Austen wrote in Northanger Abbey – I can see  by the telltale compression of the pages before me that we are all hastening together toward the end of the book.  Running from the Nazis, why are they lingering in Lisbon?  Not many pages left for them to get to Hollywood and Franz hasn’t even started to write The Song of Bernadette yet.  So I pay only scant attention to those thumps, though in the back of my mind I’m idly wondering why the house still smells of – well, it must be last night’s cooking.

 

       You’re right – it was those eggs.  They’ve exploded all the way in to the livingroom. 

        Nor – full disclosure – is this the first time it’s happened.