OK, I’m just gonna do this.
Out of the sick bed and back on the keys.

I’ve been struggling with THE FLU since the first day of December.
That means I’ve been sick since LAST YEAR.

I spent a lot of time just lying in bed waiting to get better and thinking.
On the more miserable days, I thought about some of the miserable things that have gone on in my life.
And on the better days when I thought maybe I was gonna live, I thought of some of the oh so many ridiculous things that have transpired in my crazy life.

Today on our way to the super market my husband said a one-liner to me.
Know what I mean?
One of those things that you share with someone because of something that happened once upon a time and it left you with a forever one-liner about it?
Something you share with someone else and all you have to say is the one-liner and you both crack up?
That kind of thing.

Well, he said the one-liner.
I looked at him with a goof-ball look and well, we both cracked up.

This one-liner came about just a few years ago when we were still in our sixth decade of life, real close to our seventh…..holding on to the sixth by the tips of our fingernails.

We decided (like we’ve done numerous other times in our life) to join a gym and get physical, maybe stave-off the oldness crap that seems to come with the seventh decade.
Maybe if we worked out at the gym, when we entered that seventh number, maybe we’d still look and feel like the sixth number.
Maybe somebody would guess we were sixty-nine instead of seventy?
Could happen, you know!

So, off to the gym we went.
The young man (a stretch of the word) who greeted us looked like maybe he was twelve!

He got excited, two new members!

He invited us into his little cubicle and we sat across from him as his fingers began punching away at the keys.

There were two things going on; the twelve year old was asking his questions and typing in our answers and the two of us were “playing” with him giving some ridiculous answers to the oh so boring questions. (Kinda like when you go to a new doc and they hand you about 6 sheets of health questions to answer and one of them is “are you pregnant?”….duh, ya twice this past year!)

Seemed like we sat there forever while he entered the info and then of course pushed the wrong button and “oops folks, we gotta start all over.”

We planned the rest of our day while we sat and waited…..
Wanna go shopping? YES!
Where should we eat lunch? HMMM!
Wanna stay and work-out? NAH, not today, let’s start maybe tomorrow and we began to laugh both kinda knowing this gym attempt wasn’t gonna last.

And then the twelve year old delivered the one-liner that we’ve never forgotten…..
He stopped typing, looked over at us while we were teasing back and forth and with a huge smile on his face he said………..
“I’ll be you two were really cute…..ONCE.”

“ONCE? You don’t think we’re cute now?” and he stuttered and stammered.
“Um, ya, ya…that’s not what I meant, you’re cute now.”

“So, cute enough that we don’t need to belong to a gym?”

“No, no,” still stuttering and tripping over his words. “No, you should still join the gym.”

“So, will we get cuter if we join the gym?”

“Ya, ya, you’ll get cuter.”

And then, I gotta give him credit. He was trapped and he just stopped.
“I’m sorry folks, honestly I didn’t mean it that way. It came out wrong.”

“Honeyboy,” I said. “You’re adorable right now and if one day way down your road, some VERY young person looks over at you and delivers that one-liner to you, just smile and remember that ONCE you were really cute too.”