Monday, April 20, 2015
Today I am grateful for tall ladders. BEEP! Wait. Exactly 56 seconds. BEEP! Wait 56 seconds. BEEP! Repeat 500 times. Just outside our bedroom door. At midnight. After a long day of visiting “Europe”. . .all over Pennsylvania. Add a husband who, when it beeped a loud “I’m gonna die soon” warning a week ago said, “I’m not doing it now. I’m waiting until it gets annoying because it’s a pain in the ass to go up there and change it.”
“We” waited and it is. For me. Not for him. He sleeps, hearing-aids-out-deaf and doesn’t hear it. I shut the bedroom door. BEEP! I turn on the humidifier. BEEP! I turn up the TV. BEEP! I consider hauling out the tall ladder and dragging my sciatica-bulging vertebrate and a bursitis laden hip, up that sucker to change it myself. No way. It wasn’t MY procrastination. I won’t own this one. No matter how close we come to divorce.
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I poke him seconds before my eyes glow red and I’m puking green, with my head spinning around in circles. BEEP! I am not yet homicidal. Quite.
“Wha? Wha?” he still hasn’t heard a thing and is exhausted from having to talk and walk and be out and about all day long. BEEP!
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“You know that smoke detector that you said could wait until it gets annoying?. . .”
“Huh?”
“. . .Well surprise! It IS!
“Wha? I don’t hear it.” Really? BEEP!
“Of course you don’t hear it,” I’m shouting. . .but only because I know he can barely hear me. Honest. “Wait for it.” 56 second pause. BEEP! “Did you hear THAT?”
“Huh? No. Maybe the TV is too loud.”
“Yeah, well I hear it and I will not sleep a wink all night because I’ll be counting out 56 seconds waiting for the next damned BEEP!”
“Okay, okay, I’ll change it.”
Up he gets. Padding to the garage to get the tall ladder. I grab a flashlight. He goes to the basement to fetch the batteries he bought so he could change all of the smoke detectors when the time changed. A month ago. At least we had batteries or he would have been out to the all night Walgreens to find some. Usually he doesn’t pay attention to how he takes the old one out, but this time, in the middle of the night, he did, so the new one went in without having an attitude.
I know my lines here so I yammered about how incredibly stupid it was for the powers-that-be to put smoke detectors on a HIGH ceiling. . .in a 55 plus community. He knows his lines, too and said they had to be at the highest point for safety because smoke rises. My next line is, “I understand that, but is it safe for geezers to climb tall ladders for such a simple thing?” We have recited this script for over ten years. We’re good at it. He didn’t hear my lines anyway.
After the debacle, we move the ladder to the dining room so I will have some paint left on the walls. As he’s heading back to bed he says, “I think I’ll change the batteries in ALL of the smoke detectors tomorrow.” What a good idea. Why didn’t I think of that?
He was sleeping within 10 seconds of head-hitting-pillow. I was poised for the after-new-battery warning beeps. BEEP-BEEP! Wait for it! BEEP! Deep breathing. Watched some TV. Counted to 56 a few times. . .just in case. . .and. . .in my drifting-off exhaustion, praised the tall ladder. . .more than the sleeping procrastinator. No divorce. Dodged another one.
