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here’s a short and sweet story from the LOL list.

my parents have been married for almost 37 years, and as you might imagine, they often understand each other’s thoughts without needing to express them. like many couples who’ve been together for decades, they’ve developed an intuitive sense for each other that surpasses words.

and then there are the times that words seem to be the barrier to communication.

several years ago my mother was packing some clothes into a garment bag and realized she could not hold the bag and reach the zipper to close it at the same time. so she did what any wife would do in that situation. no, not hang it from a door frame…borrow your husband’s arm, of course!

“honey, would you please hold this?” she asked, and my dad reached out to oblige.

“high,” my mother instructed, trying to straighten out the zipper at the bottom of the bag so it would slide upward. she was surprised when he didn’t lift the bag higher, and so mom said again, “high!” still, the bag remained at the same level.

what changed was the expression on my father’s face: from slightly confused to completely bewildered. still bent down and fighting with the zipper, my mom was becoming impatient. “HIGH!!” she insisted more emphatically, thinking he must not have heard the simple request. when there was still no upward shift of the garment bag, mom looked up to see an obviously baffled man.

dad, realizing that she was not talking to herself and he had no choice but to respond, said simply, “hi.”

as promised, here is the first installment from the “laugh out loud” list, for your amusement.

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if you’re like so many of us in this mobile-device driven era we live in, you depend on your cell phone for many functions, including the role of alarm clock. my husband and i both rely on our phones to stir us from slumber each morning. (we each set our own and snooze individually, even when we are getting up at the same time.)

there are certain drawbacks to assigning your phone wake-up duty (oops* i left my phone on silent after that meeting yesterday and didn’t hear the alarm this morning…), causing us to repeatedly vow to buy a real alarm clock–which has yet to happen.

a few months after we were married, we both got new phones to replace the archaic models we had been carrying for so long. this was followed by the natural adjustment period while we learned the new menus and operations, as well as tried out all the possible rings for calls, mail, messages, and of course, alarms.

it seemed like we each had a different alarm sound each morning, because all the built-in ring tones are so horrible that either one or the other of us could not stand the racket in our first waking moments. (“that’s the worst sound ever, you have to change that.”) but the trouble with frequently changing ring tones is that neither of us could recognize our own alarm. each morning our bedroom was a cacophony of polyphonic screeching and cries of “turn that off already!” followed by “that’s your alarm!”

this confusion was compounded by the steep learning curve involved in adapting to our new smart phones, with chat-style text messaging and applications that can send you notifications at any hour. occasionally my phone would erupt shrilly in the dead of night with an automatic update or unsolicited message and lee would express his sleepy exasperation at my inconsiderate phone etiquette.

one night it was his phone that so rudely interrupted our sleep, and although i was not happy to be awake, i took small pleasure in being able to say “SEE! now it’s your phone!” he mumbled an excuse about how it was probably important and rolled over to assess the offending message. a few key punches later we were both on our way to snoozing peacefully again. but mere seconds passed before my phone was dancing noisily across the bedside table. as lee groaned and asked in frustration “who could that possibly be?” i stared at the screen with bewilderment and indignation.

“it’s YOU!” i exclaimed, thrusting the phone in his direction so he could view the message of nonsensical gibberish he had crafted just moments before. our mutual irritation melted into delirious laughter as the full realization of what had happened sank in. and when we woke in the morning to the raucous little devices, it prompted groggy giggles rather than annoyed grumbling.

we’ve both moved on to newer and fancier mobile phones since then, and have become much more cell-savvy. but we still remember the incoherent reply lee sent when he accidentally opened our text chat that night in his sleepy stupor: “il slus acid.”  how eloquent.

* word choices have been softened to keep this blog family-friendly. no one says “oops” when they realize they’ve overslept.

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