Member-only story
IT’S TIME
You Cannot Dance to the Kitchen Timer
You can’t even hum along to it. It’s not music.
My wife takes her Omeprazole pill every morning. She is supposed to wait half an hour after that pill before eating, so she sets the kitchen timer for thirty minutes.
I’ve been up for hours before this and have usually finished most of my chores. Once she’s up and about, I’ll go in to make our bed and, if my schedule says it’s time, I might dust the room or vacuum while I’m there. While I’m doing this, her timer is running.
Sometimes I’ll still be at the other end of the house when it reaches the end. It will then begin its monotonous chiming. Ding. Ding. Ding.
It pauses between each ding just long enough to almost make you forget about it. I’m sure someone did research to determine the pause that would make the chimes the most difficult to ignore.
My wife apparently does not notice. She blithely continues whatever she is doing and ignores the damn timer telling her that it’s time to eat. I don’t mean that she doesn’t hear it; when I have happened to be in the kitchen at these moments, I have seen her pick up the breakfast muffin that I put out for her hours earlier. She knows that it is time to eat; she just doesn’t care that the bell is chiming.
