Apropos of Nothing

Emily and I have decided that the phrase "apropos of nothing" would be the perfect epitaph for her tombstone. Don't get me wrong, I am not hastening her to the grave. In fact, my plan is to be long gone and recycled into soylent green by the time she even catches a cold.

And beside all that, we both want to be cremated, not buried. All this is beside the point, though. The point is that Emily has a personal style of communication that confuses and befuddles me sometimes. Hand on heart, it befuddles me all the time. Well, not all the time, but more than some of the time. Much of the time? Often times? See, even I'm confused now.

Here is an exchange from last night as close to verbatim as I can remember it:

Em "Did you get the e-mail your mom sent?"
Bill "No. Wait, when did she send it?"
Em (a little testy) "Bill, I had 62 e-mails, I don't know."
Bill (matching the testiness) "What was the e-mail about?"
Em "CHRISTMAS!" (she said as though I was privy to the conversation she was having with herself and just now let me in on.)
Bill "Oh. No. I didn't get it."

This is a typical exchange in our household. Em will ask me the vaguest of vague questions and it's my job to drill down to the actual answerable question that exists somewhere within the morass, like a needle in a haystack.

By the end, she feels I am being difficult and I feel like I'm stupid for not knowing the answer to her questions, like:
Em "Did I tell you what Jenny and I did on Friday?"
Bill "No."
Em "I thought I told you we went to Macy's and I got that deal on a dress for the Christmas party."
Bill "Oh, yeah, you did tell me that."
Em "So how come you just said I didn't?"
Bill "If you knew you told me, why did you just ask me again?"
Em "So I could tell you that..."

And then we get to the actual story.

Which for as vague as the question portion of the game is, lies in the starkest of stark contrast to the mind-numbingly excessive amount of minutiae that is to follow.

Em "While we were there, this girl was wearing this gingham shirt... Well, not really 'gingham', I guess, more of a sort of monochromatic plaid on twill. It was really nice, but it didn't fit her very well. She was kinda, pear shaped. She just got bigger the farther you went down.
"So, anyway, we were behind her on our way to look at the mens' store for you and we passed housewares. They have the blender I want on sale until Thanksgiving."
Bill "Uh, ok. Um, and what about the lady with the ginger swill?"
Em "What?"
Bill "The fat lady who you went in great detail of describing! You said you followed her to the housewares department."
Em "No, we were following her to the mens' store and stopped at housewares. Didn't you listen?"
Bill "Yes! What about the lady and the shirt?"
Em "Nothing. I just liked the shirt."

And scene.

I don't ask where to my hair went and where from the gray in my beard came. It's all right here in front of me.

She comes by it honestly. We all come by our foibles and idiosyncrasies honestly. In this case it is a direct DNA link to her father who obsesses over the smallest details of a story and never really gets anywhere. The one thing they have going for them is that they are both pretty entertaining and have good senses of humor, so there is a bit of a reward for your patience. And they both take my jesting with good humor when I point these things out.

I am one to talk. I will take a three minute story and turn it into a Homeric tale entirely out of scale with the reality of the situation. However, I do so in a calculated fashion that is meant to all tie together throughout. It's like a riff.

Maybe that's what it is supposed to be with Em. She is riffing with me; and I am just not in on the joke. Or maybe, since I tend to be pretty quiet around the house she forms her questions and stories this way in order to force my participation.

Maybe I will never know. But I have to go. Em just hollered from the other room that "the thing is blinking on the box again!" Only goodness knows what she's talking about this time.

By the way, I let Emily read this before I published it so she would know it's all in good fun. She laughed until her sides hurt. So don't go all Gloria Steinem, Gloria Allred, Glory-Glory-Hallelujah on me.