Final Stand At Fort Surrender

Jacob's Ladder-- Henry Blake




The Thought For Today:

About the most originality that any writer can hope to achieve honestly is to steal with good judgment. -- Henry Wheeler Shaw (Josh Billings)




The little woman is starting to worry me. Oh, her physical health is fine as far as I can ascertain, but her mental state seems to be exhibiting some signs that the train might just be starting to slip the track.

This morning I got up when the alarm went off, just like I do every morning, but today Louise wasn't in bed. Well, there are certainly reasons why she might have already gotten up, but she hadn't mentioned anything before retiring the previous evening so I was a bit taken aback.

I checked the bathroom and she wasn't in there, so I proceeded out into the living room. No lights were on, but I got the feeling that someone was in there, so I softly called out, "Weezie, where are you?"

"I'm out here... " The voice came from the direction of the kitchen, but it too was darker than the pits of Hades. I flicked the light switch and the kitchen was suddenly bathed in the yellow glow of 75 watts of incandescence, but still no sight of Louise. I proceeded out into the laundry room and found her sitting on top of the clothes dryer, both her hands wrapped around a mug of hot chocolate and staring out the small window of our back door.

"What's up?"

She stared at my face as though trying to assess its suitability for some future project, her eyes questioning and piercing. "Bob, I died in my dream last night."

Oh, Lord... here we go...

"Dang, honey, I wouldn't pay too much attention to that, I die in my dreams at least a couple of times every week and I still wake up every morning just like you did. If it means anything at all, I think it just means we could stand to lay off the Twinkies right before bed."

She sipped her cocoa and looked up at me again. "Well, I'm not worrying about the dying part... it was the rest of the dream."

Now it was my turn to stare. "I know that very shortly I'm going to hate myself for asking, but what happened?"

The woman got a strange, dreamy look on her face, as though she were actually revisiting the scene. "I was standing at the Pearly Gates and St. Peter met me and led me down a golden street, just as I had always been taught, but then he took me to a large field of beautiful flowers. In the middle of the field, there was a ladder extending as far as the eye could see into the sky. Handing me a piece of chalk, he explained that I must write one of my life's sins on each rung and continue to climb to Paradise."

I have to give her some credit... she has one great imagination. "Well, I'm sure that you must have had a few small sins that you could record, didn't you?"

"Yea, but that's where the strange part started, Bob... I was standing on the second rung examining my conscience, when I looked up and saw you crawling back down!"

I scratched my chin at this point, not really wanting to know, but unable to stop myself from asking, "I was coming back down? What for, pray tell?"

Thats when she got that look in her eyes. "That's what I asked you, Bubba. You said you needed to come back down and grab another box of chalk."

Then she started to laugh; not a polite chuckle or a garden-variety titter, either. Oh, no... this was the full-out, 50-megaton, batten-down-the-hatches horse laugh! She damn near fell off the dryer she was laughing so hard.

It wasn't necessary to say anything else, not that it would have been possible to actually speak to her at that point. By the time I'd finished my shower and gotten dressed, she'd calmed down some, but she avoided eye contact with me, and evidently the act of waving good-bye at the front door is now enough to re-create the entire scene, because as I closed the door I heard sounds that I'd never before heard coming from my wife!


I still trying to decide whether to be relieved or offended.