Forgot Who?

Forgot Who?

               Stephen slammed his hand on his desktop after seeing his Facebook page. The base of this thumb caught the keyboard, and it did a clockwise flip before it slammed to the floor. Stephen didn’t even notice it, his disheartenment at what he had seen on his computer screen had completely monopolized his mind. With his arms raised directly above him and with his hands juxtaposed in a bewildered horizontal manner, he yelled out, “I didn’t get even one ‘Like’? NOT ONE,” he bellowed even louder.

               Before he could seat himself back into his desk chair, his wife burst through his office door, “What…what…what is going on?” she screeched.

               With his open palm held out toward his computer he replied in a slightly decreased volume, “I didn’t even get one ‘Like’ on Facebook for my cartoon. Can you believe that?”

               After erasing the horrified look off of her face and replacing it with one that was an obvious depiction of disgruntlement, she asked sighingly, “What are you talking about?”

               “What am I talking about? Are you kidding me? I showed you this cartoon I drew yesterday, and I told you I was going to post it on the internet.”

               “No, I’m not kidding you, and to answer your next question, no I don’t remember you talking about a cartoon.”

               After lowering his head for a brief moment, and shaking his head slowly, Stephen raised his eyes to look directly at his wife, “You don’t remember anything I say or do. Maybe I should introduce myself. As he stuck his hand toward his wife, he mockingly stated, “Hi, my name is Stephen. I am your husband and have been so for the past twenty-six years.”

               “Ha, ha,” she replied slowly and facetiously, “but you are wrong about that last part. We’ve been married twenty-six million years,” accentuating the ‘million’.

               “Hilarious, but I don’t blame you for not remembering the cartoon I drew, nobody remembers anything I do…or even that I am alive.”

               “Oh, cry me a river please Stephen, just show me the cartoon again. I’m sure I will remember it.”

               “It’s right here on the screen,” pointing to his computer. “See the guy holding these street signs that he had pulled out of the ground and stole them. Then the police officer confronts him, and the guy says…well you can see it right there.”

               Doris bent down to look at the screen and then immediately straightened up, “I don’t have my glasses, I can’t see it.” Then, with slight smirk she added, “You see, you see… I don’t remember a lot of things, it’s not just things about you that I forget.”

               “I can attest to that, except your glasses are right there on that chain around your neck. That chain I bought you. Here we go, again, one more example of how no one remembers what I do, not even my wife of twenty-six million years.”

               Before Stephen could finish his rant, Doris had thrust her glasses on and leaned down to look at the screen again. “I don’t get it,” she said as she took her glasses back off and stood up and started to pivot in order to walk back out the door.

               While grabbing her arm to keep her from leaving he retorted, “Wait a minute, we watched that World Series together. We talked about it at the time. You have to remember that.”

               After bending her head down and looking at him with raised and smoldering eyes she replied, “Why would someone remember watching something that someone made them watch?”

               “Never mind Doris, just forget it, you will anyway. It’s time for my daily call to MLB.”

               Doris had already made a step toward the door, but stopped in midstride and turned her head to look back at her husband. “You don’t have to try to disguise it by using initials. Who are you calling, what’s her full name. I deserve to know that.”

               “It’s not a her, MLB stands for Major League Baseball, I’m calling the radio baseball show on satellite radio. I do every day, and of course you don’t remember that either.”

               Doris smiled, “You are smart Stephen, you have an excuse for everything. Just tell Mary, or Margaret, or whoever it is that I said hello.” While keeping her sarcastic grin on her face she sauntered through the door.

               Stephen plopped back down into his office chair and then scooted to the right side of his desk where his land-line phone was located. After swiftly punching in the numbers, he was immediately put on hold, but he could hear the radio show on the phone. His heart was pounding by the time he was brought on the air, because the hosts on the show had spent the entire time talking about the Yankees. Stephen hated the Yankees on a nuclear level.

               When the show’s host, Bob, answered his call, Bob announced, “Next, we have Stephen from Arkansas on the line. What do you want to talk about today Stephen, I’m guessing it’s the Cardinals, right?”

               “No Charlie, I may live in Arkansas, but that doesn’t mean I have to be a Cardinals fan. I’m a Red Sox guy. You should know that, I call you every day and talk about the Sox. You don’t remember that?”

               “Of course I do, who does not know the Red Sox.”

               “No, not the Red Sox, don’t you remember me you idiot?” The only response Stephen got was a dial tone.

               After placing the phone back in the charger, he slowly stood up and walked dejectedly to the living room. Doris was sitting on the left side of the couch and drinking coffee. She was watching QVC. “Oh my lord,” he muttered, “bankruptcy here we come, my wife is on QVC again.”

               His depressed state of mind was suddenly jolted awake when he heard the QVC host on the TV say, “Well, surprise everyone, we have Doris on the line again. It’s so good to hear from you again, how’s Fluffy, your little kitty?”

               Stephen’s jaw dropped to a new low, “They know her and everything about her, but nobody remembers me,” he said to himself, and then added after a short hesitation, “I’ll bet though, that they remember my credit card number.”

               Doris was on the phone for just a couple of minutes, he couldn’t hear what she was saying, but she saw the QVC host pick up one of the maroon-colored blazers and waved it back and forth to the camera. Stephen sighed softly while visualizing all the other blazers she already has in her closet.

               After she hung up, Stephen quietly stepped around the side of the couch so that Doris could see him coming. “Shopping again? You know I heard our UPS delivery person cussing while he was bringing all your stuff up to the porch.”

               “I’m not the one with the problem Stephen, so get off your high horse.”

               “What are you talking about my little hoarder? I’m not…”

               Doris cut him off brusquely, “I just got off the phone a few minutes ago with our daughter.”

               “What was she wanting? Let me guess, she is wanting to borrow your QVC card.”

               “No! Didn’t I tell you to get off your high horse? You are the one with the problem. She told me what happened last weekend when Mitchell, our grandson, came to visit. She said that you grabbed his cell phone and put it in a box and put it on top of the refrigerator so he couldn’t get it. She said he was crying his eyes out. How could you be so mean to your own grandson?”

               “What? He was crying about that? A stupid phone?”

               “Phones aren’t stupid, they are fun for kids. He said you stole it from his hand and then said mean things to him.”

               “No, no, no. I wasn’t mean. I was being a grandfather. I did what his parents should be doing to him. He spends all his time on that stupid phone. The two of us were sitting here at the kitchen table and he was looking down to his phone and playing with it the whole time. I tried to talk to him, but he wouldn’t even lift his eyes up from the phone to look at me. So, I did grab it, and I said to him, ‘I would give anything in the world to spend five more minutes with my grandfather, and yet you are he with me and you are playing on this stupid phone.’ So I grabbed a little box and a magic marker, and I wrote on the box, ‘Cell Jail,’ I put the phone in the box and put it on top of the refrigerator. I told him his phone is being held in contempt of court until it’s time for him to go back home.”

               “Well, we have decided that our daughter and grandchildren are going to come up here this weekend and we are going to have an intercession with you. You obviously need help, so we’re going to have this come to Jesus moment.”

               Before Stephen could snap out of his confoundment, Doris jumped up and walked into the bedroom and shut the door.

               She wasn’t kidding, their daughter, Jasmine and her three children showed up at their house on Friday night at around 7pm. They wasted little time, mother and daughter ordered him to sit in his recliner and they all picked up chairs from around the dining room table and placed them in a row in front of him.

               Jasmine started first, “Dad, you have been having trouble with your temper for a while, and I think we all know why.”

               “Please tell me because I have no clue what you are talking about,” Stephen replied while leaning forward to the crowd in front of him.

               “Well, honey,” his wife blurted, “we are not against you, we’re on your side, but we see this change in your character, and it’s disturbing to all of us.”

               “So, you want me to get off the meth?”

               Jasmine stepped in and took the lead, “Don’t be silly dad, we know that you would never do anything like that. We believe that your change in personality is due…” His daughter took a long pause while keeping eye contact.

               “Go on Jasmine, tell me, I can take it. I know I don’t do anything right.”

               Jasmine jumped back in, “That right there, that’s what we think is going on with you. Your feelings are so easily hurt. All the time, you are on edge and looking for things to get upset about.”

               “Well, little girl, you would too if you were in my shoes. Nobody notices anything that I do.” Stephen started raising his voice, “NO BOD EEE! I never hear any of you, or anyone else, mention anything that I have done. I’m a ghost, nobody notices me or what I’ve done. Everyone just zones in on themselves.”

               “That’s not true grandpa,” Sherill, his oldest granddaughter shot back. “I remember a lot of stuff that you have done.”

               “Oh yeah? Name one little girl, name one.”

               “I remember that time you were teaching Bible class in church and you were talking about how Abraham had some tents, but when you said it, it came out ‘Abraham had some tits.”

               “Don’t you go telling that story little girl!” Stephen shouted while pointing and shaking his finger at his granddaughter, “That was a mistake, an embarrassing mistake, I’ll never live that down.”

               “No, the whole church laughs about that all the time,” his wife added. “But I do remember the time you were working in the hospital, you’ve told us this story, and you walked into this room that had a frail, bald-headed person laying in the hospital bed and a middle-aged woman was sitting in the chair next to the bed. You then asked the woman if the patient was her father, and she said no. You were then embarrassed, and then said, “Oh, I’m sorry, is it your husband? She then said no, this was her mother. That was so funny.”

               “I have been working in the medical field for twenty-five years and that’s what you remember?”

               “I got one dad,” his daughter chimed in. “I remember something you did. Do you remember that time you just got off work and just as you passed the onramp from downtown Little Rock, the Secret Service cut off all traffic behind you so President Bill Clinton could get on the freeway, and when you saw this in your rearview mirror you slowed your car down to, like 20 miles per hour, and then the secret service came up to you with their sirens on and pulled you over. You were late getting home by over an hour.”

               While everyone was laughing, except Stephen, Mitchell jumped in smiling, “How about that time you went to this funeral and it was raining. You said there was no room for you to sit, so you stood on the side of the grave with your back against the tent. Then there was a great big wind that pushed you and you fell into the open grave. Now, that was funny.”

               While the were busy laughing and trying to think of other similar incidents, Stephen lowered his head and said softly, “So, that’s all you can remember about me, is my flub-ups. My legacy is idiotcy.”                               

               “No, dad, no. It’s pronounced idiocy, not idiotcy.” Everyone broke out into an even higher level of boisterous hilarity.