A Pleasant Evening at Home

SCENE: We’re sitting at the dining room table. Bill’s putting together a LEGO model of the Space Station, and I am pretending to get some writing done. The dogs are snoozing in the next room. One of them is doing tiny sleep-woofs.

“Little in the middle,” Bill said slowly, apropos of nothing. “But she’s got much back.”

“Skittles in the middle,” I replied. We often start out our gentle little rhyming games this way, entirely out of the blue.

“Brittle in the middle. Because she has osteoporosis.”

“Brittle in the middle…but she’s got a humpback.”

“Just like you!”

“I have a humpback?”

“You’re at risk for osteoporosis.”

“Oh. I am! Women over thirty really have to watch their backs.”

“The back bones are the first to go.”

“It’s really a nightmare disease when you think about it.”

“Your bones just…go bad.”

“They dissolve inside of you…”

“But you get new ones.”

“No, Bill. No, you don’t.”

“They don’t grow back? Are you sure?”

“You’re thinking of teeth.” I tapped my front tooth with my fingernail. “It’s two sets of teeth, one set of bones.”

“Are you sure? How many do you have?”

“Two hundred and six.”

(I’m only realizing now that he may have meant how many teeth, not how many bones.)

“Really?” he said skeptically.

“Really. Two hundred six bones.”

He tilted his head smarmily. “I don’t know about that. You can’t believe everything you read on the internet.”

“I didn’t read about it on the internet. I learned it in a song in second grade.”

“That is the standard of trustworthy information,” he said, nodding solemnly. “Learning about it in a song in second grade.”

After some time when the only sound was my furiously typing out this conversation, he made a comment about the texture that LEGO gave to the model. “It’s neat,” he said.

“That is neat,” I agreed, giving a very good impression of someone who had been listening all along.

“You know what’s not neat?” He looked up at me, as serious as I’ve ever seen him. “Osteoporosis. The silent killer.”