Charge!

To paraphrase Johnny Cochran,  if you make a mess, you must confess,

Why?  Because otherwise, your spouse may be tempted to start his own blog to rat you out.  I tell too many tales on Dearly Beloved to be able to keep this one a secret, so I’m going to spill my guts here.

Our garage is a tandem garage.  It holds two cars–one in front of the other.  One can’t be picky about which car to drive with a tandem garage.

DB, of course, IS picky.  He chooses to ride in the clean one, which is his.  Mine always has stuff “in transit”–library books, plastic bags, returns, etc ., so he usually moves my car out of the garage in order to get to his own.   That was what he planned to do last week when he looked on the shelf where we keep our car keys.

“Where are your car keys?  I don’t see either set.”

Hmmm.

I knew that one set was probably in the compartment between the front seats, where he sometimes puts them when he moves my car.  Fine.  We’d worry about the second set later.

He was back upstairs in a couple of minutes.

“I found both sets of keys.  Your other set was in the ignition which was still On, still in Drive,  with the emergency brake off.  And, oh yes… the battery is dead.”

Sort of like the Rapture had happened just as I pulled into the garage, only I got dropped pretty quickly.  Mistaken identity.

The last time I had driven the car was the previous day when I’d gone to the grocery store.

It started coming back to me.

I always have an audio book going when I’m in the car.  Sometimes I leave them there,  but if one is especially good, I bring it inside to listen while I’m cooking, or working on some project.  The current book was a good suspense novel, so I’d waited for the disc segment to finish, so I’d know where I was, to make it easy to pick it up at the same spot.  I’d listen while I was putting away the groceries.

Some audio books are divided into 3-minute segments, but this one went on and on.  I finally turned off the motor, not wanting to asphyxiate myself in the garage,  but left the key in On position so the CD would keep playing.  The segment must have lasted ten minutes.  Longer, apparently, than my train of thought.

I was listening impatiently, while thoughts of the ice cream, shrimp, milk, eggs, and other items warming in the back of the car began to fight for my attention.  As soon as the chapter ended,  I ejected the CD, and jumped out to begin unloading the groceries.

By the time I’d made three trips to lug all the groceries up the stairs and made a quick pit stop,  I’d long since forgotten that the car ignition was still on.  I put the groceries away.

After the discovery of my misdeed the next day, DB called our neighborhood auto repair guy, who came over immediately and charged the battery.  DB backed the car  out of the garage, but left the engine running to let the battery build up completely.

DB came inside to write the check to the auto shop.

“Now let’s see,”  he said thoughtfully, “what shall I put down as the reason for this check… ?  Battery Charge?   Dead Battery?   No, that doesn’t sound exactly right.”

He wrote  Uncharged Brain.

Later,  I asked him was I … um … declining.

“Goodness, no!” he assured me.  “You’re loopy, but you’ve always been loopy.   You’re just like you were when I married you.”

At my age, few things about me are unchanged.  Still loopy after all these years?

Music to my ears.