Run that by me again, please
I was in my parents' room, just hanging out with them and generally having a good time. Yesterday's freeze had thawed quite a bit, which meant that my mom was actually talking to me. I looked over at her and saw her scratching her back, which made my back itch. I can't ever watch another person scratch their back without feeling a corresponding itch in my own back; in a previous life, I was cat. So I asked my mom to scratch my back too, but she made me wait, more out of pure meanness than anything else. She finally started to scratch my back, but when she saw that it was making me feel better, she almost stopped, putting her fingers so lightly on my back that they might as well not have been there at all. At first I was confused as to why I couldn't feel anything anymore, but then I figured it out and told my mom that she was the worst. She just started to laugh at me.So I looked at her and said, "Just wait until you need a hearing aid. I'm going to make sure that dad always has fresh batteries, and then the two of us are going to have conversations and be laughing at you and you won't know what we're saying.*" I made eye contact with my dad, and we were cracking up, and my mother, who'd obviously missed the end of my promise, looked at both of us and said, "Say what?" And that was it, folks. My dad and I didn't stop laughing for the next two minutes, and my mom looked at us with genuine puzzlement and repeated, "But what did she say?" pretty regularly every time we'd nearly settled down, which just made us laugh even more.
*This might sound weird, but it makes sense in the context of my family; my brother and I, even as small, evil children, used to threaten our parents with hearing aids powered by dollar-store batteries and/or placement in large, badly run nursing homes in their dotage, unless they catered to our increasingly ridiculous demands. To my recollection, they never caved, but we all continue to laugh at this little family joke.
