I just can't laugh

The other day, I successfully vacuumed up a sock. Twice.

With good intentions, I was helping with the housework (for once) and merrily vacuuming along. Toward the end of my adventure, I entered the laundry room and sought out my nemesis - dust bunnies. Between the wall and the dryer, one lone sock lay nearly hidden. I reached in with my hose, thinking I'd grab it and I'd be on my way, ever the hero for having found the mate to one of the many singles we seem to have collected. Instead, as the Hoover over-zealously laid hold, I saw it disappear before my eyes.

Now, I'm a reasonable man... I did the only logical thing I could do. I held the end of the hose up to my eye to take a peek. With only darkness staring back at me, I shut the machine off and tore it open to reveal the bag inside. I managed to get it off without getting dust and who-knows-what-else all over the floor, or me - and there it was, the lonely sock, having ridden the miniature rollercoaster landing softly into the pile of dirt inside the bag, inside the vacuum.

I gingerly reached in, pinched it out with one hand while putting the vacuum back together with the other. As the gunk clung to the sock I did what any reasonable man would do... I flipped the switch and held my trusty hose up to the filthy sock.

Now, every once in a while you hear of people describing cataclysmic events as if everything were happening in slow motion. That every minute detail is noticed and recorded in the brain in high definition. Not for me, not this time. In what can only be described as the blink of an eye, the present tense of holding a sock quickly became the past tense of having held a sock.

I'm still waiting for the realization, as you have probably already come to, that the sock wasn't really all that important - certainly not important enough to get upset over - and because I'm still waiting... I just can't laugh. Yet.

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