There it is again. Is that a chuckle? It's a slow Wednesday afternoon, and I'm studying some of my continuing education courses online in my office with the door closed. I prefer to work with the door shut due to the frequent drop in visits we have from customers. Although, if I'm with another customer, I want to protect their privacy as much as possible. I also think it is good practice to keep the door closed and the blinds drawn, so there is always a question of whether another person is in the office or not.
I'm sure someone is laughing in the outer office. I didn't hear the door open; however, when I get absorbed with something that requires thinking enough to answer questions to complete the assignment, I'm pretty good about tuning things out. The laugh is unique enough to make it through the mental barriers to my conscious mind.
The laugh itself isn't unique; it is simply out of place. Not that we don't laugh here in the office, it's just that it's rare to hear someone laughing by themselves. I press the pause button; besides, I need to stretch my legs for a minute. "What's so funny?" I ask as I emerge from my office. Donna, my branch manager, is sitting at her desk with her hands over her mouth, holding back another giggle and roll of laughter. "I'm just reading your blog," she says and laughs.
I'm speechless, "what? Which one?" My less-than-articulate response is betraying my ability to write coherent sentences probably. "Flying across America," she says. I laugh, too; yep, that was a fun one to write. My wife and I had been on our way to visit our new granddaughter in Minnesota, and the impatient grandmother kept the pedal to the medal as we drove from Utah to just outside Rochester, MN. She hadn't let me behind the wheel as I tend to stop and look at things. Unfortunately, the world's largest ball of string wasn't on the map; however, we did stop at Mount Rushmore. My beautiful wife had set some land speed records for that trip, and I wrote about it a couple of days later.
Most people refer to writing or doing anything better than we would generally as "being on a roll" or "in the zone." Isaac Asimov, the famous science fiction writer, called it "writing over my head." [1] In his book, "I, Asimov," which I had been reading on the trip, recalls several stories and passages that he found "hard to believe that I wrote it." I'm fortunate to have had similar feelings with a few of my blog stories. While they certainly will never be as good as Mr. Asimov's stories, there have been a few times when I've reread an article and thought wow, that's pretty good.
It was beautiful to hear someone else enjoying what I had put on paper, and I thanked her for the compliment. But, of course, having someone laugh at something you intended to be funny is the sincerest form of compliment.
Written October 11, 2022
References:
[1] I, Asimov (p. 249). Random House Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.