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The
whole house was sick with the flu and my husband was the worst off. He
had gone up to bed at 8 pm, feverish and shivering. I felt pretty bad
myself and had fallen into a heavy sleep not much later. It was at about
quarter to two when suddenly I heard, "Wake up... honey...wake
up," he said shaking my shoulder repeatedly.
"Huh?
What?" I awoke groggy, panicked and fearing the worst.
This was one of those moments that a split second felt like an eternity
and thoughts of death, doom and destruction flickered through my head
like a crazed firefly.
"There’s...a…a,"
he started.
"WHAT?
WHAT?" I screamed in my head waiting for the other shoe to drop.
Why was it people always give you bad news slowly, I anguished.
"A...possum...
playing...the...piano," he said very quietly, apparently trying not
to wake the kids. I stared blankly at his face like I had just been
called upon in school. I let the words sink into my brain.
"Oh
cripes," I thought. He’s delirious with fever.
Not
liking my lack of response, he said it again, this time more
insistently. "COME ON! He’s playing the piano downstairs!"
Now I was truly getting scared. I wondered if I should take him to the
emergency room. I would have to wake the kids and get them dressed. It
was chilly outside. How could I explain to the doctors that his thinking
isn’t REALLY that confused, I mean living with a rehabilitator and
all. The bathroom light was on and I could see he looked pitiful, all
pasty white and hair disheveled. Still I stared at him and said nothing.
I was making plans in my head for the imminent car ride.
"Didn’t
you hear him?" he questioned.
"WHAT?"
I snapped, now annoyed with his obvious lack of cold medication or too
much thereof.
"I’m
not kidding, come on hurry up!" he said seriously and left the
room. I fumbled for my glasses and negotiated the stairs at a rapid pace
after him. I was afraid he would fall down the stairs or something. But
there he stood at the base pointing. I scanned the living room. There it
was. One opossum caught red-handed standing posed on our piano keys. A
piano possum of sorts. My husband stood there silently reveling in his
sanity. As my mind raced through the animal database of current
residents; hawk, mouse, opossum, I found what I was looking for.
"Uh Oh," I thought, "One must have gotten
through the window." Presently there were six going through boot
camp in a large outdoor cage right outside our living room, as they were
preparing for release to the outdoors in the next couple of weeks.
How
the heck could one get in here?
I
wondered to myself if I was going to find a broken window or a hole
chewed through the wall somehow. Instead of doing anything useful, I
burst into a hysterical fit of laughter and said, "Where’s my
camera?" I have to take a picture of this, people think I make this
stuff up. I left the room quickly to retrieve a camera. I didn’t know
how the little beast could have gotten in here and said so out loud. I
was thinking that this would help reduce blame later, when someone
(I really don’t like to mention any names) was feeling better and
would be irritated with the fact that there was actually an opossum
playing our piano. "Don’t you have more downstairs," he
asked. It was then I realized that the opossum standing on my piano was
not one from outside,
but one of three new recruits that had been admitted for round two of
boot camp. This was not good. I grabbed the one off the piano as he made
an attempt to drop off the end and I ran down the stairs to the
basement. There I nearly tripped over another one. He hissed at me and I
grabbed him by the back of the tail and in a swooping action swung him
to my sweatshirt-covered arm. I put them both back into their hutch; the
hutch I had not flipped the slide lock all the way down on. There was
one still AWOL. I made a valiant search until laughter once again hit
me. My face contorted from uncontrollable laughter, fit for a person
near hysteria. Tears had filled my eyes and my sides hurt, which put a
stop to my search. I made my way back upstairs, scouring the way for the
missing one as I went. I made my way
back to the couch where my husband had made up his bed.
"Did
you find the other ones," he demanded.
"No,
only one," I sighed.
"Freaking
Beethoven," he muttered. With that, I then broke again into such an
uncontrollable fit, that I could barely speak the words, "Don’t
you see the humor in this?"
"No,
all I see is an opossum on the piano," he said calmly.
"Come
on, this IS funny, I thought you had broken into a horrible fever and
were hallucinating or something!"
At
that thought he admitted a slight grin and shrugged, "Actually, he
was playing the scales pretty good. He obviously was either enjoying
himself or couldn’t get down because he was going back and forth and
woke me up. I thought it was the stupid cat."
Oh
man, I had forgotten about the cat. I went back downstairs and put out a
trap plate of food to save Mr. AWOL from becoming a meal. Sure enough,
within 20 minutes the last little bugger came out for grub. As I
replaced him with the others, Billy Joel as I now dubbed him, he put his
chubby little opossum fingers in the way of the door. "Careful
there piano man, I warned, or you’ll never play piano again!"
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The
Hallucinating Husband