All ability to concentrate or be a normal human being evaporates when my husband eats cold cereal. He makes an enormous amount of noise. Annoying nerve-wrecking noise. I’m pretty certain he does it on purpose. But not so sure because I’ve noticed every other person in the world does the same thing. Spoon goes to the Corelle bowl, spoon clacks bowl, spoon picks up cereal with milk in it, and is lifted to mouth. Repeat until units are gone.

The sound of his spoon banging on the bowl, however, amplifies in my brain 4000 fold. I should perform a comparison analysis to confirm my hunch that my husband spoon-to-bowl ratio is excessive.  I’d swear, when the cereal is gone, he continues clacking the bowl with the spoon, actually thinking he is picking up drops of milk. I want to yell, “Lift the bowl to your mouth and slurp.”

To my own fault, I prefer quiet. Exaggerating noises annoy me, but usually when I hear them in public, it’s fine, because I don’t have to live with the noise maker. But, I choose to live with my husband. And after days like yesterday, I am again reminded that the amount of annoyance caused by my husband has yet to supersede the amount of thankfulness I feel when with my husband.

I was out on the job, getting stories. I ride my bike to save on gas. When in a town almost 40 miles away from home, I noticed my back bike tire went flat. I mooched a phone and tried calling my husband, for over an hour. The phone owner and I talked, and I liked her so it wasn’t terrible waiting.

But, my husband never answered the phone. I didn’t leave a message because he doesn’t know how to listen to messages. Annoyed? Sort of, but it’s not the same as listening to clacking spoon on bowl. I’m more annoyed with myself. Where did I ride to pick up glass? Why don’t I have AAA?

Some guys tried to fix the tire but it didn’t work. The seam had a leak. Even though the guys pumped up the tire for me, there was no way I was going to try to make it home before it went flat again. The guys felt bad for me and even joked that my husband will be annoyed with me.

In desperation I call Marie. She took 2 hours out of her afternoon to drive and pick me up and take me home. My husband was home. In fact, he was in the garage and had just fixed the back tire on his motorcycle, which is the same style of bike as mine. I told him what happened and he looked at his bike and started taking the back tire off.

After I’d eaten some watermelon and cookies, my husband and I got in the car, with the motorcycle tire off his bike, and headed to my bike. It was our Saturday evening date, we told one another.

Watching my husband fix my bike displaces the annoyance that creeps up when he is eating cold cereal. He simply fixed my tire, un-annoyed. He started the bike up and checked the brake before letting me ride my bike home through the woods.