Chivalry Is Not Dead– If You’re a CD Player

One time, I woke up in the middle of the night with a terrible charlie horse. Art and I had been married slightly less than two years, and of course I couldn’t let him lie there in peaceful sleep while my leg was having contractions to rival those neat ones they call “transitional labor.” I sat in bed moaning and griping until I woke him up enough to realize he had to go to the bathroom. He left me there in all my agony, rubbing my calf and crying.

I decided maybe I should “walk it out,” so I got out of bed and limped around to our bedroom door.

And then I passed out.

Seriously.

One minute I was standing in the doorway of our bedroom and the next I was laying on my stomach across the doorway of the bathroom. I can’t have been out for more than a few seconds, because Art was still in the bathroom when I came to. I was so confused, but slowly my groggy mind figured out what had happened.

In falling I had knocked the top of a CD player that was there on the floor, and it had popped up.

My arm had hit the corner of a piece of furniture and had a gash in it.

And I was still lying there on the floor when Art came out of the bathroom.

“I think I fainted,” I mumbled.

And my chivalrous, loving husband leaned over, patted me on the head, shut the CD player, and went back to bed.

Ah, romance.