Why don’t you come up and see me gum time?

We’ve established that bizarre stuff happens to me all of the time.  What you may not know is that this unique talent is not indigenous to Colorado, and in fact follows me wherever I go.

We were in New York City a few weeks ago when it struck.  Correction: we weren’t actually in the city – we were waiting in line to board the ferry which would take us from the Statue of Liberty to Ellis Island – when it struck.  And STUCK.

I was looking at my watch to see if we were “on track” with our sight-seeing.  You do that too, right?  Sight-seeing is stressful and you have to fit it all in in the allotted time.  So you gotta make sure you’re at certain places at certain times.  Otherwise you’ll fall behind in your sight-seeing and you won’t see all the sights.  There may even be yelling.  Hey!  Yew lookin’ at me?  YEW LOOKIN’ AT ME?!  Don’t look at me that way.  You know you do it too.   

Hubby, the kids and I are standing in a sea of humanity, it’s about a million smoggy, muggy degrees and some folks in said sea haven’t discovered the modern miracle of deodorant yet.  In addition, we’re all lined up in the most disorderly, someone’s-gonna-get-shived-any-second-now sort of line.  I’ve got my arm crooked, watch at waist-level.  When from out of nowhere a piece of chewed gum lands on my watch.  It happened so quickly that at first I thought the gum…somehow…SPRANG out of my watch.  Oh look, Kids!  It’s GUM TIME!!!  CONGA!!!  Dun-dun-dun-dun-duhn-DUH! 

Hubby has been expecting Gum Time for our entire married life so wasn’t surprised when it happened and didn’t flinch or look away.  He witnessed the whole thing.  He looks at the gum, looks at me (like it’s MY fault?  ‘Cause it’s NOT!  I was just STANDING here WONDERING WHAT TIME IT WAS!  It’s not like I was shouting, “Hey!  Anyone got gum?!  My watch sure could use some GUM.  So if anyone’s got gray, chewed gum, toss it on over here!!  Because according to my watch, it’s GUM TIME!”  CONGA!!!)

He looks one more time at my watch, shakes his head, then moves away.  Just quietly slips through the crowd away from me.  Sonny is still staring at me open-mouthed-with-gagging-noises-coming-out while Sissy has had the presence of mind to begin looking around for the perpetrator.  (She suspected the culprits were a one-year-old and a three-year-old acting silly in a double stroller.  But I’m not so sure…)  so they missed Hubby moving away from us; I had to tell the kids to hurry and follow Dad!

When we caught up to him (I didn’t care where he went, I just needed the banana peel he was holding to pull the ABC gum off my watch, don’t ask) I wondered aloud why he walked away like that.  His reply?  “In case there was more gum comin’, I didn’t want any part of it.”

Hmmm.  Fair enough.