Ronnie Achieves

Ronnie was on the phone with Babe when it happened. Babe was talking and the achievement happened while it was Babe’s turn to talk. Ronnie quietly achieved this, and then the next thing she said, when Babe had finished, was this:

“I did something spectacular just then. Do you want to hear about it? Do you want to hear the spectacular thing that I just did?”

It must be admitted that Ronnie said this with some degree of withering sarcasm and the words were laden with meaning behind the actual question of whether Babe wanted to hear what had just happened in the room that Ronnie was in. In the repetition of the word spectacular we can interpret a certain cynical assessment of the gap in spectacularity between the things that Babe was doing and the things that Ronnie herself was doing. Also by pressing the question, “Do you want to hear?” Ronnie is laying the blame on, laying the onus on, with a trowel.

“I was standing here watching the baby. She had just dumped ice water down her front and it got in her diaper and made her understandably irritated,” said Ronnie with the air of someone embarking on a breathless crescendo, “So she was without her diaper and she’s way way over there across the room, looking out the window, right? And I saw a poop coming down, unfurling itself if you can imagine it. Right away I didn’t know what the poop was,” said Ronnie, maintaining her absolutely mouthwatering sarcasm, and practically biting each word down its bird spine as it came out of her egg mouth, “But then I figured it out! And I actually was able, with my good abilities, I was able to grab a diaper and capture that poop, before it hit the carpet, which is ivory, and unforgiving, and here I am wiping up the baby and giving her a new diaper, and that, my friend, is amazing.”

Babe probably made applauding noises or said uncomfortably that it was amazing. Who cares. The point is that Ronnie was dangling over the depths, and I don’t mean of profundity, I mean a real personal cravasse.