Galvin crop

She was on the couch, in the midst of her 10-minutes respite with a warm compress over her eyes, when the question emerged.

“Why do some people,” she asked, “have to use so many words when they have nothing to say?”

The sincerity was the funny part, given who she married. Not a trace of irony.

To be fair, she wasn’t (in that moment) talking about me. Rather, she was commenting on a caller rambling on to the host of the radio show we listen to each day as part of our morning rituals.

The caller was indeed rambling. Not only was there no point to his call, but it was filled with enough parapraxes, malaprops, and Bowdlerisms to make Norm Crosby sue for theft of intellectual property.

If he were still among the living. He isn’t … I checked.

I had heard her complaint without really hearing it — anyone with a significant other knows what I mean — and wasn’t really sure a response was required.

Besides, as I said, we were busy with our morning rituals. The radio show was on; the host having dismissed the incoherent caller rather abruptly. The television, muted, was set to the Golf Channel — where the players of the DP World Tour were competing (some, unflatteringly, in shorts) in the Singapore Open.

A load of towels and other pieces of what we call the “square load” were agitating — less agitated than the cat, who wanted attention — in the washer. Dishes were hitting the rinse cycle. A meat loaf, freshly prepared, was baking in the oven.

This was not, I found out much to my surprise, what I used to call “my mother’s meatloaf.”

I always had presumed it was, having shared the recipe my mother followed to make meat loaf for the years of my youth — a recipe, that is, I had clipped carefully from the pages of a Highlights magazine.

No, this meat loaf was straight from the kitchen of some false idol named Betty Crocker. I had been eating this version for 45 years under false pretenses, only now discovering the ruse. My own agitation could have been heightened if not for a couple of factors.

For one … well, it was meat loaf.

For another, my mind was occupied with a sundry of other important matters, all crammed together, jostling for first-and-foremost position.

I was puzzled over what category EAR, MAR, MER and SAT could fall under to complete my attempt to complete that day’s Connections puzzle. (Turns out each are the first three letters of the name of a planet — an answer which I took as a sign of the puzzle-maker mailing it in that day.)

I was trying to decide which chromatically coordinated clothes color I would put together for the day. (I went with gray, although for a while I was strongly leaning toward grey.)

As this was going on, I attempted to remember whether I had taken my morning allotment of seven meds and vitamins. (The empty pill container was no help; for all I knew, it could have been sitting empty on the side table since I had taken my evening allotment of six meds and vitamins.)

If this wasn’t enough, I was dealing with an earworm of Ryan Gosling’s Oscar-ceremony performance of “I’m Just Ken,” which more than a week later had yet to slither off to some remote pink crevasse in my hippocampus.

Mostly, I didn’t feel the Kenergy to write a column. This has happened before, it will happen again.

Why do some people, she had asked, have to use so many words when they have nothing to say?

“Did you forget,” I answered, “how I make my living?”

Sometimes, I swear, it’s as though she doesn’t know me at all.