Pliabilities

Scrambling

It was a bad day all around and nothing she did made a dent in her gloomy mood. When she was told she had a phone call she wanted to banish it to voice mail, but she answered it anyway.

"Listen, I'm really scrambling," was how her customer, a stranger, began the phone conversation. They'd never spoken before and she hadn't caught his name. He said he was frazzled and when she offered condolences he declared them unnecessary. "It's a condition I was born into. I'm permanently frazzled." She detected a rambling tense quality wafting from his voice, which added to her own tension. He insisted she understand this wasn't situational. To illustrate, he said, "It's so bad they let me hide my own Easter eggs!"

"Do you find them all?" she asked but he wasn't listening. He was scrambling.

She wasn't able to help him and this frustrated her even more. Just before he hung up she asked again, "Do you find them all? The eggs, I mean."

"No," he said, his voice punctuated by a sudden lighthearted mirth that was palpable. "That's why they let me hide them." In the moment his voice lifted and the laughter melted the tension between them. His feathery thanks tickled through to her belly, and her mood soared higher than it had all day.

She hadn't given the call a second thought until a salesman walked into her office declaring he had an ulcer in his brain. When she told him the story she noted how quickly the shared laughter transformed his mood. It was then she knew she'd been touched by an angel through a stranger on the telephone, scrambling.