The Ambassador from the Planet Aphasia

Today was get-out-of-the-house day. We've been snow bound. Oh, not really but it makes a better story than saying we had no place to go since Friday. Today was different. We had a mission. We had to get haircuts and lunch and visit the bookstore before they were tempted to take us off their speed dialer.

After our haircuts, we were in Cracker Barrel waiting for our chicken fried chicken and biscuits when over the sound system came a guy vocalizing, "I've got spurs that jingle, jangle, jingle as I go ridin' merrily along and they sing, oh, aren't you glad you're single and that song ain't so very far from wrong."

"Don," I asked my husband, "Is that Bill Wills singing?"

"Late, late night. Girl, girl, boy," he answered.

"Okay," I thought, "what does that mean on the Planet Aphasia?" Will someone tell me why it takes fifteen minutes to translate something like that? But it did finally come to me. Don's enigmatic reply was telling me that the cowboy singing was Tex Ritter. It's really quite cleaver how he can find ways to communicate with so few words at his disposal. 3's Company comes on TV late at night and John Ritter (plus two girls) starred in the show, and John was the son of Tex Ritter. This is what it's like living with my husband's language disorders, aphasia and apraxia; he speaks in aphasic tongue and I translate it into earth English. It's daily, mental gymnastics.

After we got our coats on to leave the Cracker Barrel, Don did one of his famous 'roll ups' to our restaurant mate's table. "Handicapped. Six---no. Five---no. Four! Vegetable," he said as an introduction.

I quickly translated: "My husband had a stroke four and a half years ago and we were told that he'd be nothing more than a vegetable."

"You sure fooled them," the woman beamed and Don beamed right back at her.

"GM. Snowplow," Don replied and I translated: "My husband worked at GM and had a commercial parking lot maintenance business on the side. He was a workaholic."