Mind over matters that may or may not matter

It has been said not violence but silence that kills a marriage.

One really wonders. Take for instance the couple, Mr. Freddie & Mrs Fannie Sitput. They have been married for years, double the total of your fingers and toes together and yet you'll fall short by a toe or two.

This couple over the years while they sipped their morning coffee slipped into a state where there was no need for spontaneous, sustained,audible conversation.

A word, a comment, a smile, a sour face, a casual remark from one and the two minds, Freddie mind and Fannie mind in tandem would take over from there on. Just the way the hybrid Toyota with fluid ease engages from gasoline to battery and back to gasoline without a fuss, nary a pause.

While the Freddie & Fannie bodies sat in pregnant silence their two minds would aggressively argue. Dissent. Agree. Disagree. Agree to disagree for the time being. "Time out" one mind would say to the other. "Let's defer this for another day."

Just then there would be another innocuous comment, " Wonder it's going to rain today?" and right away the two minds would once again be locked in conference, combat, hand to hand, banter, and after a few cart-wheels and calisthenics there will be a meeting of the two minds.

Any spectator watching these two, Buddha-like, bodies in stasis, minds in perpetual motion would be deceived.

" Look at them " he would comment, "They barely talk."

Little would he know the couple is exhausted. Their minds have traveled up and down, back and forth and in circles covering politics, parenting, children, grand children, the work place highs and lows and much more.

Little do these neophytes realize that the minds of this couple over three score years and ten have plumbed each other's soul so thoroughly and for so long that their reactions have become as predictable and real as their punctuated heavy breathing and perennial coughing. Like the denuding rain forest of the Amazon or the diminishing oil reserve of Saudi Arabia there is little now left to be tapped.

Freddie pushes his chair back, empty coffee cup in hand...

Fannie remarks, "I suppose you are going to the patio to smoke your cigar."

"I'll soon join you" she says.

K.B.Chandra Raj.