Just a true vignette. My friend Jenny was outside Harrod's when an IRA bomb went off, and they called her work contact number, and I went to make sure she was OK.

She was very cross about the whole thing, after she stopped being scared shitless.

Down the Cardiac Care hallway towards Hubby's room. The door is open, but the room's dark. Maybe he's asleep.

In other rooms monitors beep, oxygen feeds hiss, the evening TV news speaks. The sounds fade as I approach his door. Nothing from his room. Not the triple-beep of the blood oxygen sensor announcing a drop, nor his sleepy swearing as the alarm wakes him and reminds him to breathe. Not the steady beep that tracks his heartbeat.

Freshly made bed. Faintest rush of air from the ceiling vent.

"Where is he?" I snap at the nurse.

She cringes. "He went for a walk."

Oh, good one.

Too many fucking times I've made that walk down that hall. The nurses recognize me. At least half the time Hubby's gone AWOL.

Nice, Connie.

At some point, I think it would be interesting to have a drabble based on spam. For example, I just got spam with this subject line: "fairy cigars of 5882."

Silence is a gift to my mother, a relief from a busy day of noise and kids. But it makes me uncomfortable.Meditation was hard to learn at first because the mental chatter and commercial jingles overwhelmed any attempt at quiet contemplation for about three months. There are few feelings lower than lying about your meditation experience, but I would, rather than admit that my brain sang commercial jingles from twenty years ago to itself. When things are too quiet, I find myself busy with thoughts I’d rather avoid. I don’t know why...it’s not as though I have a tortured past.

I'm laughing about the fact that I suggested this drabble topic and now haven't a clue what to write.

erika, you just made me think of a guy named Brian Evans, a Mormon lawyer I knew (he came out here to be junior partner in the regulatory law firm I worked for when I first came back to the States).

He was not yet thirty, he had five kids, plus his wife was a musician. Their house was never quiet.

And he once admitted that he was terrified of silence. I remember that once, his wife Terry and all five spawn were visiting her grandmother, sicknes or something, for a week. And Brian admitted that every night, when he got home from work, he would turn on appliances, radio, TV, anything at all, so that he didn't have to listen to his own thoughts, in all that silence.

Personally? I like silence. But like you, I have trouble with deep meditation. I don't hold still very easily. Neither does my mind.

I've gotten better at it, but I'm not a born contemplater, for sure.

[not a drabble; just me shooting off my mouth....]

I can't stand silence when I'm with another person. By myself, I'm cool with silence. But even with people who I'm close with, I can't abide silence. I interpret it as a sure sign we've run out of things to talk about and therefore the friendship is over, because how lame would a silent friendship be? (The silent Marx brother would have driven me INSANE. The episode of Northern Exposure where the weird circus comes to town, and the silent dude falls in love with Marilyn? Creeped me out. Silent Bob? Way too disconcerting.)

Either that, or I interpret silence from another person as a sure sign that they hate me and are cold-shouldering me.

These are totally my issues, I realize, and pretty classic ACOA traits.

When I was a kid, some book I read had the narrator saying, about her best friend, "We didn't say much, but that was okay, because friends can be quiet together." I freely admit that I have never, not even at the age of 33, understood that concept.