This weekend I ate breakfast with two cows. Not the moo kind, but humans of the female gender who are miserable and make it their mission to sour the air around everyone else in their orbit.
The occasion was the morning meal at a lovely B&B we were staying at. Sometimes you get lucky with your co-guests at B&Bs (and we had, the day before), while sometimes things go the other way. This breakfast things went the other way.
Craig and I sat down to the table with generosity in our hearts, warmed by the delicious sleep we had had in the gigantic bed of perfect firmness upstairs and by the fire cackling away just beside us. The forced, false expressions on the faces of two women already seated tempered our moods a little, but it took a few minutes to register how foul the women truly were.
Each took up different positions on the bovine spectrum: Cow #1 took up more oxygen than the room contained, preening and casting critical glances at me from her seat across the table. Cow #2 exuded insecurity and weakness, flinging herself awkwardly into the conversation the odd time her companion shut up for more than a nanosecond.
The cows reached a pinnacle of horridness during a conversation with one of our gracious hosts. Bob (let’s call him) was explaining the ordeal his partner Paul’s daughter-in-law had just undergone in delivering a little girl to the world. The mother was thirty-seven, and she was two weeks past her due date; there was also another complication that necessitated a course of drugs. As he was telling the story, he passed a few photos of the beautiful little girl who despite these complications, is doing just fine.
At which point the cows decided to proffer their judgments into the room:
Cow #1: “Thirty-seven!”
Cow #2: “Two weeks late, and DRUGS! Not good for the baby, not good at all.”
And then, the capper.
Cow #1 blurts out, “Did she go under the lights?”
Bob doesn’t understand. “Sorry?”
Cow #1 holds up one of the pictures, and exclaims “The baby. She’s YELLOW.”
I don’t remember what Bob said to this. When I cringe, sometimes my ears get all swollen and block out sound. I do know that I skulked off to the living room and found solace burying my head in the fur of one of Bob’s adorable but smelly dogs.
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