The Hall of Lame

I don't mean to be disrespectful. Which of course means I'm about to start a prolonged harangue concerning a sensitive subject.

Today I heard one of the most Jeff Foxworthy here's-your-sign-deserving statements ever. Imagine a quiet lunch table, missing some of the regulars, a couple of new faces in attendance. As a courtesy, one of the regulars pointed out that the break room harbored a plethora of donuts, left over from Absent Regular's mother's funeral. To which a new face replied, "Oh, did Absent Regular's mother pass away?"

Sigh.

Even I, with my cold, cold heart, could not retort, "No. She had the funeral just in case."

Surely, New Face knew what she had done, the instant it was out of her mouth. I'm hoping. Because if ever a statement needed walking back, that one did.

It needed to be walked back like a petulant child to the car, after tossing a fit in the Walmart toy aisle. It needed to be reeled in like a sparkling, spiny-backed, iridescent sun perch chomping on the last shred of worm, pulling the red-and-white bobber under the sun-dappled surface. It needed to be retrieved like a Flintstone lunch box containing an uneaten tuna salad sandwich, forgotten in the classroom on a Friday afternoon. It needed to be recaptured, like a cat let out of the bag in a endangered-species mouse sanctuary.

But New Face let it go. To live forever in Val's Hall of Lame.