Irony Can Be So Ironic

So I’m at work. It’s toward the end of the day, it’s Senior Wednesday, which is always busy, so I’m tired and kinda bored. I’m standing next to my last show of the day, reading a book propped up on the trash can next to me.

Up walks this older woman. She’s one of the regulars at the theatre, though I don’t know her name and really don’t interact with her much. She looks at me and the first words out of her mouth are: “So I was at my catechism class this past week and we were writing letters to soldiers serving in Iraq.”

For a long second I feel like Dante in “Clerks II”…um, were we in the middle of a conversation I don’t remember leaving? This sentiment comes out of my mouth as, “Yeah?”

She continues, “Well, we’re writing these letters and I just don’t know what to write about. I mean, I just don’t know what to say. So I decide to say, hey, I go to this theatre in Maumee where the employees are all working so hard to get educated, that they’re always on the premises reading these big books, like the one you have there. And they’re all trying so hard to learn so much and improve themselves, and how good it is that they let you guys do that. That’s just great.”

She’s so nice and enthusiastic that I don’t point out a couple of things. The first is that I’m 29. I’m not exactly reading to “get educated,” since I’ve been out of school for years.

The second is that, seeing as how she wrote this letter because of a class at her church, it’s a pretty good thing she doesn’t ask me what book I was reading at that moment.

That’s right. “The God Delusion.”

I can just imagine the awkwardness of the next 30 seconds if I volunteered THAT little bit of information. “Uh, yeah. It’s, um, science fiction.” Hey, from her perspective, that might very well be true.