The older I get, the more I talk - or so I've been told.
By this, I do not mean to suggest I have become a brilliant conversationalist at work or on the bus or at a cocktail soiree.
It all comes down to the shower.
"Who were you talking to just now?" asks the husband, pretty much every time I emerge from the bathroom with a towel around my torso.
"What do you mean?" I ask.
"You were yakking it up pretty good in there," he says. "Aren't you aware that you're talking to yourself?"
Come to think of it, I am, more and more.
Increasingly, it will dawn on me that I am doing something, while washing the hair, that I did not do when I was 15 or 25 or even 45: carrying on a conversation with an invisible person you name it, a co-worker, a buddy, a woman who works at the grocery store - who happens not to be in the bathroom.
"This Saturday won't work," I will find myself saying. "We're going to a dinner party at Jim and Dana's, and we committed ages ago. Is the following week a possibility?"
I will be saying this in response, oh, to the old friend from high school who will have just asked me (only in my imagination) if I'd like to take in a play.
Funny thing about the shower. These conversations - or should I say, non-conversations - will not take place when I am preparing dinner in the kitchen or ironing shirts in the laundry room or watching the news in the den.
The water has to be running. I have to be in my birthday suit and standing inside the shower.
"Wow," said my husband the other day. "You were getting pretty animated in there just now. What on earth were you talking about?"
I began to dry my hair. "Not 100-per-cent sure," I said. "But I think I was talking to this woman who works at the lunch counter near my office. I think I was telling her that the bacon in her BLTs isn't crispy enough. And then she got really belligerent and told me that if I didn't like her BLTs, I should take my business to McDonald's."
"Wow," said the husband. "That's weird."
Indeed, it is. But I do know that the older I get, the more loquacious I become.
In 10 years, for all I know, I will be debating the merits of solar-powered energy. In 20, for all I know, I will be delivering a state-of-the-nation address inside the House of Commons.
Oh, well. I can't seem to stop the chatter, any more than I can stop the clock from advancing.
And anyway, a girl's gotta say what a girl's gotta say. I can't help it if no one talks back.
