There’s an old saying which goes, “if you don’t have your health, you have nothing!” And that is very true. One can have all the money in the world and all the status they could’ve wished for, but unless they’re in good shape physically and mentally then they really have nothing.

When Alice was told of this saying once, she really took it to heart. In fact, she went to the extreme. So much so, that she eventually became paranoid. The worst thing one can do when they develop paranoia, is to look up the definition on the internet, you know, the purveyor of everything censored. Anyway, Alice loved to work from home. She worked in a bubble literally, that she disinfected herself personally, because she did not trust a service to come in and do that for her. She was afraid that the people who did the job, would bring germs in with them. So no, she had to do it herself.

Now one would think that Alice would be unmarried and lived alone in a house somewhere in the middle of some marshland, where the only way in would be by helicopter or hovercraft. Nothing could be further from the truth. In fact, Alice lived in a high rise building on the 90th floor in the middle of a grand Metropolis, with its screaming police and ambulance sirens and noisy traffic. Alice was also married and married to a man who had to deal with her paranoia as it became worse by the day. TV was banned in the home, because the news was a great deliverer of all things negative. But Alice had three wonderful children. Two girls and a boy. Asher, Justine and Lisa. And the three of them were very close in age. In fact, so close that people would not be mistaken if they felt they were triplets, because in fact they were. They nearly all looked the same. Dressed the same. Went to the same school and were in the same class. It was a headache for the teacher who had difficulty at the best of times differentiating between all three, even the boy. Asher, sometimes just to confuse the teacher, would wear pants and a shirt of the same colour and fashion as his sisters. All three children were very close to each other emotionally as well. They liked the same foods and as there was no TV in the home, they read the same books, especially series. They had all started three different series, a day behind the rest and then swapped books as they finished one. When the last book in the series was finished, they would start another series and so life went on in the Garner home unabated.

The father was probably the most normal of the entire family or at least he was, when they first got married. However, as the years went on, according to his friends who diminished as the years went on, he became less and less normal. Until one day, when Stuart went to the local pub to drown his worries, he found that none of his friends there recognised him. In fact, they had decided to disown him because as he drank his beer, his hand would decidedly shake.

“How are you, Stu?” they would ask, though less and less as time went on. In the days of old he would smile gleefully and pronounce that he was doing really, really, well. But as the years passed, so did his humour, which ultimately gave a new meaning to the word deadpan. Stuart or Stu, as his friends used to call him, used to be a very funny guy. People especially those he went to school with, loved being around him. They could count on a very lively and humorous evening when they were in his company. But as the years progressed, the evenings became dreary and while he was at the pub drowning his sorrows, they showed up to just drown themselves.

Times were getting bad for Stuart. His friends tried to buck him up, but instead he would bring them down. The pub didn’t mind, because their beer sales went through the roof in proportion to the misery he levelled on his friends. At the end of the night the publican would wish Stuart and his friends a very good night and make them promise they would return soon. In fact, the very next evening if at all possible. Things just weren’t going well in the Garner household either. Alice had reached a point where she didn’t kiss her husband when he came home, at least not until he took off all his clothes in the mudroom, where he would throw them into the washing machine and then run upstairs and have a shower. This was mandated, whether the kids were home or not. To her credit, Alice did not subject her three children to that level of daily humiliation. But they did have to go through the same procedure upon re-entry to the house, just that they undressed in their rooms. The dog and yes, they did have a dog and yes, the dog became more and more paranoid as the years went on. But the dog being an animal was not accorded the same level of humiliation as the other members of the family. In fact, Bernadette, that was the dog’s name, was subjected to a new and lower level of humiliation. She went to the bathroom on the balcony. She did not go downstairs like most normal dogs. There was a tub placed outside for her and a treadmill which she was taught to operate, so she could take herself for walks. What went through her mind each time she was let back in and then had to jump into a tub filled with Clorox, was beyond belief. Poor Bernadette.

And so life each day became more and more paranoid, all because Alice the mother, the wife, the matriarch of the family, was getting more and more worse. Finally, it was Stuart who had had enough when he returned one evening from having a very lonely pint at the local pub, The Bull and Calf. He came indoors, gave his wife a kiss on her lips and remarked, “wow is that what a kiss feels like?” and sat down on the carpet which had recently been vacuumed for the tenth time that day. Then he called Bernadette over. At first, the dog was unresponsive as she had no idea what that meant. Then she began to make a move towards her master and then froze when it suddenly dawned on her that if she did something wrong, she might be thrown off the balcony. She had heard from others in the family say that she would end up looking like strawberry jam on the pavement some 90 floors below. But Stuart kept calling her and then she finally came over. “Wow!” she thought to herself, “so that’s what it feels like to be petted,” and threw caution to the wind. She lay on her back wiggling this way and that, to the horror of Alice who had to take some of her medicine when she saw the dog depositing large quantities of her fur on the just vacuumed carpet. Hearing all the noise in their three bedrooms, the three children not knowing what it was, because joy was something that was in short supply in that household, came out and were amazed by what they saw. They immediately joined in the fun as Alice took another one of her thousand pills and collapsed in her office chair. Then something happened which caused the Garner family to become normal for the first time since Alice and Stuart were married twenty five years ago. The father, the husband and the patriarch of the family, went over to his wife and ignoring all her pleas, pulled her down onto the floor. Soon there was a pile of fun-loving husband and wife and children and dog all rolled up in one big ball of laughter and fur. And then it was dinner time.

“Take out?” asked Stuart.

“Chinese for the New Year,” said the children, while Alice was the last to give her consent.

It has been said, that if one were to walk past the home of the Garners, on the 90th floor of the highest high rise in the grand Metropolis, you will hear nothing but laughter and screams of joy which will put a smile on your face. Any fear or bad things you may have encountered at work will evaporate, and you will walk by and say to yourself, “silly, silly, people. I just wish I could be more like them!”