Sometimes life is funnier than anything you could devise in your fiction. Following is a conversation between my daughter and me. I plan to use it in a longer piece when the time is right. Read on:

I was chatting with my daughter, Sarah, one afternoon. The conversation turned to one of her friends.

“So,“ I said. “How is Jessica?”

Sarah replied, “She’s pretty depressed.”

“Problems with her job?”

“She hates her job, but that’s normal for Jessica.”

“What else is bothering her?”

“She bought a pair of jeans last year and she can’t wear them.”

 “Why? Are they too small?” I kept boring down to get to the meat of the conversation.  Sometimes you have to be a communications engineer to excavate the point of a conversation with my daughter. After 17 years, I am a master at it.

“Yeah,” Sarah said. “She’s gaining weight again.”  Jessica had been at least 25 pounds overweight since junior high.

“I thought she was dieting,” I said.

“She is.”

 “Then why is she gaining weight?”

“It’s because she’s anorexic,” my daughter patiently explained to her dimwitted mother.

I was truly puzzled. “She’s gaining weight because she’s anorexic?”

“Well, yeah. But she’s not very good at it.”

Sometimes it doesn’t pay to ask.