I think it’s over.
I am bummed.
But I try to keep my chin up, spin the positive and move forward. Move on. Change is inevitable. And constant. The ebb and flow of a life lived. And despite the finality some change brings, life will certainly move on. And I’ll be there with it.
I fell yesterday. Not in one of those cool, slapstick type of falls that has you bumbling and stumbling ten or twenty feet and then eventually losing it spraying arms and legs in every direction as you land in a humiliated heap. It wasn’t even one of those “ooh” falls. You know, where everyone who happens to witness the event immediately and uncontrollably lets out an “ooh!” because they know from the reverberating thud that, “that had to hurt.”
It was humiliating all right, but no one saw it. It was humiliating because it was one of those slow motion, old man falls. No grace. Uncontrolled but stiff. It played out like an embarrassing stop action scene and what seemed to take minutes was in actuality over in a few seconds.
The phone rang about 12:45. This is not particularly significant for our phone typically rings throughout the course of the day. It’s but one of the many ways that we keep in touch with the world around us. So the phone ringing at 12:45 caused little reaction in me other than the immediate thought that I should answer it.
A quick glance at the caller id told me it was my mother-in-law. Again, no significant reaction. I talk to my mother-in-law on a daily basis. I figured that she was probably calling to let me know she would be bringing the kids home from school. In fact, I may have uttered a tiny, “Sweet!” just before I answered.
“Hey, Ed. Where are the twins?”
“They’re right here with me. Eating lunch. Why?”
“Weren’t they supposed to start school today?”
“No. They start on Friday. They may start on Thursday but the teacher said she would call if that’s the case.”
“Well, I just talked to their teacher and she’s looking for them.”
“Why?!”
“She said she e-mailed you. Said they could start today and be here all week.”
“Great.”
So it seems that I forgot to send the twins to school.
On their first day!!
So on a hugely monumental milestone in the lives of my kids, a day they have been anticipating since the last day of preschool in May, a day they have anticipated even more because their older brother and sisters have been going to school for two weeks, on the first day of school —–
I forgot to send them.
Nice!
That Parent of the Year contest is pretty much a landslide in my favor.
I have 20 tons of gravel sitting in my front yard. Check that. I have 20 tons of worthless gravel sitting in my front yard. Never mind how it got there.
I also have this cistern at the back of my house. Check that. I have a worthless cistern at the back of my house. I’m pretty sure I know how it got there. It’s obsolescence has made it worthless.
I shall add it to the list of worthless things I have presently laying about my yard. For some reason, I shall call it lunacy, I decided that the worthless gravel in my front yard could have value, worth if you will.
I decided that the twenty tons of worthless gravel in my front yard would make for a perfect filler to the worthless cistern in the back of my house.
And so I commenced to filling the wheel barrow, one shovel at a time, on average 20 per load, and carting the said worthless gravel from the front of my yard to the worthless cistern in the back of my house.
Dig, shovel, empty, cart, tip and repeat.
Many times.
The worthless cistern in the back of my house is massive. It’s cavernous, really. It seemingly has no bottom. The many trips that I have made to the back of my yard dumping wheel barrows full of worthless gravel into the hole at its opening have only made me sore. I literally have nothing more significant to show for three solid hours of back breaking shoveling and carting worthless gravel.
Unless you call the blisters on my hands and a noticeable stoop something to show for my work.
I have 19 tons of worthless gravel sitting in my front yard. and there’s a very real possibility that it’s going to be there for quite some time.
In the immortal words of Rip Van Winkle, “What’d I miss?”
Two months seems like twenty years. Longer, really. I had no intentions of a layoff. No grand scheme to stop the chronicles. There was no clever, well thought out plan to rejuvenate tired old bones. It just worked out that way. (Of course, it didn’t help that I had no desire to write either.)
