Just a dumb day

I couldn’t sleep last night. Who knows why? Just, sometimes, you can’t find the soft place – the place where you sink down and it swallows you. I keep landing on ledges – maybe because I have a yucky full physical scheduled today. Or because of the windshield. Things that are going to happen—they keep me just awake enough to know I’m not asleep.

So I got up at eleven fifteen (I know – you guys were still busy partying at eleven fifteen) and did my morning’s workout (save time – do it eight hours early). Seven hours of sleep – up at a good time – cool. Except sleep still didn’t come for a while, and in the morning, I was sluggish. I could hear G doing his workout—he runs for hours on the treadmill with the TV blasting. I almost slept through that – which is fairly unbalanced.

Then I remembered the windshield guy was coming between eight and one, and I had to get the horses out, then get them back in – no more than an hour on the grass. Too much spring grass, and you harvest a vet bill and maybe lose a horse. So I got up, and came almost awake somewhere along Center Street, heading west.

It was cold this morning, A little knife like. The pink snow was real now, lying in drifts all along the ill-kept front of my place. I parked, and climbed the fence and was halfway down the drive, shivering, when I realized that I could have driven in.

So the day started out stupid.

I knew it was Wednesday. Because I had the doctor’s appointment. Only because of that. On my way home, G called. The Suburban, which evidently has a bad heart, wouldn’t start. This massive vehicle—I mean, the thing can haul a five ton trailer with four full grown horses in it up a mountain—never gets used. We hide it from the sun in the garage, into which it fits the way a USB plug fits into the back of a computer. We had a real garage once, but that was before we bought Chaz a bunch of furniture for the household that didn’t happen, and the riding mower, and—you know—other stuff.

So I went home, and we sidled into the garage, got to the hood, and began to push the bear out. It really wasn’t that hard. We’d made about twelve inches progress when I set my foot against some cardboard conveniently and anciently put down to catch oil. When I shoved that time, the foot slipped and my head slammed down onto the hood, chin first, teeth through the top of my head. It wasn’t actually that bad – that sound of grating teeth, the momentary numbness that makes you wonder if you’ve broken your whole face. I must have warped my whole skull – my chin’s sore where it hit the car, but so’s my right temple. Glad I wasn’t watching that happen.

Got the car out. That was good. Went inside. I sat down to put together today’s deposit. Forgot all about email. Forgot all about the things I usually check first. Until I got mail. And it was M. M’s day to write. He’d been posting for half an hour: here I am in Argentina. Anybody awake? Anybody home?

I can’t explain how horrifying this was. That I’d forgotten that Wednesday meant M. That I hadn’t hurried, and gotten up early and checked my mail That I’d just slogged along through half of that precious time. Picture your child on the far side of a door, knocking, and you’re just upstairs, messing with your hair – and you don’t hear.

The writing back and forth was fast and furious after that. And just at the end, when he was saying, “Gotta go,” the windshield guy came. I hauled G in from the studio and sent him out with the guy, and then finished up this controlled fall of a conversation. It left me feeling a little suspended, like I’d run out of road before I ran out of inertia. And then I sat at my desk, a little blank now, color correcting the old family scans, trying to remember what else I was supposed to be doing.

Because there was something I was supposed to be doing. The deposit? Yes. Getting together the health records? Yes. And then, right about ten o’clock, it hit me: the horses. I’d totally forgotten them. I never forget them. And they’d been on the grass for two hours.

I forgot that I was going to take the camera to shoot the pink snow. I had visions of horses, writhing and dying in the pasture. I drove like the proverbial bat, listening to political radio that did not help my mood.

But when I got down there, they were fine. So far, I mean. So far they are fine. And even though my bottom teeth are a little bit sharp along the edge and my chin hurts, I have not formed any blood clots yet or noticed that my face is lop-sided.

And it occurs to me that this is just more of the life I’ve been living since I had kids. You wake up to a day that maybe has a few things scheduled in it. But you never know what’s going to happen in the first ten minute, or where you’ll have ended up by what was supposed to be dinnertime.

So I guess this already kinda dumb day is just business as usual. Sound familiar?