~Notes from the wrong side of the mirror pt. 1

Lessons learned from The Amazing Race:  Sometimes, when what you are doing involves an instruction, direction, command, commandment, list of requirements, contract, or law – attention to the details actually matters.  No matter how stupid you think the detail may be, no matter how anal and insignificant, the person of authority (the mother, the game designer, the lawmaker, the chef or craft-maven, the doctor, even God himself) may actually have written that detail INTO the instructions for a reason.  And that when you drop out that detail, you actually negate your entire effort otherwise.  Your result, even if you end up exactly where you are supposed to end up, will not count.  All for one detail forgotten. One requirement blown off.  One step left out.

The same lesson showed up very strongly in The Good Wife (Mar 16 – and remember, please that I watch these things on the treadmill). [If you don’t usually watch it, the first 40 minutes of this story were a crash course in the Complexity of Our Present World and Being a Grownup.  Interesting political and moral conundrums. And a really scary warning about health insurance.]

Tough lesson for Americans.  But there you are.

——=0=——

We have two new rooms.  But neither of them is actually a room yet.  The downstairs one is blocked off from the house entirely.  The upstairs one connects directly to what was once my bedroom, and is not blocked off – from anything, including the cosmos.  But we forget about these things, adaptable creatures that we are.  We just keep going on with our lives, as if all was right with the world.

So the other night, as a chilly storm front roared through the valley, G needed something from his dresser and went upstairs to get it.  He rose from his seat on the hearth, left the cozy, (if crowded) living room, flipped on the light for the stairs, ascended as he always does, turned left at the top of the stairs, pushed past the box springs that was standing on its side in the quiet, evening-lit hall, put his hand to the knob of our bedroom door, shoved the door open and stepped into — Alaska.

Wind howled in the rafters, pouring through the raw window openings in fluid waves. Plastic flew up in curls, snapping over the covered furniture.  Leaves, bits of snow mixed with drywall dust and insulation whipped in pale eddies across the old carpet.  And it was really, really dark in there.

He stepped back, pulled the door closed again.  And there he was, once again in the quiet, civilized hallway, wood floor under his feet, walls intact.  With visions of Narnia dancing in his head.

But now we have windows.