Uh Oh

Uh oh, things are going wrong; strange things; unimportant things; the trivial things I’ve come to rely on as markers of the passage of time.

They changed the clocks. Well, some of them changed themselves thanks to this world of connectivity we live in. But some need to be changed manually and it’s disconcerting when none of the clocks match because no matter how hard you try or how fast you run you can’t change them all with any accuracy. My alarm clock says wake-up. My wristwatch says I have an hour. Which to believe? They tell you to change your clocks at 2 a.m. which is a cruel thing to do. The VTR is now an hour and five minutes behind the TiVo which is 30 seconds behind the cable box because of the delay. I don’t know where those five minutes came from but they appeared some time ago, after a power outage I think.

It is one or two a.m. and all my points have mysteriously disappeared at my favorite game site. They’ll come back I hope; I worked very hard and wasted a lot of hours getting them.

I’ve been forgetting things, like what I did yesterday or five minutes ago. I forgot Monday.

And, of course, baseball season is over so there are no games to help me mark the passage of time. I am adrift.

All around me seem to be struggling through bouts of flu and sore throats and although my sinuses have been sloshing around for weeks I seem to be muddling through. I’m the only one in my immediate family who doesn’t have much to do but I’m the only one still capable of doing it. The others are in bed. So I blew and raked a half acre of leaves and discovered a muscle in my left arm that I swear wasn’t there before but now it hurts all the time.

I’m tired just about all day long until it’s time to go to sleep and then I wake up. Yesterday I drove my car up on to the curb in front of St. Stephen’s and I wasn’t trying to go to church. Luckily I didn’t kill anyone including myself and teetered back on to the pavement, the act of which produced enough adrenalin to get me home.
I made soup! My husband was home sick and I needed to make soup for him. This did not go wrong, exactly. Every once in a while I get a hankering for some taste and manage to put it together perfectly. In this case it was split pea soup. I learned there is no difference between a ham hock and a pork hock. I made the stock and tended the pot for almost hours. I brought him a bowl believing he would be instantly cured. He announced that split pea was not his favorite. I’d made the wrong soup! I glared at him. He ate two bowls. I don’t really know if he ate them because he liked it after all or if he was afraid I’d hit him.

Someone once told me that that there is great power in “I don’t know”; that in admitting and embracing the fact that you don’t know what’s coming you open yourself up to great possibilities. Someone else recently wrote “the years teach us much that the days will never know”. I try to look ahead as if I am looking back; as if the hard times are behind us and everything worked out well. There’s a family of woodpeckers, a squirrel and a chipmunk outside my window all playing some natural game of dodge near the base of the tree and the stone ledge outside my window. It’s a simple game of survival.