When Nothing Turned Out Right, But It Did

This weekend things worked out ok. The caregiver that my sister was worried about turned out to be really great. I took my mom and our daytime caregiver (who was 40 minutes late) on a jaunt to McDonalds and then a ride along the bay. On the way home I stopped at an estate sale and it was full of cool Japanese stuff. I came away with an aluminum bento box stamped with a mark for the University of Osaka. And I bought some cassette tapes that were deliciously transporting -- the kind of thing you'd hear in a restaurant in 1990.

This morning I returned to pay the nighttime caregiver in cash for her first two shifts. This means that I got to meet her and I thought she was thoughtful and charming. She had no problems with my mom.

Today is our 28th anniversary, and after shopping and Japanese music and a little Ted Lasso with my man, I felt pretty relaxed.

It's amazing what a few hours to oneself without my mom shrieking at me will do. We tidied up the pots on the front porch this morning, and I got the wild idea to put a loveseat out there in the future. It's cool and shaded in the summer and could be a perfect spot. The deer visited the street plantings today, and a fat brown bird took a ten minute bath in the saucer of one of the giant pots that came from my grandfather's Nash dealership. The bird plopped into the saucer, flapped his wings about, jumped up onto the fence, tapped the water out of his beak, and then flopped back in the water, repeating several times. He did his ablutions for about ten minutes stirring the water so that it made reflections in the glaze of the pot like something in a Hockney painting. Anyhoo, today is an ok day. I'm cooking a chicken for mrguy, and he's poised with a squirt bottle, trying to train boy kitten not to eat his one-eyed sister.

Enough for now. Someone posted a prompt today that spoke to me. "Think of a time when nothing turned out right."...

We four arrived at JFK from SFO and picked up our bargain rental car. The passenger seat was so cramped that I had to sit sideways. The glove compartment couldn’t be opened unless we pulled over and I got out. On the way to Hoboken, Mary, in the back seat, got super excited by a neon sign and rolled down the window quickly so she could take a photo. She may be 5’1”, but Mary’s strong from all of those years waiting tables. She used such force that we never did get the window up. For this reason we enjoyed the heady perfume of rush hour exhaust during our slow ride through the Holland Tunnel.

We got to the club, and after sound check the guys borrowed some tools to try to get the window up because at some point this evening we were expecting a snow storm. Somewhere during Sarah Silverman’s set, in the middle of the hot, cramped club, I started having a panic attack. I went outside and sat in the cold, trying to calm down and not alarm anyone.

I don’t recall seeing my husband’s band, or Yo La Tengo, but I do recall that the blizzard didn’t happen until morning and that it was really freaking cold on the ride from Hoboken to JFK with a broken window at 2am. We also got lost and drove in circles around Ground Zero for a while. Finally we made it to the airport and exchanged rental cars, turned on the heat, drove back to Brooklyn, dropped off the bandmates, parked and slept like the dead at our friend’s place. 

In the morning, things turned around. I slept in and ate breakfast with our hosts. The band went to play on the radio and as the expected blizzard finally arrived and the clouds dumped their load of puffy snow, I sat on the edge of the bed with a cup of coffee staring at the radio, listening to them play on WFMU.