Why am I not working now? --you are probably wondering. And the answer is, I am just DONE for the day and for the weekend. I worked most of yesterday, while the twins ran wild, and today Rocket Boy was supposed to take the twins for a drive/adventure somewhere so that I could get some REAL work done. But he's still very sick. I took the kids to the park in the morning, came back home for lunch, and then announced that I was going to do an errand. (A fun errand -- some time for me. I thought I'd get the book for the next book group meeting and look for a couple of others I might use in my classes.) RB agreed that was fine -- he would babysit.
So I set off on my jaunt. First stop was the credit union, to get some cash. Except that my debit card wouldn't work in the ATM. This has happened before, but I've always been able to get it to work eventually. Not this time, sorry. No money for you, lady. Obviously I need a new card. Add that to my endless to-do list and move on.
I had been planning to go to everyone's favorite used bookstore, the Bookworm (thus the need for cash). Since I only had $9 in my wallet, I decided to change plans and go to the Boulder Bookstore instead. (Parking is free downtown on Sundays.) I drove down there, straight to the parking garage near the bookstore -- sign said "FULL. Try garage at 15th and Pearl." Oh. OK. So I drove all the way to the other parking garage, clear at the other end of the Pearl Street Mall, found a parking place, walked all the way to the bookstore at 11th and Pearl, went inside, went upstairs to where the book club book would be -- and discovered that someone was doing a reading, right where I wanted to look at books. There was no way to get in there and look around -- it would have been horribly rude. I would have been right under the man's nose -- if I could even get there at all, with all the chairs filling the space and people sitting in them.
OK. Well, that was a bummer. I went downstairs again, out the front door, back across four blocks of the Pearl Street Mall, back up into the parking garage (at least I didn't have to pay to park), and back into my car. What to do now? I decided to try the Bookworm after all, despite my lack of cash. So I drove all the way to north Boulder, parked, went inside. They didn't have the book. Nor did they have the other books I was looking for. I wanted to buy a couple of used mysteries for bedtime reading -- one was $4, one was $3.50. So, $7.50 plus tax -- my $9 would have covered them, but then I'd have no money at all. I left the store empty-handed.
Now what? It's almost an hour and a half since I left home. Boulder used to have lots of bookstores, but no more. There's a Barnes & Noble, but they share a parking lot with Whole Foods and it's almost impossible to park there on weekends. Still, my only other option was to order from Amazon, and I don't do that anymore. I drove to Barnes & Noble. And, wonder of wonders, found a parking place. AND, even more of a wonder, B&N had my book. Just one copy, but that was all I needed. They didn't have the other books I was looking for, but they had the book for the book group. So I bought it. And drove home. Two hours, that dumb errand took me.
When I got home, Rocket Boy and the boos were home -- no one had gone to any parks or on any drives and the kids were climbing the walls. Literally. And also pulling the wallpaper off.I have to remind myself that Rocket Boy is sick and I should be nice to him. Despite the fact that he has been sick since the weekend before school started.
Eventually we decided that he would walk to our neighborhood park with the kids and I would follow a little later. They left the house about 4:30 and I followed at 5:00. When I reached the park, they were ready to move on -- we had decided to walk to Table Mesa Shopping Center and have dinner at Under the Sun, as a treat.
So we walked over there and Rocket Boy got cash from the credit union ATM with his card (Under the Sun only accepts cash). We got to Under the Sun at 5:25 and it was packed. Overflowing with people, tons of kids -- I'd forgotten Sundays are "kids eat free" days -- and tons of people waiting for tables. "It'll be about 20, 25 minutes," the hostess assured me, so we decided to wait. At 6:05 (40 minutes later, if you're counting) we were shown to a table. We ordered a pizza, an appetizer, and two kids' meals, and then we waited. And waited. And waited. No appetizer arrived, no pizza, no kids' meals. Our waitress brought our drinks and vanished. The restaurant has lots of games, so we played a round of Scrabble (I helped the kids make their words) and a round of Uno. Still nothing. It was almost 7:00. Finally, here comes our waitress, full of apologies, followed by the manager. They had "gotten slammed" with people coming straight from skiing and their wood-fired oven only cooks 6 pizzas at a time. (Oh, the many and varied problems of rich white people.) "But our appetizer," I protested. "I thought you wanted your appetizer served WITH your meal," the waitress said. "I never said that," I argued, feeling close to tears. "Well, whatever happened, your food is on its way and it's on the house," the manager told us.
We thanked him, and when the food did arrive, I tried to be grateful that it was free. I was certainly hungry! But I had such a knot in my stomach that I could barely swallow. After chewing on a couple of pieces of free pizza and feeling like they were going to come right back up again, I told Rocket Boy that I was ready to leave (he's a slow eater, so he wanted to stay longer). The boys were done too, so they came with me. Of course we had to walk all the way home, since we'd walked there, and by now it was chilly and very dark. "Stay close to me," I warned them. "There could be a mountain lion, and if there is, it will grab one of you if you aren't close to me." That sounds like mother-hyperbole, but it isn't. We have lions in the neighborhood at night and they do grab small children (that is, I've never heard of one grabbing a small child in the neighborhood, but I have heard of them grabbing small children on hiking trails). Boos chose to believe me, and stayed close by my side as we walked through the park -- and nobody was eaten by a mountain lion. But still, what a frustrating day, coming at the end of a very difficult week.
I was reading Traveling Mercies by Anne Lamott recently -- it just surfaced from one of my piles -- and in the title essay she repeats a story told by someone else who was given some advice by someone she met on a journey (don't worry who's who in all that, it's still a good story).
It turned out that this man worked for the Dalai Lama. And he said -- gently -- that they believe when a lot of things start going wrong all at once, it is to protect something big and lovely that is trying to get itself born -- and that this something needs for you to be distracted so that it can be born as perfectly as possible.
I have no idea what that means, and neither, I think, does Anne Lamott, but it still sounds nice -- the idea that a lot of bad things could be happening not because you are a bad person, but because "something" needs for you to be distracted so that something good can happen.
I don't know if my situation right now counts as "bad things." It's more like irritating things, frustrating things. I feel almost like I'm being taunted -- the Boulder Bookstore fiasco had free parking, the Under the Sun fiasco ended with a free meal. But I definitely am distracted. I am distraught. I am losing my mind. I hope it's for a good purpose.
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