Last night, Jaime yelled from the kitchen table, "Judy Garland is dead!"
This post has nothing to do with that.
We hadn't taken Harper to the dog park for awhile because she had pink eye, and the whole of the Midwest has been smote by god for continuing to let Republicans have children.
It was -1˚F (-20˚C) when we arrived at the park this morning. The car was trying to tell us that something was wrong, but we didn't listen because we fear taking responsibility for anything. The dog park is part of our Saturday routine along with picking up take out in midtown, so we pushed it.
Conjunctivitis Mary was napping in the back seat when Jaime got out to pick up our bento boxes. Normally, I am thrilled when he volunteers to grab the food, but today was special. We'd also decided to get something sweet from our favorite bakery, and that was far too important a job to trust to the man who once shouted, "Vanilla!," at a girl behind the counter of the most famous ice creamery in Missouri. She and I were both mortified.
But he pulled vaccine rank on me (he managed to get his first shot) and hopped out. I turned the car back on so Harper and I wouldn't freeze the many nipples we have between us off while we waited.
Cypress Hill was right in the middle of Insane in the Brain when the car died a few minutes before Jaime returned with way too many things. I pretended to know nothing as he tried and failed to start our Sentra several times.
I called to request roadside battery assistance from AAA, and the operator informed me a driver would contact us shortly.
We ate every single thing in the first ten minutes of waiting.
When we finished, Jaime told me to stay off my phone to conserve the battery as he leaned back in his seat and got on his phone. Harper snuggled him, and he started stroking her ears.
Now that my family and phone were out, I decided to just let my mind take me wherever it wanted, and I was excited about it.
The first thing I tried to imagine was being paralyzed. We watched Penguin Bloom last night, and even though it wasn't very good, I couldn't shake the willies of how easily life can fuck us. I was bad at being paralyzed. I couldn't not use my leg muscles to shift in my seat and wouldn't let my arms lift completely dead weight.
The air bag warnings were in English and French. I was surprised at how well I could read the French version checking myself with the English side. Reading French is easier than being paralyzed.
Then I tried to discern how many flavors I could still taste in my mouth from our lunch, but I could only taste the last thing I ate. I traced all the power lines around us with my finger and then with a pen. It was more fun with a pen.
By then, Jaime was typing something. I asked about it, and he said he was leaving a goodbye message to a sociologist he liked. He is dying and his children had set up a message board for people to leave well wishes. I asked him if it was really more important to write a man he'd never met than to talk to his wife, and he said yes.
I thought about the debate my 6th graders had, unprompted by me, this week. Is cannibalism a form of bullying? They were pretty split down the middle.
The last thing I did before calling my brother was write "help us" backwards in the condensation on the window. It had been over an hour. No one was coming for us. I added the word "please" while he was on his way.
It took him less than a minute to jump start our battery. He asked if we'd tried to stop anyone in the busy parking lot we were in for help, but we hadn't thought of that.
