The clocks blinking red aren't trying to annoy me as much as they are. It's not their fault. A sometime-in-the-middle-of-the-stormy-night power outage cut off the electrical circulation of our house veins but isn't it funny how we can still breathe without it? I rose from a bad night of semi-sleep, still breathing, but frankly finding it all unfunny. My nervous system was immediately...nervous, thinking of our refrigerator full of food and my son hacking with spring allergies and the need for Mickey Mouse Clubhouse this morning to get last week's laundry finished and this weekend's kitchen cleaned and a few home repair phone calls made and working myself into a dreary morning frenzy about the need for more time even though I had no clue what time it was, exactly. My phone was dead and unresponsive. Looking up, the clock went from off to red digital numbers blinking: 12:00, 12:00, 12:00. Oh, I think, in a very small moment relief. A flatline day of unproductivity - averted. But my blood pressure was still stuck at bad-mood over Monday-morning, which is, never a good ratio. It's dark and cold outside. I looked at my Bible sitting there and tried with half my heart to say a prayer for patience. Half-way through, I opened my eyes and noticed how dirty our carpets looked and remembered that I needed to buy carpet cleaner. I couldn't resuscitate myself. Take a breath, try again another blinking time.
And wouldn't you know, that literally between this sentence and the last, a time frame of roughly two hours has passed so that I could detour all of my good chore intentions to attend to the completely-out-of-the-blue percolating wet bar sink and the flooding basement and the burping shower drain and the leaking toilet, and having had called Tom's Plumbing with Daren and Robert (Tom must be Spring Breaking it this week) knockety-knocking on my door and kindly informing me with all the politeness of plumbers that in addition to the something-something injector something, there was also another something something pipe somewhere leading somewhere "out there" that was in need of immediate replacement. In his diagnostic explanation of its necessity, Robert stood there, behind a nodding Daren, made a terrible clicking noise and simultaneously showed me the invisible pipe, twisting his hands around it and speaking medical plumber idioms and assuring me that my husband should call them with any questions. I was already in a semi-despondent funk. I hadn't enough energy or care to cross-examine them or even, ask them the price. It sounded serious, especially with that guttural clicking noise. Alright, Daren and Robert. Good job, go to it. About an hour later, they both emerge from the basement, plumbing scalpels in hand, and a bill for...$141 even. Oh, hardly not the budgetary damage I was expecting. Not the figure I was imagining with all the positivity of a Monday mid-morning plumber. But you know, thinking about the both of them, these hard working middle-age fellows - they were not as bad as my creative pessimism was invisibly writing them out to be. In fact, they were both just nice-enough nose-to-the-grindstone everyday people who I just kind of waved in and waved down and waved away like pestery flies. And jeez, for a small 141 dollar sum, they saved our basement, minus a few nice storage boxes we just bought, and prevented a bursted pipe of watery pre-move catastrophe. To the lifeline of our everyday functioning - the flushing and the washing and the rinsing and the unclogging - they're like doctors who do house visits in flannel shirts and ballcaps and who go into the foreign trenches of our home's anatomy.
Thinking about Robert's demonstration, my swinging pendulum of pessimism stopped dead to a point of...agreement, and yes, appreciation. And yes (head hanging lower), apology. Before he walked out the door, I told Daren that I'd give'em a good Google review. He took my check and laughed and shut the door. Okay Daren, I gotcha. Springfield people are not Yelpers or Angie's List review junkies. The Darens and Roberts of Springfield know neighbors and talk to friends and make referrals using their voice, talking on landlines and sitting in Charlie Parker's diner. Oh, Springfield. If you weren't so gray today I might be able to think beyond the blah.
So, here I am, trying my very, very best to not reflect the mild dread of the afternoon and the annoyance of the glowing red clock that is now flashing 5:25, 5:25, 5:25. Just a blinkety-blink reminder that I've spent five hours and twenty-five minutes wallowing in self-pity over much-ado-about nothing and finding not the slightest bit of motivation to change the clocks back to the real time of...get-over-it-already! After finishing that last sentence up with Joey having fallen asleep in my lap, I just laid him in his crib, the innocent culprit of my terrible night's sleep, and he coiled into a sweet position of sleepful prayer, his small hands holding each other like matching friends. Ah, a reminder of what I need to do. Pray, that is. Well, sleep maybe too. Both of which are natural, self-prescribed, over-the-counter heart medicines that are better when unbottled and taken as frequently as possible.
My blood pressure drops. I'm breathing. As are my kids. Our house is alive. My sewage pipes are unclogged. So yes, it's time. Time to get up off my lazyass couch stretcher and victim-is-me attitude and change the clocks, something I shoulda just done 5 hours and 25 minutes ago.
Okay, make that 26.
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