“They grouped in the road at the top of a rise and looked back. The storm front towered above them and the wind was cool on their sweating faces. They slumped bleary-eyed in their saddles and looked at one another. Shrouded in the black thunderheads the distant lightning glowed mutely like welding seen through foundry smoke. As if repairs were under way at some flawed place in the iron dark of the world.”
— Cormac McCarthy, All the Pretty Horses
I’m never going to complain, like I did last week, about having a boring week ever again.
I didn’t feel so great this morning and wound up calling in sick. I don’t know if it was the garlic shrimp I had for a (rushed) dinner last night or what, but staying home seemed like the preferred course of action. It meant I missed drinks after work this evening, an open bar and hors d’oeuvre to celebrate the end of a recent sales conference, but I wasn’t in shape to make the most of it anyway.
Around 10:30, my mother said she was going out to get a bagel for breakfast and stop at the bank, and she’d be right back. And that was the last I heard from her until almost 7 o’clock. She spent the entire day with a stalled car, waiting for a tow truck and unable to reach me because the phone had gone out in the rain. I admit, I was kind of beside myself with worry at that point.
The weather had been terrible shortly after she left, bucketing rain in a huge and unexpected storm, with lots of flooding and — as I’m sure Heather will be pleased to hear — even some large hail. And despite a short respite, during which you probably wouldn’t even have known it had rained, the bad weather kept up into the evening.
My mother no longer has a cell phone, since this is her first week of retirement, and the phone she had belonged to her employer. So I guess it’s good I was home and she was finally able to reach me — this time from the local deli where she got her bagel. I might not have been home until 8 or 9 if I’d gone to work and drinks. The tow truck she’d been waiting on apparently never showed, so I drove over — at best a five-minute drive — and picked her up.
My father got home a little after 7 o’clock and I drove us both over to see if we could jumpstart the car and then, when that failed, if we could finally get a tow truck from AAA to show up. One finally did, after some more phone tag, and we were back home (sans car) around 8:30 tonight. She’ll have to call tomorrow to figure out what needs to be done with it.
Everyone’s okay, which is what matters, but I don’t know about you, but I think I’d prefer boring any day of the week.