Time to Reflect

Heading down the basement today in stocking feet I stepped on a thumb tack, a large one, the kind that holds fabric to furniture.

We had taken an old overstuffed chair out of the rec-room a day earlier, and a tack must have popped off it. Blood slowly stained my white sock as I pulled the tack from the ball of my left foot. But as I brought it up to my eye to study it, the tack slipped from my fingers and fell two steps farther down the stair case-- or rather, I thought it did. I went down to get it and realized, too late, that it had only fallen one step. I pushed my foot into it a second time, this time the right foot.

Blood seeped slowly into sock number two. Frustrated, I sat down on the steps, and thought about my life, all of it, the whole thing.

Something isn't working for me right now. I'm not feeling in charge. I don't have the reigns firmly in my grasp like so many others seem to.

I sat for 20 minutes on those basement steps. I thought of the trip to the store a day earlier, where I had purchased the hot soup-- a large to-go container filled with vegetable stew. Leaving the store, spooning a little broth into my mouth, I had pushed the glass door with my shoulder, but it hadn't been nudged with enough force, and it it shot back quicker than I anticipated, knocking my soup from my hands and sending the container cart-wheeling into a firewood stand, where birch logs were splashed with peas, carrots, celery, potatoes, onions and broth.

I got into the car and was able to laugh it off, but only because I didn't see the trend. I didn't know that within 24 hours I would step on a single tack twice, with two different feet, on the same staircase, nor that five hours prior to that, I would be at a gas station learning that I must pre-pay before pumping. Heading into that gas station, I would be distracted by a two-for-one special on cheap, flavored cigars. As I paid for the cigars and my gas, my mind would play a trick on me and convince me that I had gone to the gas station solely for cigars. Consequently, as I got to my car, opening the pack of cigars, I would forget all about the gas I had paid for, and would drive away, happy with my cigar purchase, but having failed to get my end of a 30 dollar expenditure.

Four blocks later I would remember, while sitting on a freeway on-ramp, surrounded by cars, preparing to get stuck for 45 minutes in a rush-hour jam, unable to find a place to turn around and get back to that station before somebody pumped gas I paid for.

And I would never make it back. As time passed, I would come to feel too embarrassed. Adults just don't do this sort of thing. I didn't want to stand in front of a young clerk, and plead my case. I just felt too ridiculous.

Twenty minutes may not seem like a long time to sit on a basement staircase, but in that time I was  able  to think about my life, and where it's going, and what's changed.

It seems just yesterday I was a 22-year-old college kid with the world by the tail. Where'd that bon vivant go? Who is this clown seated here with two bloody socks? Who's this guy who in the last 24 hours bought four bucks worth of soup he never ate and 30 bucks worth of gas he never pumped?

I'll tell you who I am. I'm the guy they write the cheap self-help books for. I'm the guy they hook at Barnes & Noble, the guy who, when no one's looking, grabs the cheesy New-Age schlock looking for a way out of the hole.

But the words don't help. There's only the consolation of the book store's comfortable chair, and  it's hot coffee--coffee that may stay in my hand, not fall on the floor, or be left on the counter, steaming hot and ready to sip, as I drive home without it, oblivious.

I take solace in that.