December 29, 2006
So it was 3 o’clock in the morning in Charlotte. I had been sifting, sorting, organizing, cleaning, and packing for just about twenty hours. I was packing up the rental car, which actually looked more like a pregnant roller skate than a car, with a couple boxes of books, a double wide file box of my European memorabilia that needs to be put into scrapbooks, a hanging bag of working clothes, a suitcase full of sweaters and yoga clothes, and a few things to make a room a home in New York.
It was 3:12 am when I closed the hatchback door and it hit me. “What the hell am I doing?” I had just packed up a rental car to drive to New York City where I had no job, no home, and virtually no money. “Are you out of your #^*#*! mind?” I said, incredulously into the night air. Despite the structure of the sentence it wasn’t a question but a statement. It struck me as particularly humorous that this was the FIRST time this idea had struck me as ludicrous. It felt like I had just woken from a drug induced coma - as if I had been aware of what had been going on around me but was unable to influence it one way or another.
It was now 3:16 a.m. and I was standing in my friend Ian’s driveway, on a cold night, wishing I could go back into the coma and just watch my insanity from afar. “Well” I said to myself. “No one has a gun to your head. You don’t have to go. You can unload the car right here. Stay at Ian’s. Get a job in Charlotte. You’ve got a license here, and connections. You don’t have to go anywhere.” I pondered this thought for a moment. A very quick moment, before saying, again out loud “Oh what the hell, the car is already packed, may as well go now.” And so I went.
The next day, stuck in traffic on I-95, I was telling this story to my daughter, April. She laughed, paused a moment, then said – “You know what you’re like, Mom? You’re like someone who decides they want to go sky diving and just to make sure they do, makes the pilot jump first.”
There was a moment of silence as the veritable truth of the comment registered on the airwaves, then we both burst out laughing. Sometimes the ones you love most certainly do know you the best!!
(God I miss your wit, April. I wish you’d start writing your blog again…. )
Comments