Monday: I was painting the tiny house parked in the
gravel driveway beside the cement one leading to our garage.
Wait, the story gets better.
I was sitting on a camp chair in the back of my 1998 Toyota T-100 pickup—my makeshift scaffolding I had backed up to within inches of the house. I have orders not to work above my head, so
I’m bringing my body to the level I’m painting.
A lady biker pulls up, stops, and asks, “Do you need
any help?”
“Oh no, thanks, that’s asking too much.”
“No, really. Let me paint for a while.”
She climbs up into the pickup bed and paints as high
as she can reach, leaving only a little “V” at the gable that she couldn’t
reach. We chatted; we hugged goodbye; she climbed on her bike, aiming for
the high school to meet her kids, and I felt visited by an angel.
There are really good people in this world.
Are you having trouble with time as I am? Tuesday,
I had to be in town and missed my blog day. I don’t hear any complaints, but I
try to make Tuesday my blog day. Today, I’m happy to sit down at my
computer and talk to you guys. Outside my window, the maple tree leaves
are stacking up on the ground. Didn’t they do that two weeks ago?
Halloween is happening next door, where horror decorations taller than people appear in greater abundance each year.
And I know Christmas is right around the corner. I feel it coming. Yesterday I heard a groan from that box of decorations stored in the garage. It sounded like a kid being awakened for school.
Jo, Go with the flow…
Okay.
Life gets squeezed in between days of writing, which I
consider my job. I had to laugh when I read that as a child Liz Gilbert was
embarrassed to be driven about town in a Ford Pinto filled with goats, but she
knew her dad was doing his own thing and following his own path. (My daughter
once bought a calf at an auction and drove it home in the back seat of her
Dodge Neon.) Gilbert didn’t have a name for it then, but now she realizes her
father was practicing something she calls ”Creative living.” Not that she wants
to make the same choices her father did, neither being a farmer or a
Republican, but she wants to forge her own way in the world as she likes.
Isn’t that what we all want?
“Life is not orderly,” states Natalie Goldberg in the
Introduction to Wild Mind. Try as we might, events happen. Like about a
week ago, I was sitting in my pickup reading and waiting for my grandson to have a piano lesson when Whap! Someone
hit the back of my pickup.
A shiny white Jeep wagon pulled up ahead, and a 92-year-old man walked up to my window: “I wasn’t watching,” he said. (I found he was 92 when I looked at his driver’s license.) A couple of fellows came over and asked if I was all right. I was. And my dear old pickup had only a little hole in the plastic covering of the rear bumper. No other damage. The fellow’s Jeep lost a side panel. I was glad I didn't drive our car that day.
My pickup is becoming a character in the novel of my life. My grandson prefers the
car, but I told him that anything that gets me where I want to go is a good
vehicle.
Not that I don’t like fancy cars; once I owned a
brand-new Jaguar, but those days are over. Still, owning one convinced me that
wild possibilities can happen.
About the bump to my truck's my rear end: I wondered what that
was about. Am I sitting around waiting to be hit? Do I need to be bumped out of
something? Was the universe saying “Wake up!” Was it that I had moments ago
read about some dire thing that is happening in the world, and the Universe was
saying, “Stop it.”
Or was it that “Shit happens?”
We could choose any of the above. And we can wonder if
events happen for a reason.
You see, when you are young, you have more answers
than questions. When you get older, you have more questions than answers.