When Life Gives You A Wheelbarrow, Drive Carefully

Margaret Mitchell never wrote another book after Gone With The Wind because she didn't think she could top it.

Now I know how she felt! And it wasn't even MY writing.

(steps to podium) I would like to thank Blogspot for giving me a free site and making it so even me, the idiot, could figure out how to post entries. I would also like to thank my father for writing the most perfect letter ever written and also LIVING that love every day. I would also like to thank you, wonderful readers, for writing your loving comments. (gets teary eyed) You like DADDY, you really like him! He was quiet, but could write like an angel and when he talked, it was worth listening to.

I'll post the full letter from my birth mother and thoughts on what to do about that in a few weeks after I have a chance to think things through. I hadn't seen the letter in 10 years. I got it, shoved it in a drawer and tried to forget about it. It's pretty brutal.

Anyway, back to the mundane things, oh, like having a child suddenly develop a condition that exactly mimicked a life threatening illness.

You know the days that you remember your whole life and how they start out with cereal and coffee just like every other day? Well, Wednesday, Feb. 8, 2006, was about as routine as you can get until 1:31 when my cell phone rang in class and the house of cards started its slow mo tumble...

"Um...Meredith is breaking out in welts all over...very suddenly. We gave her a Benadryl, but she's still breaking out... (the headmistress) I've never seen anything so sudden in 29 years of running this school..."

Put down phone, dismiss class, climb in car, and drive 85 miles/hour to take child to doctor. The school will of course call an ambulance if necessary, but I've had a few allergic reactions, and anaphylactic shock can kill you in minutes. otoh, they can't just have an ambulance stand around on the off chance that she'll, like, die, can they? of course not. I'm processing this fact, complete with musings on the sorry state of health care in America...

As I continued my speedy ride,
With a tractor trailer truck on my right side,
Illness started to bode
In the form of a wheelbarrow in the middle of the road.

I'm on the phone with the doctor's office, driving 85 miles an hour, cut off from the other lane, and there's a wheelbarrow in the road. It wasn't a big one. It looked just like the one in the picture. But it was blocking most of my lane.

"SHIIIITTTTTTT!" I scream at the top of my lungs.

"Ma'am?" inquires the nurse ever so politely.

"I'm sorry!" I scream. "I just almost hit a wheelbarrow on the highway!"

Will I see 47 the next day? Will Meredith see 4:17? Will I need to have a Thorazine drip?

And the gods smiled and said, "Just kiddin'!"

I avoided the wheelbarrow.
Meredith turned out to have a benign, harmless virus.