soapboxdiner

Don't flick the boogies

I've never been a fan of roller coasters. I've never enjoyed the ups, straining the muscles in your neck when you try to keep your head up. I've never liked the downs and having the bottom of my tummy hit the abrasive grooved metal under my feet. Topsy turny, upside down. I don't like those sensations one little bit.

Today was a roller coaster, from start to finish. It was both the best day and the worst I've had in ages, and I am drained from it. Tired.

When I sit quietly on my cigarette breaks each day, when my mind is quiet, it wanders to the icy bridge I cross each morning. It rises at least two football field-lengths above a jagged river ravine. Early in the morning, I cross that pot-hole-poxed bridge, that narrow bridge shrouded in thick white fog.

When I sit in the quiet of my breaks alone with wisps of smoke and my twisted thoughts, I picture in my brain my plummeting death over that bridge in the early early morning. I picture Steven's life without his mother. A life already devoid of a father. I picture the authorities sitting in my mother's living room, telling her I'm dead. I picture my son.

Today I laughed and sang Brick House, Run Around Sue, and Superfreak a cappella to my co-workers. Today I told the story of Certifiable Sally, of whom only those who remember when SBD was The Bot may recall. Now Certifiable Sally was the Fiscal Coordinator at the morgue. (That's where I used to work.)

So today I told my new co-workers the story of the time Sally and I had a stand-off over Kleenex. She wouldn't order tissue for the office because the autopsy staff and medico-legal investigators would come up and "steal" the Box For The Bereaved from the front desk. So when families came in sobbing and wailing, we had no tissue to offer them.

"What do you want them to do, Sally? Hork them up into their sinues? What? You want them to flick their boogies? Just order some tissue, already. Jesus, they're in pain when they're here. All they want is a single tissue and a consoling pat on the hand."

This, I think, is the very least we can offer and still call ourselves compassionate, decent members of the human race.

So after many of my requests for tissue still remained unheeded for the above reason, I went to Safeway and opened my wallet for a four-pack of tissue. I brought them in and distributed them to the various departments. I saved the last box for Sally's desk aka the reception desk. When I got there, I said, "Here you go Sally. I bought some tissue for family members to use if they need to. Now, when they come in grieving, we can offer them tissue! Isn't that fabulous. They won't have to *HHGGGGGGGK* snort back/swallow their boogies of bereavement because we're cheap, heartless bastards! Nope, they won't have to flick their boogies anymore!"

Sally never did share those tissues, which confirmed in my mind that she truly was an Evil Hellbound Cow Without Soul Or Conscience. On more than one occasion, however, I found her daintily pick/wiping her share of nose cheese into her pilfered stash of government issue tissue when the box of Puff's was gone.

New co-workers and I laughed and laughed at the hork/flick scenario. We all love a good flick, I think.

Driving home, I was back to belting out Duke of Earl. And Supa Freak. I was one bouncing, head bobbing mama in the car, darlings. Nothing in the world can lighten my heart like a catchy tune. And if it's boppy and pointless, that's even better. By the time the gear shift was safely back in park after my hour-long commute, I was a free-spirit only TOOO ready to call RDG in hopes of still taking her up on the offer of a happy hour drink. All I needed was to confirm (beg helplessly for someone to take pity on my lack of a social life) with the folks that they'd watch Steven for a couple of hours.

When I walked into their house, Stepdad told me that my mother spent the better part of last evening in the ER due to left-sided numbness. She couldn't even walk. After hours of EKG and CAT scan monitoring, plus a slew of bloodwork and other miscellaneous lab tests, the doctors determined that they had NO clue what was wrong with her. So they sent her home.

Fuck me, I'm thinking. My mother had a mini-stroke last night and COULD HAVE DIED! and the doctors just sent her home.

When mom got home from work, I gave her the hugest, most piteously worried and loving hug you can imagine. She shared that the docs actually diagnosed an abnormal migraine that caused all her muscles to spasm and cut off her circulation to the left sided extremities.

I sat her down in my lap and gave her a facial and scalp massage for probably an hour. I don't know who I was trying to comfort more; her, or the daughter who would be lost without her last and best parent.

8:05 pm - 12.31.02
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