The long and winding week
This week was something of an endurance test. On Monday, my work group learned that our boss’s mother had suddenly passed away over the weekend. Fortunately, our boss happened to have flown out to see her mother that weekend, and so they were together at the end. However, our boss was away from the office for the rest of the week, and we’ve heard nothing directly from her since we last saw her.
On Tuesday morning, I attended the funeral of the mother of one of our clients, a solemn occasion turned all the more dismal by the pastor’s cheerfully generic homily and his open admission that he did not actually know the deceased.
Wednesday evening, I left my purse sitting in a seat after a movie screening, but the hosts held it for me until I returned several minutes later. (A grateful shoutout to Mike Dennis and all the great volunteers at Reelblack!)
Come Thursday, my runaway glove made yet another break for the circus, and has remained unseen since. That same day, I bought a salad at a convenience store for lunch…and left it on the counter.
I closed out the week Friday by paying for the same book — twice. Many months ago, I borrowed a copy Ann Patchett’s Bel Canto from the library, only to leave it tucked in a seat-back pocket during a plane trip. So on Friday morning, I paid the library for all the fees associated with absent-mindedly feeding literature to a jumbo jet. Later in the day, I found myself in a used bookstore, where I came across a secondhand paperback copy of Bel Canto. I quickly snapped it up to avoid paying any more fines, and to eventually get to the end of the story.
There at the used bookstore, I suffered a setback of a different sort. While standing near the architecture shelves, I saw a man pulling down an oversized, cloth-bound book with a geometric pattern embossed across its cover. He said that he was an architect himself, and we chatted for a few moments about the latest book from Alain de Botton (The Architecture of Happiness), the Getty, and Gerhard Richter. I overheard him speaking on his cell phone to someone about a nearby movie being sold out; he confessed with a hint of sheepishness that he had been trying to get tickets for “300,” despite near-universal critical agreement about the mediocrity of its dialogue and plot. He was talk, dark, and built-like-a-lumberjack handsome.
Alas, dear reader, I failed. I failed, completely and utterly, to make so much as a half-hearted play to try to see him again, even though I lingered like a bad cold while my friends patiently shuffled around the cash register, buying a book to kill time while waiting on me. I forgot that I’m still going to be making entries to this blog while cashing out my retirement annuity if I don’t start asking for a bit more and picking up rejection at a faster rate. Really, I do promise to try harder next time, to step up to the plate and swing.
But there you have it: That was the week that was.
