A Rare Lucid Moment

This is what happened. It was Wednesday night, and I was in the middle of typing a decent paragraph - in the middle of a word, actually - when, wouldn’t you know it, the phone rang.

I knew the paragraph would never be a world beater anyway - it barely made sense, even to me. But understand that I’d just begun writing after first cleaning out my keyboard, dusting off the desk, straightening up the six sacred books on its shelf, and finally, putting in just the right background music. Sure, all of that (purposely) took the better part of two hours. No, I wasn’t going to lose my train of thought. Yes, I can multitask with the best of them - but so what? It’s one thing to waste my own time. It’s another for someone else to do it, by God, and especially after all I went through to put off writing for as long as I had. This better be important, that was what I was thinking; the house better be on fire.

Speaking of fires, I’ve never been in a house fire before, nor any kind of fire at all (and hopefully never will be). But I had been in a flood several years ago, and that was bad enough. Ah, mother nature at her finest...and my worst - I remember it like it was yesterday, mostly because that’s the closest I’ve ever come to losing my sanity. We lived in the country back then, and the morning that Manitoba turned into a scene right out of the movie Water World - the flood of ’97 - I walked downstairs at dawn, still half asleep with a mug of coffee in my hand, and stopped on the second-to-last step to watch a plastic toy float past me. Yes - float. Of course, my mind couldn’t quite wrap around that one, so I just stood there in my t-shirt and underwear, holding my mug in my hands and watching the toy, thinking: No, that isn’t a floating toy, in much the same way one witnesses a car accident and their mind refuses to accept it. But it was a toy, and it was floating. And when those two things finally registered, I dropped my coffee mug…which didn’t break, but instead joined the floating toy in an absurd game of Ring-Around-The-Family-Room. It was around the time when I started rooting for the mug that things finally started sinking in. Mainly, that I was standing in water - the same water that the room’s electrical cords were immersed. Thank goodness the power had been knocked out or my dead, floating body might have given the mug and toy a run for their money. That was when I finally thought to move the sump pump aside and, perhaps, bail the water out of the hole and into the washing machine. Now in my own defence (and under any other circumstances), that would have been a really good idea. However, the electricity was still out (thank God, or, like I said before, I would have been part of the mini armada which was by then navigating their way around my coffee table) and pounding on the washing machine didn‘t seem to be working. About the only other option left to me was to carry the water up the stairs and outside via two ten-gallon pails that just happened to be in the laundry room. So that’s exactly what I did…and the first indication that the storm was still raging came to me the moment I stepped outside. Even so, I knew I could do this - I could single-handedly save the basement and it’s contents. I could be a hero. I could do it all by myself. Besides, I won’t need to do it for long, I figured, because surely the hydro knows about the power outage and were already hard at work to fix it. By six o’clock that night I’d been reduced to a crying, soaked, cold, smelly, exhausted, shaking mess. But I was still bailing! Sure, my arms felt like rubber by then. Sure, I was only moving out of habit by then. Sure, I was struggling to carrying the two ten-gallon pails up the stairs and out into the driving rain while dying of dehydration by then. Sure, the toy and the mug were going around the room for the millionth time by then. But in the other race - the Me verses The Flood race - we were about even. And then it happened. There was a little candle, you see, and it was lit, and I’m pretty sure it was around that time that my mind started to go because all I remember is looking at it and wanting more than anything to knock it over. More, I could literally see myself knocking it over; and I remember thinking that all would take would be a little bump, a little nudge, and the problem would be solved - I could just walk away. I don’t know how long I looked at the little flame. What I do know is that it had been long enough for me to make a mental checklist of all the important things I’d have to remove from the house before the “accident.” But no, I couldn’t do that (could I?). So I went back to bailing again…until I happened to look up in time to see the hydro truck passing the house. The trouble was, it didn’t stop. Decency be damned; before I knew it I running down a gravel road in the dark, in a storm, with my hair plastered to my face, crying and waving and screaming, with nothing on but a soaking wet t-shirt and undies. For some reason, it took them a while to stop. Afterward, I put the candle away, glad that I hadn’t bumped it.

It turned out that the phone call was from a quasi friend of mine, another writer, who was finally going to take me up on one of those mysteries of life that rarely, if ever, come to fruition - the dreaded “Let’s have coffee sometime” comment, which is always followed by the obligatory smile and nod that in layman’s terms means: “As if.” Yet, there he was.

I know just what you’re thinking, ladies. Don’t think it hadn’t crossed my mind as well. I mean, a male that actually phoned? Even though he’s only a friend, that could upset the delicate balance in the universe, couldn’t it? The end of everything as we know it, perhaps…and I’d be held responsible. Oh the pressure. Oh the guilt. Chicken Little, you were right! The sky really is falling!

“How’s Sunday morning at ten sound?” he asked. “Tim Horton’s?”

“Sounds great,” I answered.

After I hung up, I had this insane notion to look out the window, just to see if everything was still where it should be. It was, but I was pretty sure he had tempted fate just enough to be stripped of his “Male” card and cast out among the shunned of this world.

Skipping ahead to Sunday…

I was twenty minutes late, and he was sitting in the curb beside his car and looking bored when I pulled up. After apologies and no problem fibs, we made our way inside, ordered, found a table away from everyone else and proceeded to brainstorm stories. Actually, he told me about his latest project while I mulled it over…until the end that is. The ending surprised me because it was predictable, cliché and boring as hell. In other words, it was not his usual at all and likely why he had broken the cardinal no-call rule.

“So, what do you think?” he asked, putting me on the spot.

Unfortunately, all I could think of was: If I only had a candle…