Things that Make You Cranky

Write something.

Start by thinking that it is beautiful outside. And cool, with a brisk wind. The daffodils are swinging in the breeze. Start by thinking that this would be a delightful way to start a post.

Go to turn on the computer so you can write this and spill your tea. A good half a cup of it  slowly drifts across the table toward all the important electronics that people have stowed there: your son’s fancy, treasured headphones. Your daughter’s professional camera that she bought with her own money after working at a trendy pizza restaurant last summer. The ancient iPad, that your son is now using because his phone is broken in a big way.

About the phone?

His old one: very broken. Half the screen is dark. He is 16. This is a crisis.

He finds a reasonable replacement with the added bonus that, “Mom! It is 5G!” This means nothing to you. Who cares about the 5G? But he is so excited, and his new phone arrives in the mail yesterday from a trusted seller on Swappa. You have had such good luck with Swappa. You buy all your replacement phones and devices there. You have even used this seller before!

Except somehow, this particular phone was reported as lost or stolen, so Verizon won’t activate it. Your son has been so anxious to get this phone. Your husband takes time off work to drive him to the Verizon store to see if they can sort it out.

As it turns out, they cannot.

Swappa and the seller respond quickly to emails. They apologize. It’s not the kind of thing that happens! They say. Except it did. So now you have to go to the post office, get a small priority mail shipping box, and send it back to the seller with a copy of the email so that they can correctly credit your account. Also? The hunt for a reasonably priced phone with the 5G continues.

It is a bother.

This is life. You sit and want to think about daffodils and the breeze. You end up panicking and racing to the kitchen and getting a dish towel and mopping up the mess and checking the electronics that were sitting on the table to make sure none of them got wet.

You sit again. Take a breath. Notice  the birds are at the feeders, like they are most mornings, and feel happy that the perennials are starting to come back to life, including the little Japanese maple tree which has just been a twiggy thing for years. Also, possibly? Two of the three trees that you planted that arrived in a long box from the Arbor Day Society a couple of months ago.

They seem to possibly maybe have buds? Which is fantastic news. Because the ones that you planted a year ago from the Arbor Day Society? Nothing. They were just little sticks with withered roots when they arrived, and that’s all they were months later when you hesitantly poked at them to see if they had any life in them.

Now there are buds. Maybe. Could also be your imagination. Time will tell.

But don’t check the news.

Because while daffodils and birds save you, the news is not so good today. You don’t know how to respond to the mass shooting  at a supermarket in Colorado. Or the shootings at the spas in Georgia. Or the heartbreaking news of a local boy, just out of high school, who was involved in a fatal car crash the other day not far from where you used to live. It was early morning; he veered into the wrong lane. He hit a car coming the other way. A woman died at the scene. Alcohol or drugs were not involved, the highway patrol said.

You know this young man, not well, but that doesn’t matter, because you can imagine the agony he is feeling, and his family, and the family of the woman who died down an embankment on that country road, a road that you’ve driven hundreds of times, early in the morning, less than a week ago.

You are not in charge of anything cosmically important, and it’s a good thing. The earth keeps turning, the seasons change, our hearts beat: you are not responsible for any of this. But if you had some kind of big power, you might send every baby to earth with a special “time change chip,” something that would give them a chance, just one time, to turn the clock back thirty seconds or so.

It seems like these time chips would be very helpful in preventing catastrophic car accidents and forest fires and loss of life from untold natural disasters.

If someone at P G &E could have turned off power to the line that sparked the Paradise fire (or any of our other recent life-stealing fires where they had culpability, and there have been a few) thirty seconds before the fire started, the town of Paradise would still be standing, no? Or these time chips could help you avoid meeting someone at a party who would turn out to be a terrible stalker person and would ruin your life. Or maybe you just miss connecting with someone that might have been your forever soul mate, and you go back thirty seconds and run into them after all. There would be good things that would happen that we somehow missed. There would be terrible things we could avoid.

You do not have this power, though. The terrible keeps happening, all around. People go shopping on a Monday afternoon and get gunned down in the cereal aisle. People live in golden California in the age of global warming and wake up early one morning to a fire that kills dozens of their neighbors and destroys their entire town. People drive on a road that you’ve driven a thousand times, and this time, they don’t make it home. You spill your tea, and it floods the table and threatens the electronics. Your son’s new phone is locked and has to be returned. This makes you cranky, until you realize that it is not a thing. It is nothing. It is nothing at all.