Not quite sunny, but not overcast exactly, not cold, but not exactly warm, this day certainly opened on an odd note, that was to develop into a strange melody with the passing of the hours. I had my coffee, but no breakfast, as I was headed for a mid-morning private yoga session with my teacher to work on headstand and to pick her brain about my sketchy plans to follow a course of yoga teacher training course leading to certification.
My teacher lives in an idyllic spot, all of it very conducive to the contemplative and restorative practice of yoga. Not surprisingly, my headstand studies went well, and there I was, upside down, feeling weightless and as if I could stay like that forever. In the end, though, the forever turned out to be closer to 10 minutes, plenty of time, though, to get things shaken up.
When the hour was up, I got in my car and feeling still weightless and floating in my own space of calm, I thought I would pull into the little shopping center on the way home and buy some groceries. I suddenly had plans for cooking a dinner that would much in taste that wonderfully satisfying feeling of weightlessness I just had.
Before going into the store, though, I though I would check my phone messages and emails. I have been jumping at any chance to play with my new Motorola DROID phone, and so I checked for messages and kept on checking and fussing with the phone all the way into the store. I then ambled around the aisles considering the offerings and resisting temptations – which is pretty much the same thing as considering the offerings, isn't it? I even called home to ask my son, off for the day from his studies, if he would like me to bring him home something special for lunch.
I went through the checkout line, gathered my groceries and reached for my car key in my purse, and when I couldn't find them there, I searched my pockets. No keys. Very odd. Odd enough to have it crash through my floating state like the proverbial ton of bricks.
There was only one other place to look for those keys. Yep, the car. In any place but Marin, I tell you, there would have been no car left to search. But here I was, in Marin, and there was my car, in the parking lot, the engine fully on and purring away, the radio blaring a piano sonata, and no driver inside – and no one around giving the spitting, vibrating, restless automobile even so much as a second look.
All the way home, I kept wondering if this was the first of many signs that old age has my number and is ready to take me down that fast slope of mental decline. Of course, that I had done this before in my 20s, when I wasn't standing on my head or getting obsessed with new gadgets, didn't seem to cheer me up.
Once I got home, it was time to give my son a ride to the auto repair shop to pick up his car that died on him yesterday. So off we go, with me at the wheel. I am still bummed about having forgotten the keys in the car with the engine going, when my normally taciturn son, with a tone of more-than-slight irritation chews me out for driving too fast. Ah, to go from being almost senile the hour before to driving like a reckless teenager … what can I say? Except that I was getting plenty ideas for a post in this month-long series of daily blogging.
Little did I know that the strange melody of this day was about to change keys on me again. Having dropped off my son, I was heading back home, and was almost at the turn off the main street when my car suddenly died. It lost power, without warning, without as much as even a small hiccup from the engine. And there I was, albeit in the right-hand lane, but still blocking traffic that kept streaming by me. I never had a car die on me in the middle of traffic before. But hey, these days, with AAA and cell phones, I wasn't to be there long, or was I?
I reached for my shiny new DROID, ready to call on it for once, for more than just play. I woke it up, gently, only to have it growl back at me with the message to plug it in because the battery power was running mighty low. By this point, whatever little lightness there was still left in the recesses of my skull from that marvelous headstand, was filling up fast with fear that sank my mood. Though I was stuck in the car in the lane right across a shopping center, with gas stations nearby, and only about 50 or 60 feet from the nearest turn off the main road, no one was about to stop and offer any kind of help. Of course, this is exactly why, just an hour before, my car parked in a shopping center with keys in it and fully running was never stolen either.
Luckily, I had placed the car charger for the phone in the glove compartment just yesterday, so I managed to plug the phone in and so make that call to triple A. And very nice young man showed up in 10 minutes, and in another 10 minutes the car was taken to the same repair shop from where I had just picked up my son. My son then had to come and get me in his freshly repaired car, all of which gave him an opportunity to give me a lesson in maturity by showing me what a cautious driver he had become. This from the kid who had done laps around the racing track in Las Vegas a couple of years ago and was dreaming of a career in the fast track. And, who also had more speeding tickets in his life then … let's not go there just now.
Well then, the DROID is getting juiced, the car is getting fixed, the sky is getting thicker with grey clouds and I am left to ponder the world and my place in it, once again, standing on my two feet, as I should have been all along as soon as I brought the very same feet down from their privileged perch in headstand.
