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2000-01-31

If I were titling these entries, this one would be called "Minor Injuries." What's weird about mine at present is how they are paired.

A few weeks ago we returned some wedding gifts and used the credit to get, among other things, a vegetable slicer. It's made in China, comes with delightfully mis-translated instructions, and sharp as hell. Despite all the delightfully mis-translated warnings to watch the fingers, I managed to slice off the very tip of my nail and a sliver of accompanying flesh sometime last week. Then last night, slicing yellow squash and zucchini, I noticed some streaks of red. I'd done it again, this time on the very top of the finger, the spot that requires two band-aids: one across the top and a second around. It's surprisingly painful.

Then this morning. Yesterday we had a day of freezing rain. I went out fully intending to drive to work, feeling actually a bit eager to get back after the weather-induced cabin fever of the past week. The front steps were covered with ice but I clutched the rail. Then, walking across the concrete driveway to the car, I slipped and fell. (Does anything take you back to young childhood faster than a fall?) I landed on my knee. It hurt.

I scrambled upright and came back into the house. Got the sympathy I sought from B--he is wonderfully sympathetic--and asked whether he'd back the car out of the driveway for me. He offered to drive me to work, which I gratefully accepted. We got there in little more than the usual time (20 or so minutes of highway driving), arriving at around nine. At ten he called from the car to say he was only halfway home--having gotten caught in horrific traffic. At eleven he called from home, having just arrived.

I felt terrible about destroying his morning and asked a guy at work for a ride home. That was sort of interesting. They recently distributed a list of home addresses and phone numbers at work; of the fifty or so employees, only three of us live in my town, so I noted this one guy, whose address is just a couple miles from mine. I'd barely spoken to him before--standard for the stony workplace culture--but he seemed slightly more human than most there. He said he actually has been living with his girlfriend in a different town for the past year but kept his apartment in my town and was heading there today to pick up his mail, so everything worked well. We chatted as we drove, him confessing that it was probably "bad" of him to have hung onto his apartment but that he just wasn't ready to take the plunge. I told him it didn't sound bad at all, that in my observation people often take the plunge prematurely.

When I got home something told me it would be nice to take the dogs out as neither of us had walked them since Saturday owing to the ice. I figured things were sufficiently melted but got maybe a fifty yards from the house and then slipped and fell again, on the same knee. Now I have one bruise on top and one soon to come below.

It's hard not to feel like these second two injuries--same finger, same knee--are something I could've avoided. You know, learn from your experience. But I guess I just didn't.

*

Today I called the airline to make reservations for my fifteen-year college reunion. It's not until Memorial Day but I'm using frequent flyer miles (frequent charger in my case) and know those get snatched up early. I haven't been to any of the earlier reunions nor even considered them. This time, however, I feel ready. My friend Susan is planning to go, but even if she backs out, I am ready to return to a place about which I have such very mixed and largely unhappy memories. (I'll get into them another time.) Susan said she was waiting to go back to a reunion until she was either married or had a cool job. She's single but her current job is very cool.

I doubt I'd be quite so eager to go were I not married (as we all know, my job is far from cool). B won't join me, though. I wouldn't subject him to it--he'd be far happier here with the dogs--and I think this is a task best accomplished alone. I want to walk the paths I walked so often back in 1980 to 1984; there are some ghosts I think I'll be able to exorcise. I'm only planning to be there for a day; I think that should be plenty.

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