I haven't been around here much lately. Well, I've been here, but my mind has been elsewhere. (I love that word: elsewhere. It's right up there with nevertheless. ) Worrying about Stella and Kelly, getting the kids ready for school, job hunting and feeling sorry for myself seem to be occupying all my brain space these days. I've been in a funk. Anxious about finding a job before my health benefits run out, wondering where to put the money I'm going to get soon, sure I'm going to make the wrong decision. My brain's tied up in knots.
So this morning, I dropped the kids off at their dad's for the weekend and as I was driving away this song was playing on the radio.
This is one of those songs that, when you hear it by chance, you're supposed to stop and look around you and see what kind of message the universe is sending you. And pay attention. And then act.
So I'm sitting at the light on a ridge looking out over the valley - at Valleyfair, it always seems like Brigadoon on foggy mornings like this, an amusement park, shrouded in mist, appears before you from another world - and the kind of car that I've been thinking about buying with some of the money turns in toward me from the left. Is this what the universe is trying to tell me? I should go ahead and buy this car? It's got all wheel drive and would be safer in the winter, and the automatic transmission would make my torturous daily commute a little less painful. (What kind of an idiot buys a stick shift car when they spend two hours a day in stop and go traffic on a four lane highway? This kind, right here.)
Or maybe I'm being given a sign that one of the jobs I applied for this week is going to work out. Maybe I'll get the call today. So I'm sticking with that thought as the light turns green and I pull out onto Flying Cloud Drive, which would be such a nice name for a road if I didn't have to drive on it so early every morning, when a garbage truck roars past and cuts me off. I pull into the other lane, still meditating on what message I'm being sent.
Suddenly, a piece of garbage flies off the top of the truck and whirls toward me. I flinch, it's round and metallic - am I about to be beheaded by a hurling hub cap? No time to react, I hold my breath, watching as it whips in the wind and shoots straight for my windshield - SPLAT. It is a pie tin. Pie residue spatters across my car and I realize as I exhale and turn on the wipers that the universe just got my attention and then threw a pie in my face.
