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For Cee’s View from the Side Challenge
Sideways glance: For Cee’s View from the Side Challenge
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Monthly Archives: May 2017
FORTUNATE MISFORTUNE
Having driven head-on into a concrete wall, I have worse wounds elsewhere, but this 9-inch abrasion on my neck caused by the seat belt is the most painful. Thanks, okcfm for suggesting aloe vera.
Fortunate Misfortune
I’ve been branded by good fortune, garroted and bruised
by the air bag that inflated and the seat belt that I used.
Why do I say thank-you, in spite of all my pains?
It could have been my spinal cord. It might have been my brains.
My car is not so fortunate. I fear its life has ended.
The impression the wall made on it they say cannot be mended.
Once more I’ve dodged a bullet. Once more I’ve stayed alive.
I’ve used up my sixth cat life in order to survive.
Cuts and bruises all heal up. A car can be replaced,
but I cannot overlook the lesson that I’ve faced.
I want to give up worrying about how life will end.
I have no need to worry. I have three lives left to spend!
Impression is today’s prompt word. It also seems appropriate for the later prompt, survive.
Tabachine: Flower of the Day, May 24, 2017
For Cee’s Flower of the Day, May 24,2017.
Tuesdays of Texture, Week 21, 2017
Frangipani: Flower of the day, May 23, 2017
My plumeria tree just keeps on blooming this year. The leaves are lusher than usual as well. I’ll try to enjoy them before the rains come and pick them all!
https://ceenphotography.com/2017/05/22/flower-of-the-day-may-23-2017-bearded-iris/
Brick Wall
cat·a·pult : a device in which accumulated tension is suddenly
released to hurl an object some distance, in particular.
Brick Wall
Two times in the kitchen—hurrying like a fool.
One time on the terrace when I tripped over a stool.
Three times in the hall when I stumbled on the stair.
The wall my forehead hit each time needed no repair.
Not so my skull which needs new paradigms inside
of how to live my life by slowing down my stride.
I am scared of my subconscious—it’s refusing to be tamed.
If I do not learn its language, I’m afraid I’ll soon be maimed.
When steps and mops in pails and stools taught me not at all,
my stubborn subconscious launched me at a wall,
totalling my car—a frighteningly close call.
Bruised and sore, I hear the words the doctor said,
“Take these pills two times a day and spend five days in bed.”
Six bad falls? One totalled car? I finally do the math.
Something wants to put obstacles in my path.
It says, “Take off the running shoes. Reduce those trips to town.
Loll around a few days more in your dressing gown.
Never do more than one thing. Give each thing its time.
To think I can do all of it is simply asinine.
Why do I think that I should be continually busy?
Why go up on ladders when I know it makes me dizzy?
The less I do it seems there are more I shouldn’t do’s.
Somedays it’s an adventure just locating my shoes
and cell phone and my glasses and finally, my keys.
Then I drive to town for broccoli and come home with blue cheese.
When did it get more difficult? It seems this is all new,
and yet I wrote about those falls a year ago or two.
A catapult propels one up over the wall
and over every obstacle that could cause a fall.
Why avoid the catapult? Why think that I should be
the person I was yesterday—that one no longer me?
Ironic that the catapult instructs me to slow down,
leave prat falls to the stunt man and the circus clown.
“Put some space around the things that you think you should do.
Take some time to hear what life’s trying to tell you.
All this beauty for your eyes yet often you don’t see it.
That same beauty within you waiting for you to be it.”
Catapult is the daily prompt, but this poem certainly also works for the prompt Reprieve.
Snipped Snafu
Has this Raquet Club employee watching my car being towed away been in the pool yet today? jdbphoto
I can’t imagine the snafus I must be making every time I speak Spanish. Oftentimes, it is the thing that breaks the ice and opens up the laughter. So it is with this translation of an otherwise unexciting Raquet Club quarterly report to members that I received in an email today. I quote:
- Since May 1, club workers are cleaned by the pool. The Board of Directors has noted that this measure has made it possible for the pool to have fewer leaves and less cloudy water.
What an excellent further use of the pool, but seems like it would create more leaves and cloudier water as surely some soap must be involved as well, don’t you think? And one would think the workers themselves would protest.
Now, please send me your own “snafus to share” in the comments below:
What Lesson Have I Learned?
Five minutes after I posted my last blog (which, along with yesterday’s blog post, dealt with mortality) when I was going to see a sick friend and giving Yolanda a ride to her next job, I ran head-on into a concrete wall and totaled my car. The engine caught fire and my door was jammed, as was the door of my passenger. We got one window open, finally, and then it occurred to me there was an override on the passenger door, so I clicked it and we both escaped.
Luckily my gardener was here and he drove me to my doctor’s office. I was afraid to move at all until someone showed me how to do so without risking damaging my spine, which was pretty excruciating by now. When after 5 minutes no one came out to help me, (It’s an emergency, Yolanda told them, and they answered that the doctor was with another patient!) I told Pasiano just to drive on to the Red Cross where with some effort and lots of pain and a back brace, I got out of the back seat of Pasiano’s car. (The front door doesn’t open.)
The X-ray tech and the on-call dr. showed me the X-rays, said there was a severe displacement of the spine and that they were calling in a neurosurgeon. Only then did I start to panic a small bit. “Breathe slowly,” I told myself and tried to go into a meditative state. Meanwhile, Yolanda unbeknownst to me, had left with my purse to go try to find my friend Audrey, who lives more than a mile away and who wasn’t answering her phone. It had been clear to me that when I called both her home and cell phone with no answer that she was probably at a rehearsal and definitely not at home, but Yolanda hadn’t consulted me regarding her decision and unfortunately, my insurance info was inside my purse and I didn’t have any numbers to call to tell me which hospital to go to in Guad. and what neurosurgeon they’d recommend.
A half hour later the surgeon arrived to tell me no surgery was necessary and that all of the places that hurt were just pulled or strained muscles or organs. He gave me two sets of little pills which I couldn’t take until I got home and had food to take them with.
Five hours since the collision event, the claims adjustor is here. He has affirmed the fact that my car is probably totalled. But . . . call me lucky. In addition to my sore neck and back, I hurt all over, have a seat belt burn from my shoulder, down my breast and to my waist, a severely bruised abdomen and stomach and two knees that don’t bend too well, but it will all mend. Five days in bed, the doctor instructed, and two of those little pills morning and night for seven days. Having taken one an hour or two ago, I am feeling floaty and I’m sure the adjustor thinks I’m flirting with him, but it is one of those little pills that is flirting with him if anyone/anything is! As the Raquet Club security arrives, and the guy with the fancy tow truck, I continue to babble on. Nothing like little magic pills to help one take such matters in stride. He seems to be enjoying it. I speak to him in Spanish and he answers in English!
Click first photo to see captions and enlarge photos. You’ll never know why the virgin is in these pictures if you don’t read the captions!
This little fella has graced the dashboard of every car I’ve had in Mexico for the past 16 years.
His passenger is the Virgin. Although I’m not religious, I am superstitious and I have a particular affinity for her
The virgin of Guadalupe also adorned the tow truck.
Full extent of the damage. My little car looks like a pug!
Very grateful for those inflation bags.
It was no easy task getting the car turned 90 degrees to get its tires to rollup the tow truck bed.
I went in to get a sheet of paper for the claims adjustor to write his phone number on and missed the final exit. Just as well.
okcforgottenman tells me he’s had an uneasy feeling all day since reading my poem. Coupled with the one I wrote yesterday, he had a premonition that something was about to happen. I can only say that if it had to happen, I’m so glad it happened in this particular way, where no one was hurt except my car and me. Something like this has to reaffirm the importance of this wonderful gift of life.
What walks on two legs and is black and blue all over? Me, until I get my rental car in up to 5 days. Since I’m supposed to stay in bed until then, I guess it’s no loss.
The daily prompt today is adrift
Sifting Time
Sifting Time
Suspended between her life and her death,
she measures the intervals from breath to breath,
noting the bed cover’s sinking and lift,
wondering when life will set her adrift.
After a lifetime of effortless health,
she is surprised by the contrasting stealth
and the strength of the grip of what waits at her ending,
no matter what care friends may take in her tending.
As the sands of her life escape through her fingers,
she treasures each grain that stubbornly lingers.
She cannot give up. She has to hold on
until the last grain is fallen and gone.
All of those pleasures that cling to her past
are pleasures now gone. Such pleasures don’t last.
Her life like a book, pages grown stiff with age—
it grows harder and harder to turn the next page.
Her life has turned gritty––a pain and a pleasure.
Each grain that remains both a curse and a treasure.
Afraid to give up what she has for what’s next,
she can’t see the ending. She can’t read the text.
There is no escape and there isn’t a cure,
and though every day goes by in a blur,
yet these last scraps of life still act as a lure
not to give up on life. To simply endure.
The prompt today is curiously similar to yesterday’s. It is “adrift.”
Red Eye Ivy Leaf Geraniums: Flower of the Day, May 22, 2017
I love these Red Eye Ivy Leaf Geraniums.
https://ceenphotography.com/2017/05/21/flower-of-the-day-may-22-2017-rhododendron/
lifelessons - a blog by Judy Dykstra-Brown 