Everyone Knows It's Windy

I set the microwave for 3:30 because my soup only has to be so hot and by 3:45, I could be dead already. Life is short. There's no need for me to burn the roof of my mouth unless the part of the food touching my tastebuds is going to make me wish I had two tongues.

This morning, I was ready to leave my house well before I had to but every nervous glance out the window made something inside my apartment unbearably attractive. I read the toothpaste label. I folded things that were already folded. I changed my socks twice. I caught me at this game and had a stern discussion with her.

Tata: Stop dicking around with that sponge. Scour the stovetop a fourth time later! Put your coat on and go to work! Do you know how fortunate you are? You have a job. Lots of people would love to have your job. And look at your apartment! It looks like a snowglobe exploded in a tinsel factory. And how about your cat, huh? Think you're going to get a NEA grant to cover that disgusting medicine? Go to work!
Tata: I don't want to go!
Tata: You're going!
Tata: Where've I heard that before?

Outside, it was raining fitfully and even with the wind the temperature was a lot higher than I expected. To cheer myself, I tossed another four grocery bags' worth of my old life into the dumpster. Joy! The road out of my complex was littered with small and not so small sticks. I crossed the Raritan River at the Albany Street Bridge and noticed hunks of stuff flying way above traffic in the stiff winds. On Johnson Drive, I recognized that flying stuff as construction materials when some landed behind me. At the intersection of Hamilton and George, where I turn, a university truck was making what looked like a labored K-turn. Then the driver parked. I shouted at him, then saw behind him one of the huge trees in front of Ballantine Hall broken into huge, woody florets, if you will, and blocking the road. Crews were just arriving with chainsaws. I later told Daria.

Tata: Suddenly there's this concrete demonstration of precisely how fortunate I am.
Daria: Good lookin' out with the stalling tactic.
Tata: Thanks! I was surprised my tantrum paid off. How will I know from now on whether I'm being bratty or having a danger-averting psychic vision?
Daria: Your dosage.
Tata: Yeah, so on Hamilton Street, one of those public garbage can lids - one of those big metal ones - was sitting in the middle of the street.
Daria: Get out! Like a dumpster?
Tata: No, no, like a public trash thing. They're on every city corner.
Daria: Yeah yeah, the middle of the street?
Tata: Yup, and on College Avenue, trash bags and plastic garbage cans were thrown all over the place. Where I parked my car, traffic department sawhorses were blown down and aluminum siding panels lay on the ground. The walk from my car to the front door seemed very, very long.
Daria: You were perfectly safe, what with flying monkeys.
Tata: If you see the bottom of a house: duck!

In point of fact, no one's dropping a house on my sister. Luz, the woman who sometimes babysits her kids is the mother of one of Daria's many ex-fiances. Between Daria and Anya, I bought four bridesmaid dresses I never wore to weddings. Anyway, Luz was really sick and needed to see a doctor and the doctor was on one of those corners in New Brunswick where you don't slow down even if the light's red. Daria and her three kids dropped Luz at the doctor's office and waited two and a half hours for Luz in the Ford Expostulator. If anyone else I knew did that, I'd put DYFS on speed dial.

Anyway, my soup's slurped, my lunchtime's over and my coffee's cold. Evidence of my good fortune is everywhere, when I look for it. My co-workers and I went to Piscataway for a meeting and got blown about some in the rain, but even so we were wildly lucky when a passerby stopped his Jeep to retrieve our crooked umbrella. My new assistant, who speaks five languages and could snap me like a twig intellectually, finds me leafing through a dictionary. "You know many words," she says, one hand on my shoulder. I am wearing a ruby-red velvet shirt. My Magic 8 Ball refuses requests.