strike that

proof

Tonight as I was heading out to pick up juice and yogurt, I pulled the front door closed behind me and the knob fell right off. It was suddenly heavy in my hand and then it was falling and then there was a loud bang, and there I was standing in the dim glow of the porchlight, in shock from the noise, with my fingers outstretched.

I picked up the knob, an object I’d never noticed before, and pushed the door open, and stood confused for a moment – because I had been on autopilot, a simple plan for a run to the store, and suddenly this loud noise had thrown everything off, and the door could not be left. And in my confusion I looked up and Brad was sitting on the sofa with his laptop, and I smiled and held up the doorknob.

The next thing I know he is down on one knee and I am bringing him the screw from between the wooden slats of the porch, and he is aligning the screw hole and I am holding the handle just so, and then I am fishing a screwdriver out of our utility drawer and he is proclaiming There, that won’t fall off again.

I am an independent person; I can do all the daily shit that is required in the world. But I don’t always want to. Last month when my computer gave me the blue screen of death, all I could do was cry. Twenty percent over the potential loss of the computer and eighty percent at the prospect of having to call someone to fix it. In the end Jamey found a phonebook and did it for me.

This very afternoon I took my truck to a garage to check on the front tire’s slow leak, and it’s the sort of thing I hate. I hate that they will ask me questions like When did you last have your alignment checked? and What kind of new tire would you like? and I won’t know the answers to these questions. But I went – albeit weeks after first noticing the leak - and I answered as best I could, and I got the tire fixed. That took what I had for today, though, and it left me in a place where the smallest help with a doorknob was huge to me, and that’s so often how the equations of favors are: an effortless action on one end lifts a disproportionate burden on the other. The bizarre math of the universe of Other People.

posted by tortaluga @ 11:13 PM