Gob-Smacked

Gob-Smacked

If nothing else life is quirky.

Amidst the pain, joy, confusion, anger and self-doubt, is that which crops up every now and again and makes you think, “Whoa, that was random.”

The more extreme the random is, the more extreme the degree of quirkiness.

So now I behold my recent tech issues, combine them with a one chance in 26,575, and throw in a Holiday Season laced with turmoil because of the declining health of my mom, and we find the ultimate example of quirkiness.

First the tech: I recently replaced Terra Jean, my original MacBookPro, with Suzy Puente, and have been adjusting ever since. One idiosyncrasy is that I ended up with a different method of sending and receiving emails, one which indicated that I had close to 27,000 read/unread emails lurking about.

Did I care? I don’t know. Do they take up memory? I don’t know. Do I want to just dump them? I want to dump the face/book notifications but not the personal ones, like those from my sister JT. 

Of my eight sibs, JT is the only one with whom I carry on weekly correspondence. We are as close as the 360 days that separate us, indicates.

So in cogitating the matter, momentarily, I randomly opened one message from JT from Christmas-time, 2013, and perused its contents.

It was like getting gob-smacked in the face: Mama’s declining health, her need for full-time professional healthcare, the disagreement amongst siblings as to the best method to provide this care, all set two days before Christmas Day itself…it’s no wonder.

The email I had randomly selected (Freudian slip?) was lengthy, detailed and unemotional. It was like a detached summary and I will leave the contents unvisited except for the last sentence, “I even have a pretty gift for you which I cannot very well send…”

This time it was more like being face-punched. Pretty gift? For my sister who is 360 days younger than I? Maybe in a pretty box? Sitting amidst my Giants shrine? Ignored for a minute or two?

Uh, oh. Who turned on the sprinkler system? 

Got it. There isn’t one.

Much love, JT.