I woke up this morning — better would be to say, “I extracted myself from a comfortable and warm bed simply because a loud noise urged me to and not because I was, say, ready” — and dressed quickly before heading down the hallway to the kids’ room to get them up for school.
I walked into the room and thought, Why are their beds empty? I was very confused by this — surely I would have heard them if they were downstairs watching TV, wouldn’t I? (What didn’t dawn on me until later: the odds that they would pass by my room without paying me a loud visit were nil. Or lower.) They weren’t downstairs. They weren’t in their beds. They weren’t on the floor. Where in the hell were they? I didn’t freak out, precisely, but I was certainly on the periphery of it.
Then I realized they were in bed: both of them were sleeping with all of their covers drawn up over them, so that it looked like their beds were made. I pulled the sheet down from Sophia’s face and said, “Time to get up, honey.” She grunted and pulled the sheet back up. It took quite a bit of cajoling. I am so glad I make them take out their clothes the night before or we would have been there forever. Zeus Almighty, that momentary panic took a few years off my life.
I understand the problem of wondering what happened to the kids will get worse during their teenaged years when they actually will be gone from the room.
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A friend of mine IM’d me the other day with a link to a news story from about 10 years ago about a white collar criminal who made off with over a million dollars… but then got caught. I pinged back saying, “WTF? Who cares?” My friend then pointed out that we knew the guy. I hadn’t known what his full name was.
Oh my God.
He did what?
I am by no means pals with this guy. We know one another’s names and see one another once in a while. But still: I liked him, I liked talking to him, I never would have thought he was the kind of guy who could do something like this. At no time did my spidey sense tingle. And maybe it shouldn’t have: after all, he’s done his time, and the way I know him has nothing to do with doing crimes. It’s none of my fraking business, right?
But wow. I am stunned. Finding out stuff about people — thanks to the Internet, things need never put behind us again! — completely changes how you think about them. I mean, am I going to be able to have a conversation with this guy again? In fact, am I going to want to go to the get-togethers he puts on?
I know we don’t believe in redemption or rehabilitation in this country — we say we do, but we lie like little rugs on the floor. I just never realized how much I didn’t believe it.
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Is it scary or wrong of me to want one of these?