I find that the mellowness and calm reflective attitude that I expected would soothe me as I became older has yet to arrive.
Just yesterday I was doing my laundry and, because I found it hard to reach the clump of dried-out socks and undies plastered against the rear of the dryer’s interior, I knelt before the machine on the cold concrete floor of my basement, my bloodless knees painfully atingle.
In that awkward attitude I began to flail my arm wildly within the machine’s metallic insides, trying to reach the still piping hot clothes. The machine resounded like a kettledrum as my arm banged against the barrel-like spinner, the booms deafening me as I bruised my forearm, wrist, and hand by smashing them against the recalcitrant contraption. I wanted nothing more than to reduce my limb to a bloody, battered stump.
As I continued to kneel on the hard floor, my chest tightened up, exacerbating my asthma and onset pulmonary artery disease (diagnosis pending) so that I gasped for breath. The more I hurt myself, the angrier and more impatient I became, in a feedback loop of expanding outrage. By the time I finally grasped the hot wad of laundry and pulled it from the dryer, throwing it on the dirty floor in a fit of distemper, I was in tears and inconsolable about life’s injustices.
That experience should have taught me a lesson, but it did not. Before I had properly cooled down with a cup of tea and a chicory vape and some therapeutic flower gardening, I decided to search my refrigerator for a lemon.
I thought one lay on a shelf somewhere within the cold, dank confines that hummed so irritatingly, and in my impatience I used my head as a battering ram, thrusting my face onto shelves and into crispers with such force as to send my glasses flying and foodstuffs scattering.
With my nose and cheeks, I plowed through cans of ice-cold Hudepohl and crushed a Styrofoam container filled with leftover chicken tikka masala, spreading rice and chutney everywhere. When I finally located the clever lemon, who was hiding like a thief in the rear of the topmost shelf, my whole upper body was inside the fridge, save my arms and hands.
Holding the swinging door open with one hand, I tried to spear the yellow fruit or vegetable with my teeth, my swaying motions causing the enormous and weighty appliance to rock dangerously. When I finally withdrew my upper body from the cold interior—my free hand, which I had thrust into the freezer compartment, verged on frostbite—I had guacamole on my raw and reddened face, butter in my hair, salsa on my bent glasses, and I could only hurl the lemon, gripped in my unfrozen hand, against the kitchen wall for all the trouble it had caused me.
What was wrong with me? Something rotten in my disposition, most likely, that had stunk since childhood.
I was the same person I was in the third grade, when on Valentine’s Day years ago I had to sign my name to twenty or so celebratory cards, one for each of my classmates. I got tired of the exercise after about five cards and just scribbled on the rest.
When our teacher, Mrs. Riggs, handed out the cards, one kid asked why his card was covered with scribbles. Mrs. Riggs, who was on to me, glanced at him and glanced at me and said “Hush.” Maybe she thought I would stab her with my thick, clunky pencil unless she kept her mouth shut. Valentine’s Day in the third grade is an awful ordeal, and not just for me. You don’t actually love anybody, you just want the day to be done.
It was Franz Kafka, or someone saintly like him, who said that man’s greatest sin is impatience. I think I have that right, though I can’t say I knew the man. That’s probably a good thing. A testy Franz would have spat at me, and who needs his tuberculosis?
Michael Fowler writes humor and horror in Ohio. He has recent posts at Defenestration, Little Old Lady Comedy, and Chewers by Masticadores.
Featured photo by Alexander Zvir (Pexels)
