Each Day

Welcome to a mostly Southpaw edition of the Nexus of Improbability.

Saturday began like any other. I had all but washed a bad movie and the stress of a challenging week from my mental palette by laughing my @$$ off at Dane Cook: Vicious Circle before going to sleep, and I awoke to a bright, sunny day and three day's of freedom.

“Guess where your father is?” was the second thing my mom greeted me with when I stumbled into the kitchen. The first was, “What happened to your hair? Go look in the mirror,” but bedhead isn't relative to this tale.

My dad may have a heart condition, but otherwise he rarely gets sick. The last few days though he's been sporting the cold I had last weekend, so of course he was outside chipping ice. Yet surprisingly, when I headed out the door to help him, he was coming inside already.

“Where are you going? You can't do nothing; it's frozen. Forget about it.”

“I need the exercise.”

So, I took the metal shovel and ice pick, and set out to open up our driveway, even as he shook his head.

He had already succeeded in smoothing out the uneven snow where we had been plowed in, but a good six inches of snow and ice still engulfed our driveway and yard. We're just going to have to drive on top of it until it gets warmer. I did my best, and I cleared some ice from the edges and shaved it down, but the stuff was solid. I gave up after fifteen minutes and moved on with my day.

After eating breakfast, watching my tape of the morning's cartoons, and catching the latest new episode of Day Break online, I drifted off into an unplanned nap for an hour or so. In my dream I was Michael Scofield, a fugitive trapped in a garage with my brother. The police showed up and arrested everyone outside, but we hid until they were gone, then hot-wired a car and raced off, presumably to meet my girlfriend, Dr. Sara Tancredi.

“I'M LEAVING FOR CHURCH IN FIFTEEN MINUTES; ARE YOU GOING TO BE READY???”

Still groggy, I soon found that a bigger irritation than my mom's bad timing was a stiffness in my right elbow. I wondered if I bumped it when I hid under those fuel drums in the garage, even as I adjusted to reality. It felt a little bruised but there was no mark, and I could move my arm freely.

In church, our pastor dropped a bit of a bombshell during his homily, casually delivering the news that the bishop was reassigning him to another parish, at some point between now and June. He didn't know where he was going or when specifically. Apparently pastors serve terms of six years, at which point they can opt to renew their appointment or move on to a new assignment. Father Mike had been with us for nineteen years, which was astounding to me. I remember other priests before him, and thought he joined our community near the end of the eight years that I was an altar server. I remember him officiating when my parents renewed their vows on their 25th wedding anniversary. I remember my dad going to a more traditional church, because “this guy tells too many jokes!” I remember when the new pastor, a bearded Dave Thomas lookalike, first arrived, but I didn't realize it had been almost two decades ago, two thirds of my life.

He went on to talk about life, and the unexpected, and how we need to look at each day as a gift. We wake up, and thank God that we're breathing on another fine day. He said this slightly sarcastically, intimating that while we should greet life like this, realistically most of us do not. Change is hard to initiate, and harder to face when we have no choice in the matter. People have lost their jobs at every place I've ever worked. Some deserved it, like a thief at the gas station. Most were simply victims of economic cutbacks, and didn't even see it coming. So, to some degree, with each job I've survived, I found myself grateful for each day I was still employed after others weren't. I know someday the same thing might happen to me, but every day is one more.

It's hard to separate each day, to wake up and say, “Thank God! Today is going to be great!” We get weighed down by responsibility and routine, and I find that days blur together, differentiated only by what's on television or what my mom's cooking for dinner. There's a week and there's a weekend, and those are two large masses of days mushed together. I think the trick is perception, and focusing on positive things. This past week on Scrubs for example, J.D. learned the valuable lesson that the less he complained about and wallowed in his problems, the less problematic and insurmountable they seemed.

After mass, we teased my dad that the priest was being reassigned to his parish. Meanwhile, my elbow pain had gotten worse, radiating from the bottom of my elbow down to my wrist and fingers. It hurt to bend my arm, and while I still had mobility in my hand, I wasn't sure that it wasn't swollen.

“I don't know what I did to my elbow...” I mused aloud, wincing as I tried to force it to bend. “You probably hurt it chopping that ice,” offered my dad, “I told you it was frozen.”

My dad was right; that ice was frozen. I'm not sure why it took hours later for any muscle strain to show up, but it was as likely a theory as bumping my elbow in my sleep while dreaming about being on the lam. My arm isn't completely useless and I can sort of type, but every once in a while I accidentally bend it and see stars.

Each day is a gift. It brings new hopes and dreams, and it's one more day that we're alive on this Earth. There will be challenges and pain, and no matter how we greet the morning we may look back at night and think, “that's rough” or “this place is killing me” or simply, “Ouch.” A day can get away from us when we aren’t looking. Of course, the next day we might find injuries healed or healing and cold symptoms fading. We might wake up with a different attitude entirely. If at first you don't today, tomorrow, tomorrow again.