My partner Kathy has a cousin who believes that she can't ride in a car because she will cause all of the gauges to go haywire. I must admit, I've been skeptical about this. For one thing, she also believes she can tell your birthday simply by shaking your hand. For another thing, she continues to ride in cars anyway, and she seems to get where she needs to go. Also, it sounds a little like something Mulder and Scully might have investigated.
However, this past year, I've started to think that perhaps I've come down with a touch of what Kathy's cousin has. We have had to replace, so far this year, the dryer, the TV, the laptop, the alternator on the car, the VCR, and the answering machine, and now the refrigerator isn't sounding so good. It's like it's studying to be a helicopter when it grows up. The TV we knew was old...I bought it from Sears several years before I even met Kathy, and it was barely new enough to accommodate such modern technologies as VCRs. The laptop, too, was pretty ancient, as these technologies go: I like to think of it as the caveman model, as it looked like something that might have been carved from stone and was about that heavy. I think it was the one they used in a Flintstone's episode. The dryer, in contrast, we tended to think of as new because we bought when we moved into the house...13 years ago!
While the VCR and the answering machine really were pretty new, it might be unclear, so far, whether I was the problem or whether it was Kathy...after all, it's her cousin who has the unfortunate condition that started me on this path in the first place. The first day of November, however, there came definitive proof that it is me who is the problem: my hard drive at work had a nervous breakdown, became completely catatonic, and had to be put to rest. They tried valiantly to revive it, but in the end, they had to give me a new one. I can feel your skepticism as I write this. You're thinking it was probably, like every other appliance or piece of electronic equipment in my life, old. But I'd had it less than six months...a fact that registered shock on the IT guy's face, who says it should have lasted three years.
If I were a less optimistic person, I could put a negative spin on this, but because I am basically good natured ( don't believe a word Kathy tells you otherwise! ) , I like to think that what's at work here is my magnetic personality ...which also accounts for the dog hairs and pillow feathers that chronically stick to me as well as the way the mildly insane seem to be drawn to me. Alternatively, I could take this as a sign that I have too many material possessions and become a Buddhist or a nun. I would rather, however, like to think that this quirk of my chemical makeup or, if you insist, this twist of fate is causing us to go out and do our patriotic duty and single-handedly pump up our sagging economy.
Of course, after the events of September, it feels rather shallow even to be concerned with material goods at all. I remember how disdainful I was, years ago, when I read Paul Monette's whining complaints about "the Jag" being in the shop again in his memoir about his lover's death from AIDS. His anguish about his partner was undeniable, but it's hard to be too sympathetic to someone who has a Jaguar...the most gaudy of their possessions...when so many others deal with AIDS and other life-threatening circumstances huddled around a Formica table in a housing project or out on the streets. And the fact of the matter is, it's just "stuff" I lost this year. My family is still intact and my loved ones are all well. So if the refrigerator decides to follow its housemates to that great junkyard in the sky, taking all of our milk and ice cream and spring greens with it, I won't complain...even though there is cappuccino gelato in there right now.
And when you and I meet and you feel yourself drawn to me, you'll know why.
