Les Bonnes Choses

I had been refraining from posting anything lately for fear of making anyone feel bad about themselves after reading about my fabulous life. But alas, the amazing All-Clad brushed stainless steel 4-quart saucepan that I finally selected from Williams-Sonoma for my birthday gift from my family is probably more than outweighed by the fact that my motorcycle ended up being a writeoff, despite that the damage was basically limited to broken plastic. Stupid plastic. Sportbikes look cool and I think are more my style, but all that plastic is damn fussy. Still, I think I made the correct choice in doing everything I could to keep my bike upright rather than wiping out on the road. My bike would have been in better shape, but at the expense of my right leg. As it happened, the worst injury I sustained out of the whole thing are the welts from the fabric bandage that I applied to my shin -- yep, it looks like I'm still allergic.

There was a brief moment just a few days back that my life nonetheless seemed like a dream. I don't mean to disappoint those of you interested in metaphor (even the cliched kind), but I mean this quite literally. The local community (and I mean really local) is centered around the park behind our house.

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There is a long-standing tradition whereby one of our neighbours puts up a large screen just in front of an earthen mound in the middle of the park and shows a movie. In previous years, this has happened on Labor Day weekend. For whatever reason, this year's Movie in the Park feature was delayed until last Sunday, when he produced the showing of the original Ghostbusters movie. The movie ran between 7 and 9 pm but, because of the time of year, and because we are at the Eastern edge of the Central timezone, it may as well have been midnight. We eventually managed to convince Jude to go out to the park by telling him about the marshmallow man, and were able to catch the last third of the movie. Jude wasn't especially interested in the movie itself, so we entertained him on the swings and the teedee-todder and watched the film from a short distance. It was as I was gliding back and forth on a playground swingset in an eerily lit park in the middle of an oddly warm November evening that I found myself unable to shake the feeling that I was in the middle of a remarkably lucid dream from which I could not wake. If only there were a midget in the park, then I could have been completely flummoxed.