The Thursday Threesome
Onesome. The Good. Read a good book lately? Recommend a recent read - as well as your favorite book of all time. The last book I finished was "The Talbot Odyssey." It was a real page-turner and very thought-provoking. My favorite book of all time is "Gone With the Wind." I like to read it again every few years.
Twosome. The Bad. Was it so bad that you couldn't watch anymore? Tell us about a bad movie - did you leave or suffer through it? The worst movie I ever saw in a theater was that Harrison Ford/Anne Heche fiasco. Six Days and Seven Nights or Seven Days and Six Nights or some such thing. I hated it so much I'm not even going to waste my time looking up the correct name. I remember looking at my watch to get an idea if it might be over soon and being stunned to learn I'd been watching it for only a little less than 30 minutes. I didn't leave though. I kept thinking to myself "Harrison Ford's in it. It's got to get better soon." It never did.
Threesome. And The Ugly. And then things turned ugly.... Oh, have a day (or date) seem to go so horribly wrong it can only be described as "ugly"? Tell us all about it. I've been sitting here thinking about this one for quite a little while. There have been events that have been ugly, but never really entire days. It wasn't too long ago that I wrote about the date from hell/boyfriend from hell or something like that, so I don't want to do that again. But August 20, 1999, comes to mind. Around noon that day, rain started pouring down really hard. But there was no wind. The clouds weren't moving. They stayed over the area and the rain just kept falling and falling and falling. Around 1 p.m. my now-ex-husband came home from running some errands, told me East Main Street was flooded more than usual and part of it was blocked off so he couldn't get to the bank to deposit his check. But he said it looked really cool and asked if I wanted to go take a look. I did. We figured we'd also take an alternate route to the bank. By the time we got there (5 minutes later) the street was like a raging river and more water was flowing hard and heavy off the hills/side streets. We went home. Fast. Our basement had already started flooding. The ex started freaking out. I started freaking out because I wanted to go to work. It was my day off, but I knew I should be there because in a natural disaster there are always more stories to write, more people to talk to, more things that have to be done. But the ex was freaking so badly that I didn't dare leave. The ex and a neighbor started using buckets to get the water out of the basement, but it was coming in too fast for them to keep up and it was inching toward the fuse box. There had been reports on the radio saying that if you needed your electricity turned off, call the fire department. I did. Several times. They finally showed up about the time the rain stopped. But after the rain stopped, I would have thought the ex would calm down a bit. But no. That's not how his paranoid schizophrenic mind works. During the couple weeks leading up to the flood, he'd been digging in the backyard, which is adjacent to a wooded hill that is part of a national forest. For more than an hour he insisted that he was going to get arrested for (and this is an actual charge in Pennsylvania. I don't know if it is in other places.) risking a catastrophe. In his mind, he thought it was his digging that caused the entire city and surrounding areas to flood. Somehow I got him calmed down enough to call his foster mother who is a minister. She prayed with him and that seemed to help for a while. Until we decided to go get some food before cleaning up what we could and assessing the damage. Since we didn't get to the bank, we didn't have any cash on hand, or food, and now all branches of our bank were inaccessible, so we couldn't use an ATM. So we decided to go the grocery store where we had a check cashing card and get something from the deli. As we drive down that street, we see all kinds of bags, boxes and cans of food all along the side of the road. We get to the grocery store parking lot and see yellow caution tape. The roof of the building caved in from the weight of the water. So, the ex starts freaking again thinking the grocery store owners are going to sue him because he started the flood. Somehow I calmed him down yet again and managed to get him to help me dig through the car for any loose change we could find. We found enough to buy sandwiches, chips and soda at the closest convenience store. (All the fast food places were closed.) So, we get home. Eat. Talk. Listen to the radio. Find out just how much the initial damage estimates are. I try reasoning with him to make him realize he didn't cause the flood. It actually worked that time. But just about the time we were going to try to get some sleep and put off everything else til morning, it started raining again. But even though it was just light sprinkles, he started freaking again. I couldn't deal with it anymore. I fell asleep on the couch. He stayed up all night watching the rain.
No comments:
Post a Comment