I thought I was prepared for last Friday, its being Friday the 15th and all. It was close enough to Friday the 13th to give me bad luck all day. And it was just around the corner from the Ides of January, reminding me that not even Julius Caesar himself could escape the Ides.
It wasn’t Friday the 13th, though, and it wasn’t the Ides of January. March 15 it would have been the Ides, but the Romans had their own ways of counting things and so made the 13th the Ides in most other months. Caesar had been warned to beware the Ides of March, and then he turned up on the Senate floor, a well-drained pinata at a Roman toga party.
My troubles Friday were only minor, but they lasted all day. They started at once.
I had arisen early so I could visit my doctor’s office before work. I was putting my leftovers from supper into little plastic containers for my lunch. I dropped a loaded container all over the floor. I salvaged only a little of its spaghetti.
At the doctor’s, I realized that the lab results I had been handed the day before by Thursday’s doctor were nowhere in sight. I had left them at the house. The nurses had to drain more blood from my arm, making it two days in a row. I really felt like Caesar now.
At work, a colleague and I decided to make a fresh pot of coffee (black coffee is beneficial to the health, my doctor had said).
I hadn’t used the pot in a while, though, and it was, after all, Friday and nearly the 13th and nearly the Ides, so the brewing began before I had put the carafe back into the machine. Coffee spurted everywhere. It took the both of us and a redwood of paper towels to mop it up.
I drank my coffee at my desk, looked down and saw that I had somehow written a huge flourish across my pants with an ink pen. Black on khaki, kind of tacky.
I microwaved my lunch and sat back at my desk. The next time I looked down, a splatter of spaghetti sauce, meat and all, had joined the ink on my pants leg. Hello, greasy spot.
The doctor had told me to avoid cream and sugar, but I found a packet of honey and stirred it into the cup, knowing full well that honey is just as bad as sugar. But I was safely out of the doctor’s sight.
A short time later I noticed a stream of honey running down the side of the mug, where I had nearly missed the cup. Not only that, but my hand was sticky, and I thought back a few minutes to when I had met someone in another office and shaken his hand. With my sticky hand.
Frustrated, I scratched my head. With my honey hand. Now, sticky hair.
The week had begun so much better. JoAn and I became great-grandparents for the first time. Granddaughter Madison and Mitchell gave us Mason (a couple of letters short of Madison, not to mention “m’son”; we joked that a girl would have been “m’daughter”).
Reach Glynn Moore at glynn.moore@augustachronicle.com.
