Camel Down

“I can’t . . . do this . . . ALONE!”  

I stared in disbelief at the chaos lying on the dog-hair covered floor. All I did was hang up one more shirt on a rolling clothes rack that’s tucked into the corner of my little apartment and realized, too late, it was literally the straw that broke the camel’s back. There was a loud SNAP! and my four-foot-tall rack was reduced to four and a half inches.

Tears and sobs erupted as I stood there in my pajamas at bedtime. Alone with a minor inconvenience that felt as catastrophic as a Mount St. Helens eruption, I wept in the room again, “I can’t do this alone!”

Then I did it alone.

I was angry, but I did it, saying all the while, “I guess I can do this. I can do this. I’m doing this!” I picked up handfuls of hangered garments, threw them across the sofa and a couple of chairs and finally reached the traitorous pile of poles that lay askew beneath everything instead of standing tall and proud the way they were supposed to. The metal poles pointed to the real culprit in it all – a flimsy plastic joint that had snapped under the overwhelming weight it was never meant to carry.

I hate it when my furniture behaves like me.

The next morning, I stood on the driveway talking with my daughter, Katy, telling her about the late-night drama in my room. “Oh, no, Mama,” she sympathized.

“I had a little temper tantrum,” I said. The corners of her mouth turned up the way her dad’s used to, barely concealing a smile.

“Then I had a fight with your father,” I added, and the smile went full-scale grin. “I feel really silly doing that,” I admitted, easy to understand since her father, my husband, rests in peace in faraway Florida. Another brilliant move on his part. There isn’t always a lot of peace these days if you hang around me. 

“I have to do everything myself now, I told him, all of it while my heart is shattered. It’s like learning to walk again but without legs. Learning to breathe without lungs.”

 My wise daughter nodded, waiting for the rest of the story.

“Meanwhile,” I’d said to Rob, “you’re busy flying around heaven, having tons of fun with absolutely no idea of what I’m going through.” At that point I’d thrown another shirt on a chair. “I’m tired of talking to you, Rob,” I finished. “I’m going to bed. Just . . . go off and enjoy another conversation with Moses or Abraham or Pharoah or somebody, although Pharoah probably isn’t there.”

Looking at my daughter, I confessed, “I worry about my sanity sometimes, Kate.”

Katy, so much like her dad, was chuckling, picturing me telling Rob to go find some ancient prophet to hang out with and leave me alone. “I think, Mom, when I hear you say things like that to Dad, that he’s probably cracking up the way he always did when he got tickled by something. I bet his face was turning red and he was laughing so hard he couldn’t breathe.”

She’s probably right. My one-sided fight with him sounded a lot like all the other one-sided fights we used to have. I always thought it was because he avoided conflict. But maybe it was just because he was laughing so hard inside, he couldn’t answer me.

Nothing ever got the best of Rob McLeod. Not my temper. Not the opinions of others. And now, I am realizing, not even death.

He’s still my hero.

With thanks to Adair Broughton for permission to use the photo seen above. The original can be viewed from this link: camel bow | my humps, my humps, my sexy camel humps? | adair broughton | Flickr