Re-wired

I’m not an electrician, but I can make the connection between throwing a switch and hearing the blender turn back on. I know there are red wires and yellow wires and white wires and maybe green wires, and if you mix up the colors when you hang up a fan, the house could blow up. I know I shouldn’t use a blow dryer in the bathtub because I read the warning on the label. (I don’t have a bathtub anyway, so I’m safe.) Here’s what I don’t understand. If my blow dryer won’t turn on in the master bathroom, why do I have to run down the hall to the guest bath and push that little reset button thingy? Shouldn’t it be in the same room where I keep my blow dryer?

And why do I have so many light switches in my new house? Why aren’t they labeled? Shouldn’t they be color coded, too, just like their inner wires so I’d know, for example, that the brown switch goes to the brown fan? That would make life easier. As it stands now, every time I think I’m turning on the living room light, the outside floodlights wake up my neighbors. But if I flipped every switch at once just to make sure the pendant lights came on, I’m pretty sure you’d be able to see my house from outer space.

It makes me wonder if my house was wired backwards. I’ve wondered the same thing about me lately.

Grief makes you feel like your brain has a short in it. It turns out that’s normal. I just discovered that the reason it takes so long to recover from the traumatic loss of someone who was your entire world is because we’re wired wrong. Well, not exactly wrong. Just, maybe, old school. Like when you buy a house called mid-century modern, but the entire electrical panel has to be replaced because the circuit breakers aren’t up to code and your house could self-combust. You can’t live in the twenty-first century with twentieth century technology. You need to be re-wired.

Sometimes I feel like a mid-century modern fire about to happen.

I have loved Rob McLeod since I was sixteen years old. This week I will turn sixty-four and I am still in love with him. Every aspect of my life has been wrapped up in “us” and “him.” That’s the way my brain has been wired for forty-eight years. He’s in my DNA. I catch myself saying and doing things that are the best imitation of Roby that you’ll find this side of heaven, and I’m not even trying. In fact, every time it happens it makes me cry. I didn’t know how much he and I were one until I became . . . one.

Now, I’m living a life I don’t recognize. Every detail of my life, with few exceptions, has changed. This isn’t always the case with loss, but it’s how it happened with me. The adjustments over the last fourteen months have been unbearable at times. They are constant reminders that the life I chose, the passion I pursued, the meaning life had for decades is all gone and will never be mine again. Every day, as I’m repeatedly startled by habits that don’t align with my circumstances, my brain screams out in self-defense, “I’m doing the best I can! I can’t adjust all at once!"

This is harder than it looks. My brain is working overtime, trying so hard to re-wire itself to how things are now that it’s sending up smoke signals. Grief sorts out the old from the new so you don’t get lost in your own driveway wondering what happened to the asphalt version you owned in the mountains and why you just saw a chicken cross the road here in the desert. Literally. It takes time. A lot of time. Which, to my relief, explains a lot.

Like the car wash.

It happened last month on a day so full of crazy that I was too embarrassed to talk about it right away. I’d worked on taxes by myself all weekend and, since I had a few minutes to spare before I dropped them off, decided I’d make a quick run through the car wash. I needed a minute to relax and wash away all the frustration of doing one more thing on my own that Rob and I always did together. Since there was no time to pamper myself after a stressful couple of days—getting a facial would have been nice—the next best thing was a car wash. The list of things I can’t control is so long now, it was empowering to focus on the one thing I could.

I could make my filthy truck sparkle again. So, I headed for the sit-in, drive through, take-a-nap-for-thirty-seconds car wash.

I like riding through the car wash. Settled comfortably in my captain’s chair with the a/c set to icicles, I close my eyes and pretend I’m in the middle of a massive thunderstorm. Desert rats are a little fixated on rain since it happens so rarely. I’m such a pluviophile they know me there by sight and just wave me through now. Well, also, I have that little membership sticker I bought.

It’s noisy going through a car wash. The roar of all that falling water is crazy loud, so when it amps up, I lean back against the headrest and, for the next half a minute, I’m transported. Slowly headed into the middle of a terrifying downpour, the pounding vibrations against my vehicle punctuate one sobering truth—there’s no turning back now. It’s better than a Disney ride. A cascade of soapy water coats the windows while a deluge of chaos swirls around me in a rain tunnel so epic it feels like I’m caught in the eye of a storm.

Only, I’m not actually supposed to get wet.

I don’t know why I didn’t figure it out sooner, what with all the gallons of water and soap they dump on you while you’re trapped inside that machine-filled cave. It’s just that the drip drip drips didn’t start until I reached the wind tunnel where all the water is supposed to blow off and away. Suddenly, all of it was blowing in—on me. Not a good feeling. Impossible, I told myself, as a splash on my face woke me up. Panicked, I grabbed at the sunroof's cover in a last ditch effort to save myself. The irony of my predicament was alarming. I was seated in a state-of-the-art vehicle equipped with so many safety features I don't even know what half of them are. But in a twist of fate, like a sailor in a submarine holding on for dear life to a screen door, the only thing lying between me and a flood of Noahic proportions was twelve inches of felt-covered plastic. This couldn’t be happening. But it was.

I drove through a car wash with the sunroof cracked open.

To let out the hot air.

Not to let in the car wash.

I could have sworn I closed that thing before I pulled out of my driveway but swearing to it didn’t change anything. As I hung on for dear life, the thought went through my head that if I opened the cover to look at the slider window above me, maybe I’d discover it was closed after all. I might have checked, too, except for the wave of water that poured onto my head and shirt at that moment, drenching me while the manic blowers tried to suck the cover out of my hands. Fine. Clearly, the sunroof was open. Clearly, I was an idiot. Clearly, my nearly new vehicle was about to be destroyed from the inside out. What do they call that in really good literature? Poetic justice? “Rebellious desert rat drowns inside her vehicle while pretending she’s in a rare rainstorm.”

I felt like that dad in “Twister”, trying to keep his grip on the handle of the storm cellar door, his family watching in horror as he’s lifted off his feet. With his body waving wildly in the air, he frantically cries out, “I.   Can’t.   Hold.   On!” just before the tornado sucks him out of the room. I had déjà vu just thinking about it. I knew I was in trouble. I figured it out just as my soggy bangs flattened and glued my eyelids shut. His nightmare was about to become my nightmare, right here in the Lucky Ducky Car Wash.

While the sunroof’s cover vibrated and jerked in my hands, I kept holding on, arms over my head in the claustrophobic space I shared with a steering wheel. I was determined not to give up the fight. Like radar lock, my only goal was to make it to the flashing “Exit” sign at the end of the conveyor belt without having the cover ripped from my hands. Maybe then I wouldn’t be sucked out of my Tahoe and washed down the drain into the sewer system. They never found that dad, you know. I was pretty sure if I went into the sewer system, nobody would even come looking for me. Gross.

There are a million thoughts that race through your mind when you think you’re about to die. Like, I can’t believe that stupid car wash attendant didn’t tell me I left the sunroof open. Or, one more thing to add to the list of Embarrassing Ways to Die. And, if I make it through this alive, will my insurance company replace my truck or is there an exclusion for Acts of Stupidity?

I did not die. I did not drown. The only casualties of the wind tunnel were my hair and shirt and possibly a very soggy angel taking the brunt of the ordeal. It’s the only explanation I have as to why even the dashboard remained dusty while every ounce of water was attracted to my body like it was a sponge. When I came home to change clothes, my daughter, Katy, took a load of towels out to try to soak up the floodwaters. There weren’t any. She looked as shocked as I was that even my truck had survived an ordeal like that.

I drove through a car wash with the sunroof open and the only fatality was my hairdo. The rest of me, as promised by Lucky Ducky, came out looking clean and shiny.

I dropped off my damp, smeared tax documents without explanation, comforted myself with a Peppermint Mocha from Starbucks, and drove around for a while until the sunroof cover dried out. There weren’t even any water spots in the headliner. It’s as though nothing ever happened.

Nothing, that is, except for a little more cerebral re-wiring. And a longed-for facial I thought I’d have to wait on. You know what they say about things like that, though.

Be careful what you wish for.

With thanks to Alvaro Tapie for the electrifying photo seen above. The original can be viewed at this link:

Tesla | society6.com/alvarotapia/Tesla_Print | Alvaro Tapia | Flickr