And How Was Your Day?

After arriving in the parking lot at 7:45 this drizzly morning, I made sure the fan and heater knobs were turned off all the way in the car before getting out, remembering the one car owned by my son whose battery would drain if the heater was left in any position except off.   I do not want this to happen to me, and because cockeyed things do drop from the sky, it's all around better to be safe than sorry.  As I opened the door to the car to disembark, I noticed that the radio stayed on.  Now, with this model car, the radio does stay on until you open the door unless things are frozen up and then sometimes you have to manually turn it off, but only in the most Arctic of weathers.  Ah, just a fritz, especially since yesterday I put in the semi-annual brake fluid, a twice a year ritual that occurs when a sharp temperature change occurs, which did yesterday.  No big deal, and I flick the radio off with a finger.

Go into work, blah blah blah, sit down, leave him alone, synonyms, how is it that your pencil has broken again, line up, dismiss, come back in, correct papers and geez, everyone else has gone, I should too.  3:15 in the afternoon.  Where the hell are my keys?  Neither purse nor pocket confess, so with hope they are probably in the car.  I get the emergency-backup keys out of my purse, go out to the lot and there is a car that looks like mine, but I know it isn't mine because it is running.  Ah, someone with a car starter has their engine going but in this parking lot this neighborhood, not always the best of ideas.  I turn to go to my own car, and it isn't there.  What?  What the hell, someone stole my car goddamit.  I must have really left the keys in there and someone helped themselves to the opportunity.

The parking lot cameras record me scooting around a few cars further down, looking for a car that looks like the car that is running but isn't.  Many cars look like mine, and one or two are often at this lot.  Wow, the day before a holiday when you think of giving thanks, some jerk stole my car.  I need to call the police.

But wait, I know me, this is why I made a set of extra keys for when I lock myself out of things.  I should take a closer look at that car and see if the driver's side door is a different color, before running in to building security.  Well slap my biscuits, it was.  Imagine my surprise when the dawn cracked over the old cerebellum, and ran down in drips of stunned.  It was my car, running.  I left the unholy keys in the ignition that morning, on, and it hummed away merrily for 7 1/2 hours of loitering.  The mileage was really good, for there was a quarter of a tank left, plenty to drive to the gas station in a half-baked state of unbelief.

Because the sun was lower in the sky, the license plate was obscured.  Because I am still amazed that I have a car that looks this new if you don't look at the driver's side black door or the dent, it didn't register as my car immediately.  Besides, my car shouldn't be running.  What the hell.  After self-flagellation, there was a flood of relief that the thing didn't overheat, start on fire, explode, or, get stolen.

In years past, the people who work where I work had a close relationship with the security guards of the attached building, and everyone knew everyone else and their kids.  How did no one notice that there was a car idling for seven and one half hours in a public lot?  Apparently, Al Qaida could move in and set up a meth lab by those standards.

But that is a mild adventure with a happy ending.  What floors me is my lack of recognition of things, the doubt that arises as to what is really mine; I can look straight at something I have owned for forty years, and if it is put into a different context, the brain opens the floodgates of doubt and are you sure this is yours?  Objects become alien, unrecognized, uncertain.  Photographs and people, no problem; but a unsentient thing loses whatever familiarity and conviction that existed in surety just minutes before.  I have had this problem since being a somewhat jumpy child.  I think this has to do with all the yelling my father did, this self-doubt as to if things were the way I perceived them to be.

The car was the model, color, and left in the area of the lot where I park, but it didn't register as mine simply because of the one differential of it running.  Couldn't be, couldn't be going for all day without someone noticing, but then I remember the radio staying on.  Oh.  If I hadn't turned the defroster fan off, that would have signaled that the engine was still engaged and chugging.  Well, tell you what, I'm over it and ready for the next adventure.  Forty dollars more worth of gas over it.

Sleep well, have your rituals and emergency-backup plans in place as a method of keeping some sort of order, of buying safety in packets of self-preservation.  I keep a flashlight near the bed, an extra toothbrush at work, and sundry keys are hidden around parts of this city in case of getting further locked out.  Jupiter, Neptune, and Uranus hang in the south of the sky, points of light wheeling through centuries before engines or humans were ever thought of.  Neptune's winds are the fastest in the solar system, estimated at 2,000 miles per hour, determined by watching how quickly cloud formations change in the planet's blue atmosphere.  Clouds come and go, nothing ever stays the same, some things faster than those Neptunian breezes.  Circle the sun, attend the moon.  Sleep, drowsy child.