I prefer to live in a “drama-free” zone. So does my husband. Even our dog hides when a voice is raised at our house.
Now, that doesn’t mean our life is 24/7 Kumbaya or completely void of passion. It’s just that, after the past two years, I can hardly imagine what could be more dramatic than a persistent pandemic actively seeking to infect us all the goddamn time. One that gleefully throws a curve-ball into, well, every plan, every chance it gets. Self-certified experts at rolling with punches, the two of us are officially all out of shits to give, making it nearly impossible to be, “emotionally surprised by events or circumstance— which is how Miriam Webster defines drama.
Enter 2022.
Last Monday night, as we engaged in some not at all sexy tandem teeth-brushing, my husband informed me that he might have to visit Urgent Care at 3am.
“Why don’t we go now and save ourselves some drama?” I asked, with a mouth full of paste.
“Because right now I’m fine. I want to observe.”
Let me just say, we observed the shit out of his condition——if observing is snoring with your eyes closed for seven hours.
The next morning, everything appeared under control. I even got my new dryer delivered six weeks late, a day early.
All was right with the world.
“Why don’t you pay urgent care a preemptive visit today?” I suggested, while loading perfectly clean clothes into the washer so I could give my new dryer a test spin.
“Good idea!” he replied.
So he did.
That’s when things went sideways.
“Urgent Care can’t fix the problem so they’re sending me to my doctor,” he said, from his car speaker-phone.
“Mmmmmkay,” I shouted over the loud kerplunk of jeans in the dryer, “lemme know how it goes.”
“I’m getting worried.” I texted two hours later. A short time after that, he called me. “I need emergency surgery,” he said. He sounded like shit.
“I’m coming!”
“You can’t. No outside visitors allowed. Covid.”
“Fuck.”
“I know.”
The surgery went well. I know that because the doctor told me so. My husband, on the other hand, texted me from recovery which was…well, if you ask me, I think they give them their phones too soon, you know, because they can’t have visitors and let’s just say—— I don’t recommend it.
Alone in bed that night, I petitioned god for a referendum on any further drama. We’d had an agreement and she’d broken it. “That’s it!” I declared. “You get one thing. And you blew it all in January so, that’s it for 2022. No more drama.”
Did you know you get to do that?
I learned this trick from my shaman after the California earthquake of 1994.
Terrified of aftershocks, I’d feel every damn one while he felt NONE OF THEM.
NADA.
Zip.
Zero.
It was beyond infuriating!
“I didn’t feel a thing,” he remarked after one particularly strong tremor that sent me diving under the dining room table. Apparently, the kitchen, a mere ten feet away, was not prone to aftershocks. “Remove yourself from the drama,” he advised, “you lived the initial trauma, you don’t have to keep re-living it. Ask to sleep through them.”
So I asked. And from that day forward, I was impervious to aftershocks. I slept, or drove, or simply ladeedah’d my way through them. Seriously.
At 9:30 Friday night, there was a fire across the street. Another one! Except this one was inside the house and it was enormous. Five fire trucks. The home fully engulfed, with flames shooting ten feet in the air. Thick, black smoke. I saw the pictures and I’d have to say it was the highest drama possible without anyone being hurt.
And we had no idea. None.
Our neighbors knocked for us, but when we didn’t answer, they assumed we were out of town.
Stranger yet, you know who hears and smells all of that? All the sirens, smoke, raised voices, and door knocking——Our dog.
Did she hear a thing that night? Nope.
The three of us were blissfully ignorant inside a drama-free bubble in the back of our house. Indulging in comfort food, watching The Prisoner of Azkaban. Spells are magic. Agreements are nonbreakable. God is a mensch.
Abracadabra, y’all,
xox J
