Pebbles II

My mind is a seashore strewn with the pebbles of random thought. As I did when I lived near Lake Superior, I wander up and down the beach with no clear goal in mind, idly collecting them. What there is to attract me to a particular pebble of thought I don’t know, but something causes me to notice them, and I bend to pick them up and study them carefully for a moment before letting them drop back onto the sand and moving on. Sometimes I remember where I dropped them, and return to pick them up, but mostly they’re just there and then they’re gone.

My days are made of pebble moments. Most are just passed by, relatively unnoticed, but some are picked up to become emails to friends, or the inspiration for blogs.

Two of today’s pebbles are cases in point. And though I had a reason, at the moment, for selecting them from all the others, your reaction as to why I chose them might be more one of puzzlement than enlightenment.

The first pebble was sent as an email to my friend Gary. It involves my cat, Crickett, who has developed cancer in her left rear leg at the site of a past rabies shot. The vet says this is not uncommon, and Crickett is, after all, around 17 years old…I can’t remember exactly, though I’ve had her since she was a kitten:

“Crickett’s leg is now all but useless. Today, as I was sitting on the couch, she tried to jump up to be with me. She could not make it. I leaned down to pick her up, but she yeowled…the first time she’s done that. I put the empty box the printer had come in on the floor up against the front of the couch, so that she could jump up on it fairly easily, and from there jump to the seat of the couch. She did not grasp the concept and refused to use it, instead walking around it. She made another one-rear-legged jump and made it this time, by digging her claws into the couch and pulling herself up.

“I’m now giving her medication every other day in hopes that it relieves her discomfort. I wonder if she knows she is dying. I know.

“Life is not easy.”

Earlier in the day, I’d gone to buy a new printer—the box for which being referenced above—my old one having given up the ghost. Though I knew it was dead, I kept delaying the inevitable (I am quite good at that) in the hopes that the next time I went to use it, it would work fine. It never did. Went to Best Buy, which is my nearest electronics store, and looked at endless rows of machines with prices ranging from $49.00 to God-knows-what. To me, they all looked identical. There were two HPs side by side. One for $69.00, one for $79.00. 

On reading the little cards that accompany the price tag, I noted that the $69 one seemed to have more features/advantages than the $79. When I pointed that fact out to a clerk, he told me that the $69 one was on sale, though there was no indication of that fact anywhere. When I asked the original cost, I was told it was $89.00 but, on checking, he amended that to $99.00. So I bought it, brought it home, managed to install it all by myself—no mean feat, I can assure you, given my total alienation from anything with moving parts or that requires plugging into a socket, and it’s worked quite well so far. (I always find it necessary to modify positive statements.) There is even a little digital display like a tiny TV screen which guided me through the installation process and thereafter advised me on the status of my printing and scanning. Probably it was the glow of that little digital display that attracted my attention to this particular pebble. See it?

Ain’t science wonderful? So are pebbles.

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This blog is from Dorien's ebook of blogs, Short Circuits, available from UntreedReads.com and Amazon.com; it's also available as an audio book from Amazon/Audible.com. You can find information about Dorien's books at his web site:  www.doriengrey.com: