Dialing.

I got up too early, wrote a postcard to an old friend I don't remember anymore, took four different kinds of pills that have to be taken on an empty stomach, made a pitcher of lemonade, and then spent an hour ticking off a fantasy grocery list. It contained things like frog eye salad, lutefisk, khanom chin, dilly beans, scrapple, anchovy pizza, lingonberry jelly, leeks, elephant garlic, marinated artichoke hearts, chicle, frozen Cornish pasties, salted duck eggs, and 2 gallons of whole chocolate milk.

Then I got sleepy sick, with a subtle headache that wouldn't admit to being painful, and nano-term memory loss -- I couldn't remember why I was typing on my keyboard or what my fingernails were. My head was a bowling ball. So I wrapped myself in several large kitchen towels that smelled of bacon grease and lay back in my recliner with a thin pillow under my chin to hold my head up. And slept for three whole hours. It was wonderful; when I woke up I felt pardoned from some shabby, disreputable crime. 

But my mind had skipped ahead to Saturday. I always wrote postcards and made lemonade on Friday, so now I was waking up and it must be Saturday. My body knew it was Saturday on a sub-atomic level. But when I  messaged my daughter on Facebook to ask if she and the kids were gonna go up to Park City to go skiing she replied it was Friday, the kids had school, so they weren't going until tomorrow. I wrote back that I knew that, ha ha, and I must be getting senile, LOL. 

But I didn't know it was still Friday. It didn't feel like a Friday; it felt like a lackluster and laid back Saturday when you make pancakes and roll sausages around in an iron skillet like you were torturing Lincoln Logs. And they always burned, but who cares on a Saturday? Just put them in a bowl of syrup for a coupla minutes.

I bitterly regretted failing to purchase a wall calendar this year, but they kept falling off the fridge door and besides a calendar wouldn't tell me what day it really was, not unless I was marking off each day like a prisoner in a stone cell. Who's got the energy to do that every day, anyway? I can barely manage to bush-hog my nose hairs on a daily basis. My Tracfone doesn't tell me the day of the week. I wondered if the cable TV would list the day of the week if I turned it on. But I have a hard and fast rule to never turn it on before 5 in the afternoon. Then I remembered my mother dialing the rotary phone on the kitchen wall to find out the date and time, and the current temperature. She did that at least once a week. 

So I called 911. But they were very rude and said I could be arrested before they hung up. The girl who answered had a nasty foreign accent. I bet the city outsources all their 911 calls to India or Timbuktu. I was so upset by this that I ate the last piece of brie in the fridge that had not been wrapped properly and was now as hard as a bar of soap. I took warped pleasure in gnawing on it and savoring the iron flavor. 

What finally settled the issue was the sound of vacuuming from the hallway. They only ever vacuum the halls on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. Never on Saturday. When I opened my apartment door to make sure, there they were -- vacuuming in a businesslike and very Friday manner. And on my door handle someone had hung a plastic bag full of individually cellophane wrapped oatmeal cookies and six tiny fruit punch juice boxes. I threw it all away in disgust, but then dug out the juice boxes for the grand kids. They'd never know I'd put 'em in the garbage first . . . 

At a complete loss as to what to do with a day I had already written off as done, I went out to buy bird seed and got a pedicure. Then I wrote out all the above and emailed it to Hannah Knowles, a General Assignment reporter at the Washington Post.  At least it would take her mind off of all this impeachment nonsense.