I woke up this morning with a warm glow, knowing that I had no classes to teach today, and it was a sure thing that I would finally be able to finish my income tax return. Because I work as both a teacher and a musician, this is not an easy task.

However, first I had to take my brother to his urologist’s appointment, a small matter. My brother has many challenges in his beleaguered life, not least of which are bi-polar disorder, juvenile diabetes, and schizophrenia. As he gets older, the list seems to expand exponentially. The appointment was on the heels of another of his own personal Great Depressions, another low-blood-sugar crisis which, unchecked, can send him into a coma, and the discovery of a small cancerous mass in his kidney. When crises occur with Ray, his siblings are often called into action despite his wish to be left alone, and we often have to keep moving, while he expounds upon the benefits to all of us of just allowing him to die.

We joked in the car about the “You’re illogical” (urological) Center, stopped to run an errand or two, and returned home in much better spirits than earlier. He was weak, so I gave him some lunch, ran back to my place to get some supplies he had run out of, wished him well, and left.

Before the morning was over I had to run over to my real estate agent’s office to sign another form for my closing date of March 31. Then there was suddenly another closing-date-need-piece-of-very-important-paper emergency that sent me downtown. After that, there were some phone calls about homeowner’s insurance.

It occurred to me to check my e-mail to see about flights to New Orleans for a family wedding in April which details had already been worked out once, when the airline decided to cancel all flights to that particular city, beginning only a few short days before our scheduled takeoff. Online with siblings, we hashed over the alternatives with each other, ad nauseam, until we were all thoroughly confused. Some of us made a decision.

In a moment of panic I realized that today was the deadline for submitting a column which I hadn’t even written yet. And as daylight faded into dusk, I conceded that yet another day had passed without my doing my income tax return. Also, moving day was looming ahead, with no packing done and precious little preparation for it.

Frantically, I typed an e-mail that had to go out immediately, and accidentally hit a key that overwrites instead of back-spacing. Couldn’t figure out how to get it back to normal again.

And that’s when the server shut down.

My brother has issues with being a victim, and to some extent perhaps we all do. They say that the difference between pathological behavior and what we call “normal” is only a matter of degree.

But there’s a wonderful old fable that I sometimes recall when I’m tempted to move in that direction:

A farmer threw his aging donkey into a pit because he no longer had any use for it. The donkey wailed loudly, as the farmer began to fill up the pit, shoveling the dirt onto the animal’s back. Then the donkey became silent. The farmer feverishly continued his work, too busy to notice the donkey as it shook off the dirt and stepped up … and shook off the dirt and stepped up. Finally, the donkey trotted off, leaving the surprised farmer with shovel in hand.

Maybe I’ll do my tax return tomorrow. Shake, step … shake, step …

Print This Article
Email (and more) with