Monday mornings are always hectic for me. I usually end up having a late Sunday night, which it turn means a groggy first hour or so in the morning. Last night, David and I got in bead around 11:00 p.m. We are night owls and this is pretty routine for us. We try to be in bed by 10:00, but it NEVER happens like that. I craft, clean, talk to my mom,.... I can just never get there. But I am SO totally okay with that. I love having "me" time at night.
Monday mornings are also busy for me because I have duty from 7:30 to 8:00 a.m., and then after school duty as well. Our district also has meetings after school on Mondays- Mondays for me are like watching Lifetime movies; they are really not all that bad, but geez, are they long!!
This morning started out like any other- talking to Bichon in bed, laughing at her antics, visiting with David in the bathroom getting ready, telling jokes to get the other moving. David left before I did this morning, so I headed out after he had been gone a good 20 minutes. With a 4 minute commute, I can get there in record time! And that is just what I did this morning!
As I was nearing HWY 62 from our subdivision, I noticed how heavy the traffic was. I knew I would have to get on the gas if I was going to make it on time to get through the traffic. As I waited for a break in the flow, I sang along to Foreigner's Urgent. "Urgent, Urgent, EMERGENCY!!" I was grooving. As I turned left and put the pedal to the metal, I heard a gunshot- from inside my car!!!
I tried to drive straight, but I was as scared as Star Jones going under the knife. I ducked my head, closed my eyes, kept a few fingers on the steering wheel, and began to sing "Jesus, Take the Wheel!" Then I felt it. From my ceiling, came a dripping brown, wet, sticky substance. Was it blood? I just knew one of my kids had finally taken me out, just like they'd promised. Gosh, whatever it was, it smelled...good. Like coke. Coke? Coke? Oh my....
I drove on down the road, unable to stop as the can sprayed itself all over me, the interior of my cream car, my perfectly bobbed bob of a hair do, all the while, coating everything with a thin glaze of carmelized sugar. It coated my windshield, and in order to keep going, I had to wipe a spot clean with my bare hand. When I came to a stop I resembled a chicken factory worker- only in pink heels, minus the feathers, and plus the graded papers that hung to me like, well, like only papers sprayed down with coke can do. I was in tears by the time I arrived to my first class. I was sticky, smelly, and thirsty. My lunch coke was officially out of commission. All twelve of them.
A student whispered that I should have been drinking water anyway. I thought to myself, I should be drinking whiskey agreeing to work here with you, but I bit my tongue. And it hurt. The longer the day went on, the more depressed and obsessed I got. The interior of my car reached 90 degrees. And all the while the coke dried, and hardened, and turned into a solid, back to a liquid, and finally into a mineral rock substance. It baked onto my CD collections, my leather seats, my mechanical buttons and levers, and onto my gearshift.
I emailed David is hysterics, asking him to quit his job, drive to my school ,and have my car detailed. He refused. He laughed. He thought it was quite comical. I cried. I cursed, and taught the scientific elements needed to create a vortex.
As I crawled to my teacher's meeting at 3:30, I tried to peer my car in the parking lot, and spotted it easily. It was the pimped out car with the blackened windows. If anyone were to try to look into it, they would notice the windows were blackened by a liquid, and would have seen the twelve spewed cans floating around the front seat like Baby Ruths in a swimming pool.
At 4:30, I rushed out of my meeting, and opened the hot car. The smell was sweet. The inside was black. My roof, yall, was the worst. I could actually hear the Jaws music in my head. My beamer had become the stunt car of Chris Rock on Rush Hour. It was "tuff". As I drove home, I tried to think of what Jesus would do. I figured he would have been drinking water.
David met me on the porch all smiles. He carried a big bucket of hot water, and our whole collection of chemicals. "Yes!" I screamed. "Yes!!" I yelled to the neighborhood! "Bring all the chemicals you can find!!!" "We are going to have mix them together to make it strong enough!!"
At that very moment, yall, one of my students rode down the driveway. I am not kidding. He took one look at the blackened windows, the "obvious" drinking problem I had (obvious by the million cans spewing in my floorboard, blackening my windows), and David holding every chemical cleaner under the sun, and simply sat on his bike, and stared at me. I stared at him. The sun glinted off my chintzy sunglasses. He raised his eyebrow and said, "Coke, hu?" "Yes." I replied.
He nodded, still looking at me. He thinks I'm making meth, I sighed to myself.
After an hour of scrubbing, we are making progress.
There is no real moral to this story. It was just a rotten, horrible, no good day.
