Found On Road Dead

If it wasn't for bad luck, I swear I'd have none. The clichest of cliche's. I know it ad nausea. Like the back of my hand, like a childhood story read to me over and over I could recite it in my sleep.

In the past week, I became jobless, my car broke down not one but three times, and I was again reminded why I had chosen to walk away from a once very important person in my life.

My last week at work was sad, mellow. Oddly enough Administrative Professional's week, which I just so happened to be. And I didn't go unappreciated. I got beautiful flowers on Wednesday, I got a lovely handmade scarf. On my last day I got taken out to a fantastic lunch.

It was just, sad. 2 years I spent there with those people. 2 years of getting to know people, to know about their kids, their families. Know their day to day personalities. It's been 5 days now, and I miss them.

The car, a whole other can of worms.

Not just worms. Flesh eating, mind-numbing, science fiction kinds of worms. Set out to destroy the planet. Well maybe not the planet, but me. Little by little. Slowly but surely by removing pieces of sanity bit by bit.

First, my belt goes. Yes, sounds nothing enough, but no, it wasn't. The entire thing vanished into thin air. Magically. As though abducted by aliens.

I go to the gas station on Thursday morning, on my way to work, my last Thursday mind you. Fill-er up. GO to turn on the car again, and the battery light is suddenly on. Weird. Now the wheel is impossibly hard to turn. What the deuce?!

The gas station attendant hasn't the foggiest what happened in the say, 5 minutes since I had pulled into the station. So I struggle with the wheel, like what I imagine turning an entire steamship by myself in the early parts of the century was like.

I get to Dylan's school, drop him off. I pull into yet another gas station. I explain the issue. Mechanic is on vacation. Stellar. They tell me I can leave it until Monday. Are you fucking nuts? It's Thursday you idiots and I have shit to do!

They top off my power steering fluid, and again I trudge off, all the while making a plethora of phone calls to my triad of car gurus...the boyfriend, the brother and the pseudo brother/neighbor...to see who will answer first.

I someone make it to my mothers. Apparently my belt had vanished, and I was running on what little voltage I had left. I was almost dead. Who knew? (ok apparently the "car" people knew, but me the vehicularly challenged not so much)

My wonderful boyfriend drove an hour from his house to my mother's on his day off, kids in tow (as it was still school vacation) to fix belt. Stopped on the way to pick up the belt at Auto supply store.

Yeah, about that.

As he gets about done with the belt install, he realizes the morons at the Auto store gave him the wrong belt. Poor bastard has to UNDO the entire thing he has just struggled to install, and go BACK to the store, return it and get the right belt. Yes, my car is apparently Satan.

SO now, new belt in hand, he returns, puts belt on successfully. YAY!

6 days later I am about to get on the highway, and I hear a squealing sound. Hmm. That's not good. A squealing sound them followed by slapping. I pull over, open the hood. The goddamn belt, the 6 day old belt had SHREDDED. Yes that's right.

Problem all over again.

Are you fucking serious?!

So since I was on my way to meet my boyfriend to actually help HIM by meeting him at a dealership to pick him up as he got HIS car fixed, he now had to leave, drive 40 minutes to come get me by the side of the road, then go to Auto store, again get belt and put another one in my car.

This time in the rain on the side of the road.

Um, can we say how much I love this man by the way?

So now, car has new belt, and am gingerly on my way...again.

Only to have the starter in my car DIE the next day in the parking lot of my best friends hair salon.

ARE YOU FUCKING KIDDING ME?!

Car is officially out to get me. Wants me to suffer severe anxiety and cry. Ok so I DID cry.

Had car towed to my house and is literally being worked on in my driveway as we speak (type) by pseudo brother.

If anyone ever had any doubts of the Evil Vortex that lived in my driveway and was out to get me and kill all my cars, it has now found me at my new address, and it has a serious vendetta.

Bastard.

End of an Era and Yesterday's Garbage

Today is the beginning of the end.

As I drove in this morning, I started the last leg of my commute to work. My last Tuesday here. It would have been Monday oddly enough if it weren't a Boston holiday and the masses (mild pun intended) weren't off to celebrate Patriot's Day/Marathon Monday.

I came in a little later, since it's also a school vacation week and my boss won't even be here for my final week. Sitting in bumper to bumper traffic on the Southeast Expressway, ranked 14 worst for commuter traffic in the country. I should be a little happy to not have to sit idle in my car, playing merge and dart with carious other vehicles also trying their damndest while only mildly caffeinated to get into work at a reasonable hour in the morning, but I am saddened.

And so I started to sort through my belongings. The stuff I have all over my desk that makes it a little more personal. Photos of Dylan, pictures he drew me. A pair of glasses that had been lost that I taped eyes inside to resemble the Geico commercial "Somebody's Watching You".

This entire weekend has been ends of era's as it were. My 2 years here are no different. I love my job, and am sad to leave. The people I work with have been wonderful to me, and they too wish I were able to stay. Of course, if it weren't for corporate red-tape and policies sent down from offices afar, I likely would be, but alas, that is clearly not how the new Corporate America operates.

It's mind boggling the detachment that exists. A single mom now jobless, searching for a way to support her child. Working with 4 staffing and placement agencies, using every online tool in existence to find new employment to no avail. Tossed aside, all business. Cold and calculated.

And this weekend, another detachment was witnessed that made me sadder still. The only grandfather I have ever known, my neighbor my entire life, who's blood and mine are not the same, but he is family nonetheless. A man who I would go to the ends of the Earth for, is now in assisted living. His home of over 60 years, a home I grew up in essentially, is being picked apart by his biological children and things are being thrown away so callously. His lifetime of memories and hard work, nostalgia tossed into dumpsters like garbage.

I did my best for stays of execution. Tried to save what I could. Me, being the sentimentalist. I could save it all if I could. Archive it in some sort of Grandparental Mausoleum if I could. My own memorabilia placed exactly had it been in the home that was my second one for as long as I can remember.

I recalled every story I had of that house, of the contents. Of my grandfather (and you will NEVER hear me refer to him as anything but) and the things we did. Of his antiques, of his garden. Of watching him build his model ships every day after school, or listening to the stories of him being a professor at Northeastern University.

Stories of surviving the Great Depression. The wars. Countless sessions of him correcting my grammar as I spoke. Making iced tea on the stove with my grandmother before she passed so many years ago. Planting flowers in the yard and listening to Big Band music.

I was there every day as a child. The slight incline on their side yard, a HUGE hill we would sled down in the cold New England winter's when covered in snow. Riding in his 1930 Model A Ford in parades around town, reveling in all the other kid's jealousy as we whizzed by them.

And his son's, just tossing out his life. Thrown away like yesterday's garbage. Not wanting to be daunted by his stuff, by his memories. Completely detached and complacent. It sickened me they could do such things while he was still alive. He, being kept away like a prisoner surrounded by people ready to die, people who have given up. I get the methodology of it, but it hurts nonetheless.

He hasn't given up, he is 91 years old and still fighting. He is in fair health and perfect mental clarity. It makes me so upset to hear him so downtrodden about leaving his home, his life. To know the disappointment he feels in his children about the handling of his things, to hear it in his voice, defeated. All that the man has left.

His closest friends are dropping like flies, as they do when you reach 91. He only recently stopped driving, and only because he was ill, not because he could no longer do so. He is no longer close to his friends, to all that has been familiar to him his entire life. The place they put him is near to them, and he hates it.

He didn't want to be a burden. It angers me. The man has never been a burden in his life. Has never once put himself first. He spent his boys youth working his ass off, and yes maybe they resent him for not being there, for not being that "I'll play catch with you son" dad, but times were different back then. He loves his family, and I am blessed to be a part of it.

I know that losing my job of 2 years is nothing like losing your home of over 60 years, but I feel like he's lost. I know that I am. I am lost and I am scared. I don't know what's next, I don't know where the road will take me, what I am going to do. I can only imagine that my grandfather, in his solitude an hour away from all he has ever known is far more lost than I.

It's the end of an era, and I think it’s happening too soon.