Maiden Voyage

come down from the ceiling

The start page in my Safari opens to a generic Apple/Netscape page. It is annoying at best, but it gives me the temperature, which like my good friend Annie, I need to know before I get dressed in the morning. I have just been too lazy to change it and I don't really have a favorite virtual place in which to begin my on-line day. This morning, a skull icon caught my eye. It was a link to the Lifeline Calculator,a little test to determine life expectancy. They asked the expected questions, how over weight are you, how long did your grandparents live, how often do you exercise, do you smoke? I was doin great until I came to the question about living. That is, with whom do you live?

Family, spouse, significant other? They didn't have a category for "living alone for nine months for the first time in twenty years" or for "my son lives with me two nights a week in the summer when he is home from college." The closest I could come in their multiple choice format was "living alone for less than ten years." With that, they predicted I will live to the ripe old age of 87. Then I tried it again, lied and said I lived with a significant other, I gained two whole years. It wasn't 10 years or twenty, but, all things being equal, living with family will add two years to your life. Two years, when faced with the end of life, is nothing to sneeze at.

On another note, the plumbers are back, but they broke with tradition and came while I was eating my breakfast yesterday. I say they, but there is really only one plumber, a short, sweet, plumber in his late sixties, who apologized for not returning my calls because he had nothing to tell me. He also promised to fix my shower, which currently pours torrents of water into the tub while at the same time a shower stream barely trickles from above. He also brought with him the carpenter, who loved my comic book shower curtain and is going to replace my missing walls and floor. But before he does that, they are still replacing piping and have now ripped out the pipe and a good chunk of the ceiling. There must be some synchronistic, Fung Shui meaning to all this, the walls of my inner sanctum being ripped away, exposing ancient, rusty pipes, peeling, rotted wall board and a view both downward to my neighbor's kitchen and upward into darkness. Not to mention what it is like to sit on my brand spankin new toilet and wonder who can hear me going about my business...no I won't mention that. But what does it all mean? Is it a reflection of some inner renovation? And when it is all put back together will I love my solitude so much, that I won't mind losing those two years?