On Days that Get Lost

I awaken most days between 5:00 and 5:30am and by 5:45am I am in the cabin and happily (on most days) at work on document-of the-moment. I can usually work steadily for an hour or two, and then I re-enter the house, kiss daughter good by before she leaves for school, drive to meet with my dearest friend with whom I run, less distance now than before but now as regular as before. When I return I make a good-enough breakfast, prepare a mug of tea and go back into the cabin for another hour or two of writing or reading or studying. And I am for the most part content.

But sometime around 11:00am the day gets away from me. Today the external hard drive for the computer crashed (I didn’t now that was possible—but then a lot of things occur that I did not know were possible!), and I am off as a hamster on the wheel. I call the University help desk but today their answers were incomplete. And so I pack up the malfunctioning hard drive and transport it to the university technology place, only to discover that yes, the worst has occurred and though they may be able to recover some files, there is the possibility that I might lose more than a few. What files I’ll lose I’ll never know because there are so many long-unexamined files saved over the years that when one disappears its loss remains unrecognized. Until as with so many lost objects, when I want it I’ll remember I’ve lost it.

And then I undertake the quest to replace the damaged hard drive. Off to the local Wal-Mart where I hope I am buying the right device, and then to a quick stop at the AT&T store to facilitate the account shift on daughter’s phone from my name to hers. The credit card number stays the same, however. I head home again, home again, jiggety-jig, but as long as I am out I might as well be run about by a few errands. Finally back in the cabin, I install the new external hard drive. I then check the pizza dough to make sure it is defrosting and will be ready for baking at 5:00pm dinner, but when I look at the clock, I see that it is already almost 5:00 pm and I don’t know where the time goes. I mean, I had other plans for the day. But what they were I have lost amidst the details.