It was dark at five o’clock this morning as I silently crept across the snowy yard from my neighbor’s house to my own. Something else alive was out there, but I quickened my steps rather than use the flashlight I’d brought to send a beam connecting with a pair of glowing eyes that would only tell me by their relative height in the night what form of beast it be. Better not to know.
I’d spent the night on her couch, watchful for effects of anesthesia she’d had for minor surgery, and thankfully she was all right. Before I left and locked her door, I picked up the bag of books I’d brought to read, sadly gone unread. In all these weeks of “time off” I’ve read little. This evening was as much for my own benefit–far away from my computer (her own is on phoneline internet, and with my own cable connection, is like a regular oven and a microwave once we get used to it). Didascalicon, if I was up at two a.m., Dance of the Happy Shades if there was not enough mental focus available for the former, and It Was a Dark and Stormy Night if only time for during commercial readings. None were opened. Neil Simon’s “The Goodbye Girl” was on at eight p.m., and we watched that. I fell asleep fifteen minutes before it ended (guess it’s not just MY couch that’s a sleep-machine), and she woke me before she went to bed. Almost on the words, “Good Night…” I slipped right back into the slumber of the mental refugee, and this morning, disappointed in the lost opportunity, I brought thousands of words I hadn’t read back with me to my home and placed them back upon the table in the living room. Accessible, easy to pick up and read, there in plain accusing sight they sit.
I must learn to budget time. Time, more important even than money, once wasted cannot be recovered.
The Lost Children: A Charity Anthology