6:45 is not the best time to wake up when you have to leave at 7:00, especially if you stink and have to shower. It can be done though, as I found out. Well, sort of.
I may not have woken up at all if it were not for a piercing leg cramp. They seem come from nowhere. A metal claw reaches out of the night and grabs whatever portion of my leg it can grab onto and yanks indiscriminately. It used to always be my calves. The clamp operator must have been more particular back then, an artisan with his tools. The new operator just grabs at anything--thigh, calf, ankle, big toe. He doesn't care about location. It's g-force he's after.
The pain is excruciating, and I can go from being in R.E.M. to standing on my feet in seconds.
And so I did. The pain is so intense, it's hard to know what to do. Staying in bed is impossible. Standing hurts like hell. Moving my ankle back and forth helps a little, if I can do it. Pain is an awful thing. The little man in the fire lookout inside my head looks out and sees the entire world burning toward him--a 360 degree view of an inferno closing in. Frozen in terror, that red phone might as well be a thousand miles away.
And so I stood there, pain my complete existence, waiting for it to subside enough so that I could sit back down and rub my ankle, which seemed to be the focus of the malicious claw man that particular morning. I waited and waited, wondering if I'd pass out. In the real world, it was probably a couple of minutes or less, but there is no real world in the world of pain. One yearns for reality like a man in the desert yearns for a well. There is no way in such a moment to focus on real things--for instance, that the earth is a speck in space and in time in a universe that stretches out to incomprehensible dimensions both in distance and eons. In the grand scheme of galactic events--of exploding and imploding stars, of black holes and super novas, of entire galaxies colliding into each other, not to mention the big bang itself--this moment of pain is immeasurably small. I shouldn't even take notice of it.
Nope reality does not exist in pain. Pain is all. The room itself, not to mention the world and the great big universe that surrounds it, vanishes.
Yet, amazingly, God does not. In a moment of intense pain everyone reaches for that red phone, whether the little man in the watch tower in the head is frozen or fear or not.
I think I said "Oh God, help me" three times in my head, but it could have been more--or less. Mathematics is not really part of the world of pain. Then the pain slacked off enough to take a step towards the door to the living room.
I had it in my head that if I could walk as far as the kitchen sink, all would be right. As I get legs cramps frequently, the fuzzy notion that, yes, indeed I would be alright was now filtering in like sunlight, reaching down into the depths of the redwoods and landing spottily on the fern covered forest floor.
I reached for the door, ready to enter reality again.
I carefully made my way through the gray-dawn living room to the lamp and flicked it on. I walked oh so carefully, feeling every stretch of the muscles in my ankle along the way. By the time I reached the sink, except for a dull ache, the pain was gone. I got a glass from the cupboard, turned on the tap and got a drink of water. Outside three deer stood in a frosted field of cheat grass. Another one, closer up, chewed on a juniper bush I have growing in a pot. I tapped on the window, hoping to scare her off. She looked up at me and then proceeded with her destruction. So, I went to the glass door, opened it, and clapped my hands. That set off our two pugs. Marci called from the bedroom, "Would you shut the dogs up?"
I thought, Now, just how do I do that?
Ignoring Marci, I turned around to head back to the bedroom and noticed the clock on the microwave said,6:50.
Oh my, I better get in the shower.
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