When Tuesday Goes Slightly Awry

In one of the great ironies of life, I, a reading specialist, am a bad reader. By bad, I don’t mean that I am not able to read well, as indeed I am able and have done well overall in reading. Rather, I mean that I don’t naturally implement many good reading practices, including reading carefully, and I have to force myself to practice what I know from years of study is more effective.

By nature, I read quickly and unfortunately, rather haphazardly. It’s true. Through conscious effort, I’ve greatly improved, but I’m still not at 100%, due in part to my obsession with multitasking. I can read while exercising and watching TV, for example, like nobody’s business, and proud of it I am.

So, when I initially received the memo about my son’s field trip to learn about horseshoe crabs, I mistook the word “beach” in the sentence about location as “island” and assumed he was traveling to another island for the trip. I hadn’t heard of this “island” before, but that meant nothing, because along the coast here an island can mean any number of things, from a larger, well-known body of land with numerous buildings and many thousands of inhabitants to a virtual piece of dirt that pops out above the water only during low tide.

The long and short of it is, I reread the memo yesterday morning after he left for school, realized my mistake, and googled the name of the beach (I’m still relatively new here). When I found the beach he was traveling to is on our island, I decided to surprise my son and pop in on him for a minute (field trips are usually open to parents). Afterward, I decided I’d walk this new-to-me stretch of beach for exercise.

Of course, things never go quite as planned, so I left later than I’d hoped, and despite my skillful, efficient navigation of the minivan, I never found a sign of the school bus or the students.

Still wanting exercise, I ended up walking on another stretch of beach I know well, and was surprised by how high the high tide was, likely due to the effects of the recent supermoon. I couldn’t find a shot of a normal high tide there, but here’s a shot at low tide:

compared with this shot of a supermoon high tide

at the same spot.

In regular high tides, I’ve always seen a gap of a few feet between the water and the rocks shown above, but yesterday, the waves came right up to the rocks.

At any rate, people seemed to be enjoying the beach,

regardless of the narrow shoreline and all the beach debris.

There were also quite a few fishing and pleasure boats out on the water that morning.

Then, I came home and, no joke, spent an hour on the phone attempting, without success mind you, to schedule what should have been a simple doctor’s appointment. I won’t tire you with the details, but suffice it to say I want my hour back.

In the evening, just when things were settling down and I was getting ready to write a post, my younger son turned to me at the end of dinner with a pained look on his face.

“I think I might need to spit this out,” he mumbled, his mouth full of food. Let’s just say that, within a few seconds, it was evident that he was doing a great deal more than just spitting, and that I would be cleaning up a great deal more than just the dishes that night.

So instead of posting, I spent the remainder of the evening compensating for his less than perfect aim when ill (90% in the bucket still means 10% lands elsewhere) and rearranging my plans for the next day.

This, for some reason, made me wonder how the day would have been filmed if I was a reality TV star. Really, it’s frightening how many times my thoughts turn to reality TV given how little of it I honestly watch. Anyhow, the way I figure it, they could have easily made three gripping episodes out of this one day alone.

In the first episode, I’d be driving through the back roads of my island in my sexy, Bondesque minivan, looking for signs of little first graders and school buses, pondering how literally the No Parking signs are really meant to be taken when I see what looks like a group of kids in the distance at one point.

Then, the phone exchange between the doctor’s receptionist and myself could take another entire episode, consisting mainly of me listening to elevator music and getting excited to hear a voice on the phone again, only to be placed on hold yet again after one or two questions.

The final episode could begin with the dinner, um, eruption, and move on to show me on hands and knees, scrubbing floors, toilets and walls. In the Real Housewives series, isn’t one of the housewives royalty, a duchess or something? Can you really picture a Versace-clad duchess scrubbing the bathroom floor, pausing to wipe sweat from her brow and to stifle the gag reflex, waiting for her duke to return home from a business meeting a fox hunt while potentially millions of viewers watch, spellbound by the reality of her life?

I thought not.