The month of October is nearly over. For me, the 2017 version has been a miserable slog, made infinitely worse by the fact that it followed a sublime September spent in Maine. As I have weathered each absurd storm which has blown through our lives these past four weeks I have often asked myself, Why did you ever leave Maine? Of course, this question is only rhetorical, since it’s answer is obvious...I don’t live in Maine, I only vacation there. My house, my job, and my life is here. Still, consider the series of disasters which have befallen me and my family since I arrived back in Short Pump on September 30, 2017:
September 30...Our dishwasher flooded the kitchen, kicking off a whirlwind couple of weeks which featured loud machines running 24/7, the ripping out of hard wood flooring, a deluge of contractors and claims adjusters fighting out the details of our claim, and a promise that all will be well before Thanksgiving...if there are no complications.
October 2...One man, armed with nearly thirty weapons, unleashed a rain of fire from his hotel room on a crowd in Las Vegas gathered at a country music concert. 58 souls perished and over 500 were wounded. And now, just three weeks later, nobody, and I mean nobody, is even talking about it anymore.
October 9...A mere 60 Days after the fact, I receive the final bill from Henrico Doctor’s Hospital for my 24 hour stay in their facility. The total bill came in a ham sandwich shy of $30,000. At the bottom of the bill in cheerful green type was the happy sum of $3,450 right next to the words, Patient’s responsibility.
October 19...I spent a delightful afternoon waging a losing battle with a bank and an out of state bureaucracy over a lost car title, which resulted in me having to pay off my son’s car in order to obtain a clear title which I will then have to transfer to his name, and send it to him via some as yet uninvented teleportation device which can insure actual delivery without getting lost by some state government employee. In the meantime, my son gets pulled over again for driving on expired tags.
October 25...My daughter’s beloved dog came down with a high fever and other troubling symptoms which required a multi-night stay at a specialty care facility. In said facility it was determined that poor Jackson had food poisoning. The good news seems to be that he will be ok. The bad news is the bill is a ridiculous amount of money, and since I don’t have their permission to reveal just how ridiculous, let me just say that what they are having to pay for Jackson’s care was only a ham sandwich less than I paid for my first semester’s tuition at Universaity of Richmond in 1977.
There you have it. In the first 26 Days since I returned from Maine, we have been hit with one thing after another. Money has been flying out of my wallet faster than starlets out of Harvey Weinstein’s hotel suite....faster than Trump types out Tweets with his tiny little fingers...faster than a post season appearance by the Washington Nationals.
Tell me again...why did I leave Maine?
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