I’m on a school trip away from Cody for ten days, chaperoning eight high schoolers with three other adults. But there’s only one day that was severely testing my patience and eternal optimism.
I’ll only tell you about the relevant instances of this day though.
I was walking across the schoolyard (with gravel beneath my feet rather than wood-chips or astroturf for preschoolers) and kept my eyes down to see where I was going. Gravel or no gravel, my balance is something that I can never fully rely on, so I kept peripheral vision near the southern hemisphere. This was a mistake as I walked – no, escorted – my forehead into the horizontal monkey bar. This hurt.
I iced it and survived.
But then my sunglasses broke. Out of nowhere. But cleanly, so “they didn’t feel a thing,” as one colleague stated. This made me sad, especially because I knew I’d really need shades for our hikes and I didn’t know where to acquire a pair of new ones on the Native American reservation we were on that week.
Later, the students asked me if I was okay because they can be sweet when they want to be and I simply responded, “I wish my sunglasses had broken when I had walked into the pole. That’d be a way better story.” The kids looked at me like I was crazy, but I meant what I said. I’m an English major – I have a desire for all the symbols crashing into meaning at once. In this case, my glasses breaking were a symbol of the lack of eyesight that led my face to become best friends with metal.
But I digress. Congrats to those still reading. You’re the real MVP, and I’m a real rambler.
SO when I talked to Cody later to tell him about my ‘bad’ day, he asked, “Did you break your glasses walking into the pole?” And as much as I wanted to lie and say yes, all I could do was grin at his response. He’s my guy because he completely gets what makes sense to me (us).
And if this doesn’t make any sense to you, well, I guess that’s the point.