Night of Discordia

This is just a quick entry to record something strange that happened yesterday. There's no substantive value to this post whatsoever, so skip over it if you're looking for something good to read. ;)

So, okay. Last night I'm watching this movie called "The Number 23," starring Jim Carrey and Virginia Madsen. It's a really, really strange picture about this guy who starts to see the number twenty-three everywhere, on clocks and in people's names and addresses and so on, and the more he sees it the more he becomes convinced that the number is controlling his destiny. And what makes it even weirder is that other people in the movie believe it too. Like I said, it's a very strange picture. Not a particularly good one, but really unusual in its subject matter. And it introduced me to this Twenty-Three business, which I'd never heard of before, which is kind of interesting.

Anyway, after the movie finished I shut down my computer and go to the bathroom to do some... thinking. (Yeah, that's what I'll call it.) So I'm in there....thinking.... about the weirdness of the movie when the lights suddenly shut off. The house is in total darkness. I finish thinking as best I can without light, wash my hands and go to a window to look outside. Apparently it's a blackout, because the street lights are off and it's just black on black out there, dark sky, dark silhouettes of trees and houses, dark like you never see it in the city. Then I hear the sound of a helicopter and a spotlight travels down the length of the street. I guess it's a police copter. They patrol the city at night, and maybe the blackout attracted their attention. But knowing what it is doesn't make that wandering spotlight any less eerie.

Then I decide to see what time it is, and go look for my watch. It takes a few minutes to locate it in the dark, so all told it's been ten minutes or so since the lights went out. Want to know what time it was?

Two forty-one AM, which means that the blackout occured at about 2:30.

Freaked me the heck out.

The Kindness Of Strangers

Something really nice happened to my family yesterday, and if you don't mind I'd like to tell you about it.

It's time to plant the garden, and with yesterday being a holiday I got Dad to come with me to the garden centre. It was pretty hard for him, because this was a small place full of plants and people, and poor Dad has to haul around this huge walker which tends to bang into things. And on top of that, he hasn't been out of the house much (except to go to his day hospital program) in the past five years, so he was kind of disoriented at first, and had to rely on me to scout out the shelves for him. Then I'd come get him and we'd work our way through the green, crowded aisles to wherever the best seedlings happened to be stashed. At first he was kind of mad at the crowd for, well, crowding him, but after a little while he started to get into the experience and was more like his old self, telling me which plants were better than the others (a lot of them were wilting from lack of water, poor things), and which ones he'd like to find.

So we gathered together a nice collection of seven plastic pots full of little vegetable plants (my dad's not a flower guy, except for Geraniums and roses, and we didn't need any of those), and we stand in line to pay. I'm in front with a cardboard box full of the seedlings and he's behind me. I keep shooting glances back at him to see if he's getting tired, but he seems fine at this point, much better than we arrived. We decide to buy some onion bulbs.

So I get to the cashier, and by this time I've figured out the total in my head, so I tell her "it's probably just under seventeen dollars." And she says, "You're going to be pleasantly surprised when we get to the end." Dad asks for the onions, then she totals everything up and it's actually a couple of bucks less than I thought it would be.

Then she turns to my Dad and says. "I told you you'd be pleasantly surprised. A lady about eleven or twelve people ahead of you gave me this..." And she shows us a twenty dollar bill. "She said that you reminded her of her father who recently passed away, and she wanted to pay for your purchases." And my Dad is just stunned, and so am I. At first Dad doesn't seem to understand, since he reached into his pocket and put his own twenty on the table. But she ignored it, rang everything up on the till and gave Dad six dollars, saying "And she said that you were to keep the change, for a nice coffee or something."

Then Dad and I are both saying "Thank you!" and I ask the cashier if the lady is still here, because I'd like to thank her in person. But she keeps saying that no, the woman was long gone.

So my Dad got free plants for his garden, and we both got a lesson on how kind strangers can be. Dad was a little ambivalent about starting a garden this year, since he wasn't sure he could eat all the vegetables, but that anonymous woman seems to have gotten him all fired up about growing things again. He said that he thought about what she did all last night, and today he's full of ideas on where he wants to put the plants. (And he wants me to write a letter to the newspaper thanking her, so maybe this is draft one of that.) And I'd really like to thank her, whoever she was, because her impulsive, unrequitable act of kindness really changed my Dad's mood that day, and may have made his whole summer.