Settled, Uh Huh

my house is a very very very fine house
Originally uploaded by mygothlaundry

Most people get these crisis type things like, once every now and then or a couple of times in a lifetime: you know, spaced out nicely throughout their lives so that they get time to look back and say, hey, I really grew from that and then, comfortable in the knowledge of their unparalleled spiritual growth and fortitude in the face of adversity and all, donate money either to some ashram in Portland or the Republican party, their pick. Me, I like to have my crises all at once in a big huge giant ball of crisis and give my money to the kwikee mart for cigs and beer.

That would be why I got a phone call from A that C, who is A's friend who has become the QOB's careworker, had just called her hysterical because the QOB had just fallen at the CVS parking lot on Hendersonville Rd. and they were even now en route to the emergency room.
"Which hospital?" I asked, super calmly.
"Mission," said my daughter, which, alas, in Asheville is no help at all, since there used to be two hospitals, Mission & St. Joes, but now there is one hospital, Mission, which has two uneasily combined parts, Memorial and St. Joes, and there are two emergency rooms, both called Mission, and, like everything geographical in Asheville, you can see how it gets confusing even to those of us who have lived here a long damn time.

So I called my brother and sent him off to the St. Joe's emergency room and I hied myself to the Memorial emergency room where I found that the QOB had just been admitted. Therefore I called my brother and got him on over and my daughter A showed up and C, who was all freaked out but okay and then we all went in in turns to see the QOB who, fortunately, had nothing much wrong with her, being as how she had landed on her face when she fell and she only has the two teeth to go through her lip and only one of them did. Therefore she needed stitches and she got them, eventually, after we had explained that she had no photo ID because, hey, she is the Queen of Bohemia and they should bow down and shit and then we all came home and drank champagne.

Well. In the middle of all this I got a frantic hysterical call from Young M who was being held prisoner, yet again, in the main office of the high school because they would not give him back his cell phone. Nobody adult at the school would talk to me so I had to leave the QOB in the ER all alone, which is to say, with her bazillion concerned relatives and friends (we freaked out the security guard, who had these orders that patients are only supposed to have one person back in the ER with them but let us have two and then we kept changing those people until finally he just gave up and buzzed all of us through whenever we started in on explaining) and drive at batspeed over to the high school and stare down the principal. Fortunately I was in the mood to do some staring so that didn't actually take very long and right then, I frankly did not care who was in the wrong or the right, so I got young M and his cell phone released into my custody in record speed and we got back on over to the ER where we had a lovely time spending all my spare change on the snack machines while they sewed up the QOB's lip and determined that there was nothing else at all wrong with her.

All good and we came back home to drink heavily (okay, I acknowledge that there is in fact out there a better and healthier stress response than dreaming of a beer, but there you have it) except that when we got home young M called to me in a voice of alarm that I had to come see this. This was a huge pool of "water" on the floor (don't ask. It was mostly yellow.) in the downstairs living room which set off a new round of phone calls and I had to get poor A, my rehabbing friend who is fixing my new house, to drive back in to town from Bat Cave and saw a whole bunch of new holes in the wall and the ceiling to find this new leak since it was, apparently, his fixing of the old leak that prompted the new leak to spring forth in all its glory.

Which he did and somewhere in there A went on a heroic quest for straws so the QOB could drink champagne unhamperd by her giant Hitler bandage. And here we are and I'm frankly utterly relieved that there were three crises today because, jesus, three is enough and three generally means, according to my mother, anyway, that all the shoes planning on dropping have totally dropped. Or god, seven. But let's hope that this time it was three.