One Gnat's Butt Pimple

When Hindsight is fully awake and doing its job there's a lot to take in, sort through, think about, analyze, put into perspective, and blog about.

I have just returned from a ten-day very eventful trip to Indianapolis, and I'm glad it's over. It wasn't one of my best visits back home. Most of the events were insignificant yet Hindsight thought them worthy enough to share with me...over and over and over.

Here's an example: One day, after leaving Jason's house in Trafalgar for the one-hour trip back to my apartment in Lawrence, I was on a narrow two-lane country road (with drop off's and no shoulders) just south of Franklin, when a big white SUV with a Cadillac emblem on its hood raced up behind me and cozy'd up to the back bumper of my car. I was driving five miles over the 50 mph speed limit, but apparently that was not fast enough. I needed to go faster, faster, FASTER!! With each glance into my rearview mirror my blood pressure rose 10 points. With each second I was getting more angry. Finally I pulled off the road, rolled down my window, made a mad face while shaking my finger like a scolding teacher as the car passed me. I might have said some things too, but my memory is not so good these days.  I continued on home and by the time I pulled my car into the garage, I had forgotten all about the tailgating incident. But wait! Not so fast. Hindsight saw the whole thing and played it back for me...over and over and over again. The part of the brain that deals with logic got involved; there was a lot of analyzing going on; things were put into perspective. Please see below for the final analysis of this event:

This event is as important as a pimple on a gnat's butt. 

In the big scheme of things, it's not significant.

Hindsight is trying to make up for neglecting its job in the past when it slept a lot, stuck its head in the sand and basically let me do things repeatedly that were not in my (or others) best interest. Without Hindsight's retrospection, without sorting through past events, thinking about, critiquing and analyzing them, and putting them into a context that made sense, I was doomed to repeat not positive results forever. 

As the days passed, one gnat's butt pimple turned into big bulbous acne and I was a mess, mostly because Hindsight was on its game and kept bringing me its catch of the day. Like a cat that repeatedly deposits mangled dead mice at its owner's front door, my hindsight was delivering dissected parts of daily events that made me look really bad. After each event went through analysis, the final report was always the same: This event is an important as a pimple on a gnat's butt. In the big scheme of things, it's not significant.

And then on my last day in Indy, Maggie Mae got sick. I rushed her to a 24 Hour Emergency Vet Hospital. Everything was happening so fast and yet it felt like slow motion. The ever-increasing intensity of her pain and suffering was so hard to bear as I held her in my arms while driving the short five minutes--which felt like an hour--to the people whose job it was to save my precious little girl. Things did not go well, and the next twenty-four hours were full of tears and sobs, anxiety, and constant concern. The thought of losing Maggie Mae was so horrific, I couldn't allow myself to go down that rabbit hole. I gathered within me all the strength I could muster to not fall apart because instead of helping Maggie, the Emergency Vet Hospital misdiagnosed her condition and gave her medicine that turned her condition to critical; I had a difficult choice to make. Would this be the last day of Maggie's life? 

The answer was "Nope! Not if I can help it." I took Maggie out of the hospital at 7:00 a.m. yesterday morning, and while Maggie cried and whined in the backseat, I drove nine hours straight to her Vet here in Franklin, where he was waiting for her at the door. We were now in a safe place where the concern was for saving Maggie, not making certain I signed a document first guaranteeing a payment of $1200 before he saw her. 

Last night when Tom turned out the lights and climbed into bed, he did what he always does: He leaned over and kissed me on my eyebrow and said, "Oops. I was aiming for your lips." Then he kissed Maggie who was cuddled up between us, asleep and snoring. "God I love that girl so much," he said, "and you too, of course," he added.

With Maggie curled up on my lap, I am sitting here at my computer blogging about my visit to Indy. I say out loud, "I am so grateful she is still with us." She looks up at me with her little brown eyes. I wonder...does she have any idea how much she is loved? How devastated we would be if we lost her? The very next thought that comes to my mind is how clearly I can see now, when looking back with Hindsight at the events of the past week, which ones were as significant as a pimple on a gnat's butt and the one that was way more important. 

Life is too short, especially for a gnat; go to the prom.