More things to do

For those of you who suggested I have the car checked out... the car decided to take matters into its own hands.  Maybe I messed with the order of the universe by cleaning it out yesterday, maybe that car needed its messiness, but today, when I was getting into the car to leave the shop, the window on the driver's side stopped going up and down, randomly, not consistently, of course, sometimes stopping halfway, sometimes not going up at all.  I drove over to the Toyota dealership where Jerry bought the Sienna 12 years ago this coming autumn, and where he always took it for servicing, and ended up making an appointment for early Thursday morning, when they'll have a loaner car to give me.  So they'll look it over and make sure it's doing okay, along with dealing with the window (I hope).  Considering it's got over 156,000 miles on it, it's doing pretty well, but if any of you reading this are familiar with the Camry Jerry had before the Sienna - the car we leaned against while eating our lunch that Sunday we met at Lookout Mountain - you know this ol' Sienna has a lot farther to go if it's going to match its predecessor.  Which I hope it does: it's paid for.  And having a house and a car that are both paid for makes for at least two fewer things to have to worry about at the moment.

I sanded and lacquered drawer parts today for what I'm assuming will be Wood Bros.'s final project.  It's incredibly sad and surreal to be doing this for the last time - I've been a cabinet finisher, of a sort, for the Enrights' cabinet shop for coming on 11 years now, and it's most likely I'll never work as a cabinet finisher again.  And even if the universe got really weird and I did end up working with wood again, it wouldn't be with Jerry, it wouldn't be this.  It feels like I blinked, and it was all over in that instant: love, marriage, the cabinet shop, happiness.  While sorting through some more vendor bills in the office this afternoon, I glanced down and saw Jerry's 2010 desk calendar, open for some reason to the week of 14 June.  In the space for that day, he had written "Chemo?"  It took me a second or two to process what I was seeing: a suggestion of doubt, that question mark, possibly the awareness that having a round of chemotherapy was going to depend on everything going well with previous rounds.  And that day he was thinking he might be starting a round of chemo, my brain eventually realized, was in fact the day after he died.

Turned from the desk calendar, crying, and caught sight of an index card, his writing, "IN THE SHOP."

Land mines everywhere.