Trauma in Sedona Part I

Today it might be a little bit difficult for me to write with anything other than straightforward facts. I need to stay on task because the emotional expenditure that I have endured this afternoon is nothing short of overwhelming. It has been one crisis after another and I am doing everything in my power to not overreact, not exaggerate, not to annihilate your senses with the details of this day, because I fear that you too would find yourself in an untenable situation, weeping silently to yourself in your barca lounger in the fetal position. I will not have that on my conscience, but I need to expunge the stress from my soul in order to free my own restless mind and senses. For those of you who are too uncomfortable continuing down this path, please divert your eyes now. For those of you who are far stronger than myself emotionally, I recommend that you tread cautiously, and be prepared to close out this posting as quickly as you may have opened it, because by the end (I don't care if you have the emotional depth and range of a half-dead mule) you will be an absolute wreck. Consider yourself forewarned.

The trouble began last night when my mother and my cousin Joannie came in for dinner at my restaurant. They are out here on a four-day girls spa weekend that they take every year since we have moved to Arizona. As their entrees were being prepared, I went over to their table to feign interest in their enjoyment of their meal (quite honestly, I have reached the point that so long as the guest doesn't punch me in the throat, I consider it a mild success--I have got to get out of this business soon, but that is another rant on another day). We began to discuss our plans for Saturday. They wanted to go up to Sedona for the day and we were determining the specifics of the plan--what time did we need to leave, who was going to drive, what we would do if they blew another tire on the way up like they did last time--things like that. They had spent the day at the spa with Shari and the three of them had already come up with a basic outline for the day. Shari wanted to bring the dogs up with us and she was pretty dead-set on this plan. We have been to Sedona many times in the past couple of years, and our general agenda when we go now is to find our favorite trail and go hiking with the kids. I am usually carrying Lauren for the majority of the walk and the times that we have brought Abby have been quite a challenging dilemma, just coordinating who was going to hold her leash and maintain our balance enough to not drop Lauren into the creek. See The Lazy Bastard Returns (Section 2) for more details about the difficulty this poses.

But Shari wants to bring the dogs--not just Abby, but all the dogs. As you probably know from the last posting and many others, Abby is a labrador retriever and loves these walks and is fully capable of getting into and out of the water with adept comfort. As long as she is off of her leash, she tags along and plays along side the rest of us for as long as we can handle it. Shari's dogs (if they can even be classified as canine) are glorified rats with a hyperinflated squeak toy trapped in their larynx. She has a 2 pound maltese named Kaylee and a sniveling excuse for a beagle named Savannah. Neither of which has any idea what to do on a hike, and I am pretty sure that swimming is not one of their primary functions. Now, as we found out earlier this month, not having swam with any regularity does not necessarily translate into not being able to swim at all, but my instinct told me that bringing the girls was not the best idea. I mentioned my concerns to mom and Joannie, but I fully realized that we would probably be dragging the rats behind us throughout the day.

The thing that really struck me as odd, however, had nothing to do with Sedona per se. Mom mentioned that they were going to meet at Shari's house at 8AM for breakfast and that we could leave from there. Their story was that Shari was going to actually make them breakfast at 8 in the morning. I think Kim summed it up best when I told her when she responded with, "Do they not see the absolute absurdity of Shari making them breakfast at that hour?" Shari lived with us for 9 1/2 glorious months. During this time, the only thing that would arouse her from her 72 hour weekend slumber was the smell of bacon grease crackling. I cannot recall one time that she made anybody breakfast during those months. The thought that she would actually intentionally be getting up to prepare breakfast for somebody else at the detriment of her weekend recovery sleep just made no sense at all. Kim had to call Shari and find out what the hell was going on, and Shari claimed complete ignorance about any kind of breakfast plan. Somehow, however, when I went to bed last night, Shari was going to be making hosting an 8AM breakfast extravaganza. Kim seemed to think it would consist of bagels (and perhaps some of those Starbucks Frappuccinos), but I still had to witness it firsthand.

My day started out innocently enough (as they all do). I awoke in the semi-conscious numbness of far too many Glenlivet on the rocks at about 7:45. My two wonderful children singing in unison "Daddy, wake up--It's a beautiful sunshiny day!" Usually I just get Lauren providing this wake up call, but today, Hunter joined in on the fun, and my bleary eyed vision could definitely make out that there were two silhouetted bodies in some reptilian fashion urging me to arise from my content slumber. Going out last night for a couple of beverages pretty much precludes me from trying to make any kind of excuse as to wanting to sleep for another 30 seconds. This is the penance of the married man--guilt supercedes all physical and/or mental damage (mild hangovers included). So I spryly made my way out of bed and did my best to maintain some semblance of enthusiasm as I embraced the beautiful sunshiny day.

It is at this point that I will pause this posting. I realize that occasionally I write a little too much on any given topic and the misdirections of my train of thought/stream of consciousness can get somewhat off track. This story could take at least 3 or 4 solid sections with all of the craziness that went on today. There should be ample foreshadowing to consume your minds at this point and a sort of Kafkaesque sense of loss awaits those who continue over the next couple of days. The good thing is that I actually have the mornings off the next few days, we will have no visitors after Gramma G departs tomorrow morning, and I will have no excuses as to why I didn't finish this soon to be epic. Please tune in tomorrow.