(Photo courtesy Ojan, public domain.)
“Of course you have to take the phone to the bathroom with you when you shower,” a friend told me. “In case something happens.”
“What?” I said.
Until my younger son went away to college two years ago, I had never lived alone except for a year in college. Even then, I was the house manager for a rooming house, and my apartment in the building—the former library, with its 20-foot bank of windows—was the gathering place for a wide variety of people, so I was rarely alone.
I had been telling my friend that I was beginning to understand that if something ever happened to me in my apartment—I was looking questioningly at the stairs lately, with their worn, slick carpet—my sons and a couple of friends might not call for 24 hours, just by normal social rules. Even if I did not reply, it might be another full day before they got worried enough to call the police. I had not thought of the shower, but of course it is no joke: 244 people are injured in the tub or shower every day in the United States. I could imagine, if my phone was downstairs, my long, wounded, slug crawl to find it.
Things are different living alone. I do not mind it at all, but it reminds me of what David Foster Wallace said about reading, for which you also have to be okay with yourself to participate: “I have intelligent friends who don’t like to read because they get…it’s not just bored,” he said. “There’s an almost dread that comes up, I think, about having to be alone and having to be quiet.”
Of course, living alone has few rules—one of its upsides, usually—and nobody said you have to be that quiet.
This morning I hurt my hand squeezing strawberry jelly from its plastic tube, because I bought the wrong brand again. Problems. Not only did I buy the one with high-fructose corn syrup and chemical thickeners, but the container is harder to squeeze and, in the end, leaves a lot of jelly wasted. It is exactly why I try to get the other brand’s “natural fruit spread,” in its thinner-walled bottle.
“Haha,” I laughed, pointing to the Smucker’s. “You got me again, you sonofabitch.”
“Haha,” the Smucker’s laughed. “I was wondering when you’d notice. I been sittin’ in there with the ketchup and that crusty bottle of A.1., just waitin’ for this. Hahaha! Gotcha.”
A drawer flew open, and the flatware all sat up in their tray.
“Haha, Silly, you did it again!” the knives, forks, and spoons shouted good-naturedly.
“Cut him!” a little butter knife cried.
“What?” I said.
I am pretty sure I will always be fine.
