The week started off with, as you may recall, Erik the Red, my almost-new car, getting muckled on the expressway just north of Boston. He was still drivable, so I got him home okay. He’s now resting quietly, though hors de combat, in the barn, waiting for an appraiser to arrive and determine his immediate future. The driver’s-side door is the epicenter of the damage, but I’ve found that I can get pull it open just far enough to climb in and out by squeezing very small and dragging my feet after me. It ain’t pretty, and quite impossible in go-to-meetin’ clothes. Major surgery required. But remember the recent floods? The appraiser’s running just a little behind.

Then a couple of days later I got to see a dermatologist about a pair of tiny pimples on my neck that just won’t go away, no matter what I’ve done to them over the past couple of years. Turns out I was right to be concerned. Now I’m back at the waiting game again, waiting for the leviathan medical center in Lebanon to grant me an appointment for its removal.

My pretty new printer stopped printing, which is a serious problem. (I keep thinking, You had only one job!) Nothing seems to stir its conscience; it just isn’t. So I called Customer Service, who responded very enthusiastically, but in a South Asian accent that’s almost utterly unintelligible to me. They, too, failed, but expressed convincing optimism, and when was a good time to call me back. But in the last call, I noticed a disturbing tendency to ask for more information than I’m comfortable divulging. The clincher was that they’re going to send me a brand-new printer in exchange for mine (Great!). They will ship me an empty box for my printer. I affix the enclosed mailing label, send the printer back, and they will...(What!) I don’t know where or how the scoundrels crawled into the works, but I sure would like to know their physical location. I can only hope they’ve gone away and are no longer sniffing around my door. Meanwhile, the printer still isn’t printing.

In the midst of all of this, the president finally did what I’ve been hoping for, and even predicted. I’d also hoped that his erstwhile opponent would perform the usual obligatory sportsmanlike gesture to a fallen adversary, but even in that I was disappointed. He uttered a slur diagnostic of a worried bully.

You can see where all this was irresistibly leading. Down. But fate, as it often does, stepped in to save (paraphrasing again) a part of a week I had rued. By chance, my devoted traveling companion, Bea, was traveling without me to a school reunion in Princeton Junction, New Jersey, requiring a plane, a plane train, a train, lots of walking, and a cab. It turned out to be, after she reached Logan Airport, the day the computer glitch disabled airlines world-wide. On top of that, her other traveling companion, her laptop, unaccountably died, so she couldn’t kill the time with work. She got there as her schoolmates were finishing dessert after supper. Coming home on standby – after hours of anxiety, she got the last seat – she finally arrived at her house late and whipped. Her experience was even more frustrating than any of mine. My sympathy for her agonies took the edge off my own self-pity.

Still, to try to relieve, if only briefly, the discomfort of having to wait for anything to happen, as well as to please Kiki, we went for a walk in the park, where everything changed. We stopped to talk with a lovely retired professor whose equally lovely retired professor partner usually walks their dog, but was home, it turned out, nursing a wry back. Suddenly it was no longer about my pain, but hers that was important.

I walked into the house, loving the cool draft that blows down the hall when the bedroom windows and the back door are both open. The electricity was on, and the generator would kick on in the event it failed. The fridge and the freezer were doing their thing, as were the hot water heater and microwave. I have a reliable (if tiny) backup car to use in the summer. Which it now is. Everywhere I looked, things were as they should be. The cares of this life seemed all at once insignificant. Still, it’ll be great to have Erik healthy and beautiful again sometime.