John Boy Walton breaking up with his girlfriend at my dining room table
Lime green Calphalon cookware with polka-dots
Rhett Butler moving in next door
Dale Earnhardt, Jr. shopping at our neighborhood Gap store
Purple hippos dressed in butterfly costumes
Paula Deen hosting a cooking show on my back porch
What do all these things have in common?
They have all been the subjects of feverish, hallucinatory dreams I’ve had while taking my prescription cough medicine.
And, if this is any example of what is floating around in my subconscious, WOW.
It’s a little disturbing.
I spent the better part of the weekend lying in bed trying to find the will to live or at least the will to get up to go to the bathroom. I don’t know that I’ve ever been as sick as I’ve been the last few days, except for maybe the day I found out that Dr. Phil was getting his own talk show.
Mimi took Caroline most of the day Thursday and Thursday night. P had her during the day on Friday and then she went back to Mimi and Bop’s to spend the night Friday night. Unfortunately, no good deed goes unpunished and Mimi succumbed to the plague on Saturday morning, so P picked up Caroline and they headed to the ranch.
In the meantime, I was trying to keep my lungs from seceding from my chest cavity and attempting to breathe through my nose. Both efforts proved mostly futile.
However, Saturday afternoon, just as I didn’t know if I could go on living, I turned on CMT and “Urban Cowboy” was on. It was better than any prescription medicine. If you haven’t layed around half-drugged, watching Bud and Sissy fall in love, fight, break up, fall in love again, and put their matching license plates back up in the window of his truck, then you’ve missed out on one of the finer things in life.
But seriously, the scene where Bud describes how you know when your hand “gits broke” is a timeless piece of American cinema. It sustained me in my darkest, cough-filled hour on Saturday.
I woke up Sunday morning with my head a little clearer, although concerned about why I dreamed about John Boy Walton and his relationship troubles, and discovered that my people were gone. And judging by the fact that “Max and Ruby” was still playing on the T.V. and breakfast was still on the table, it looked like they left in a hurry.
I was right. They left in a mad dash. Otherwise known as trying to get to church on time when you have a four year old who likes to dress herself.
I climbed back in bed with the Sunday paper and fell back asleep while checking to make sure my name wasn’t in the obituaries. A short while later I heard P and Caroline walk in the back door, home from church.
She walked into the bedroom, shirt on backwards, hair unbrushed, mismatched socks, and a jumper that was in desperate need of ironing. God love her.
And God bless P for just letting her go with it, although I’m a little concerned that her Sunday School teacher may think her Mama’s on drugs.
Which, I guess technically speaking, I am.