Charmed

This comment will make me seem 100 years old, but I'll put it in writing anyway.

The flowers in my neighborhood are amazing right now. I know that I have a post every spring about how I love the weather, enjoy the plants, and love life, but this year the plants have really stepped their game. If you're in Baton Rouge, make it a point to take a drive through mid-city neighborhoods. The explosion of color is unreal.

Update: Old married people are funny. They start sharing a brain. @hs00 just tweeted this, almost exactly.

One time, I witnessed from a distance as she was riding her bike and got hit by a car, on her birthday. I went home and enjoyed another piece of birthday cake before going back to see the emergency vehicles lined up at the site of the accident. (In my defense, I honestly thought she had swerved to miss the car, mishandled the curb, and fell into a yard.)

I've got nothing else to add to this story; it's just something I look back on from time to time, and my callous response makes me chuckle.

I've come to realize that in a very particular, somewhat subtle way, I lead a charmed life. I don't mean that I was born rich (good looking and smart are plenty-enough of a head start in life), or that I had any advantages handed to me, or even that I'm lucky. Anyone who has seen me bet on horse racing can attest to the fact that luck is not my companion.

But I seem to have some quality where I can get away with things that would get others in some sort of hot water.

It's easy enough to write off when the favoritism comes from my mother. I'm the son, the first born, the one who looks more like her family, the one who's not a whiner. Whatever the reason, I knew at a young age that I could get away with more than my sister.

I called Mom out on it recently. Mom's so straight that I'm certain she never cheated on a test. She would never think of stealing a nickel. She spent a year of high school living in a convent. No shit. So I didn't expect her to defend my story of how as a bank teller, I would steal a dime from each customer until I had enough to feed the coke machine every day. When she shrugged it off as no big deal, I countered that if I had grown into a serial rapist, she would be in the courtroom screaming, "She was asking for it!"

Mrs. theskinnyonbenny tried to point out this quality of my life some number of years ago. I didn't believe her at the time, but it made me look for it, and I think there's something to it. This week, I've done things in the course of my job that I thought would annoy those to whom I provided suggestions. Nothing of the sort. It was all so smooth.

I'm open to the possibility that I do piss people off on the regular, but I'm just too oblivious to know. And thinking about it now, that's really the more funny possibility. I think we could write a movie about a guy who walks smilingly through life, giving people the red-ass, and unware all the while.