I lay in bed thinking about yesterday for a half an hour, as the rain drummed on the roof and the sun crept over the eastern horizon.  I pictured myself as a sailor on a battered boat, dragged to shored by strong hands which wrapped me in a warm cocoon of wool and pressed a mug of steaming tea upon me.  I made some mistakes this week, and endured some blows, and my self-pity caught me short.

Then I read about a friend’s mother dying, and all kinds of havoc in Washington; and saw a few pictures of injured children in the aftermath of storms abroad.  I browsed the Times and contemplated my relative lot in life.  True, I cost myself a few dollars by stupidity; and true, our dog finally had to be eased of pain and left us; and true, I’m still unemployed.

And yes, I know, it’s not a competition to judge whose suffering  pummels them more soundly.

But still.  Maybe it is, in a way: because I know that I’m on the lucky end of life.  Maybe not the very luckiest.  I’ve certainly had my share of setbacks, some more recently than others.  I cannot claim to have been “lucky in love”, nor with money, but I’ve got a great son and some kick-ass friends and I’m still breathing, still crazy, still feisty and without a doubt, still relentless.  (With a tip of the mortar-board and a fling of the white tassel to Judge Peggy Stephens McGraw, who once took judicial notice of such.)

It’s the seventh day of the fifty-second month of My Year Without Complaining.  Life continues.