Today I'm saving the world. First there's coffee with my sister-in-law, to discuss some family crisis. Then lunch downtown, to try to repair an old friendship that I haven't been tending to very well. Then a special stop on the way home (horrendous traffic to and from) to pick up softball shirts for my nine-year-old's game tomorrow, and then home in time to field a call from an elderly friend who is upset with me that I haven't visited lately. The reason is that I no longer volunteer at the local food pantry, where I've been getting her some help with her groceries (she lives on Social Security). She's in poor health and lonely, and she really let me have it: "Why are you mad with me? Why don't you come see me?" Added to this is the guilt of dropping out of volunteer work at the food pantry in the first place. But I couldn't explain; I had to hang up so I could go pick up the kids, so they wouldn't greet me with, "Where have you BEEN?"....And, for a moment, the message from the cosmos seemed clear: You, lady, are one sorry sumbitch.
There's an Iris Dement song--titled "The Way I Should," actually, from the album of the same name--that deals with this problem. "And then a ghost that I had met before, he kept me up til dawn/And everything I thought was right was suddenly all wrong/And he said, 'Your scores are looking purty bad,' and then he asked me what it was that I had to show." But then she realizes that she was playing a game according to someone else's rules, "trying to keep my score up in a game I did not choose/ And I looked that ghost straight in the eye and said, 'You had better not be comin' back by again.'"
I didn't talk to the ghost. I just called my friend Devra, who has short legs but who can kick ass across state lines if need be. It worked. Tomorrow I will not save the world. I'll live just the way I like, and that's the way I should.