The Universe Is Upside Down (Blog #645)

Two good things that happened today–

1. I got rich, bitch

Well, sort of. Just before Christmas and my knee surgery, I made at a cash deposit through my bank’s night-time drop box. And whereas the deposit showed up online the day after Christmas, it was for MORE than what I’d written down. A hundred dollars more. For the last week, I’ve continued to check online thinking someone had made a mistake, but nothing’s changed. Maybe I miscounted, I thought, grabbed an extra hundred.

Like I had an extra hundred to grab.

Anyway, now that I’m semi-mobile, I went to the bank today to inquire about the matter. For twenty to thirty minutes, I watched a very kind teller run back and forth, checking his computer, pulling out deposit slips, asking people questions. Finally, he came back and said that yes, there’d been a mistake. “However,” he said, “our books still balance.”

“So what are you saying?” I said.

“I’m saying don’t worry about,” he said. “You can keep it. Merry Christmas.”

Merry Christmas indeed.

Thanks, universe!

2. Someone was kind

After going to the bank, I went to Walmart for knee Bandaids and foods rich in potassium, since my legs have been achy and restless at night and I’m thinking it might have something to do with my electrolytes. (Or maybe the fact that one of my legs was recently cut open and severely traumatized.) Anyway, this was a serious chore, walking all around a damn warehouse, since I move with all the agility and speed of a slug. Everyone was passing me–people with canes, people in wheelchairs–everyone. Talk about being self-conscious. But then at the checkout line an old man, with a beard like Moses, step backed and waved me ahead. “You go first,” he said.

I think the phrase for what I immediately experienced is “cognitive dissonance,” that feeling that something is out of order. An old man making concessions for a whippersnapper like me. But I’m learning that the universe is out of order. The universe is upside down. At least from how we think about it. We think we don’t deserve something, that we’re not worthy of all the good in the world, and yet there the world is, offering all its goodness to us constantly.

Well, at least a couple times a day.

Quotes from CoCo (Marcus)

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For I am a universe–large–like you are, and there is room here for all that we contain. An ego, of course, is small, and it is disgusted and humiliated by the smallest of things. But a universe is bigger than that, much too big to judge itself or another, much too big to ever question how bright it is shining.

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