yesterday I woke up to the sound of a handclap. it was sharp, clear and near. it woke j up too.

“you hear that?”
a groggy “yeah.” responded

it puzzled me, because in my mental inventory of sounds, nothing else sounds quite like two palms slapping against each other.

I got up, looking around, trying to figure out what would make that noise.

nothing. was it God clapping me awake? what wonders lie in store for me today?

the rest of the waking day was spent wrangling with red tape, private and governmental. trying to get money and trying not to owe money. faxing appeals and invoices and tax ids and our second phone line is down again after we got charged for them coming out here when we weren’t home, coming back when we were and them spending an afternoon trying to fix the problem. the end of the day was punctuated by me skidding in the rain to a 6 inch near miss of someone’s bumper at the intersection.

this Maryland driver i was behind gauged the yellow light different from me.
for them yellow means stop, for me it meant speed up.

and this morning Faith woke me up playing with the the blind’s pull cords. bouncing against the window pane, the wooden weight of the cord sounded suspiciously like a clap…