Random Thoughts-74
February 7, 2010

Was it Karma? Was it physics? Was it a paranormal experience? Whatever it was, it scared the living crap out of me! Figuratively speaking, of course.
It was about a week before Christmas, when, for some reason, the bookcase in our office decided it was time to crash down off of the wall spilling all of its contents onto the floor, desk and office chair in the room.
Like the proverbial tree falling in the forest, would it have made any noise if nobody had been around to hear it? Say, at, like, 10:00 AM while we were both at work? That philosophical question required no answer, in this instance, because I was the lone occupant of the house, (Deb being at an overnight training seminar), at the precise time of 3:55AM, when said bookcase decided to do its crashing and I was very well aware of the noise that it made.
The resounding boom made me literally jump out of bed and put me in a state of shock. There were so many things running through my mind all at once. One of the first things, that I was aware of, was that the shock hadn’t stopped my heart because the only thing that I could hear, after the kaboom, was the banging heartbeat in my ears!
Then, as I slowly came to my senses, I started to wonder what could have made that big of a bang in the middle of the night. Was it a car hitting the house? A small meteor? Did the wood stove blow up or did that massive Christmas tree, we had just put up, take a nose dive? I was reluctant to go look.
Having no one else to send, I had to go investigate for myself. I checked the stove. Nope. I checked the tree. Nope. I checked the front and back of the house. Nothing. Had Santa Claus landed too hard and too early? I didn’t think so. There was no way that I could have imagined this, was there? Unfortunately no. Much to my chagrin, I finally came upon the disaster in the office.
“What the deuce (or words to that effect) happened here?!” I said to myself and the spirit that had possibly wreaked the havoc.
I quickly checked the damage and after finding that nothing significant or important had been destroyed I turned off the office light and closed the door happy that I hadn’t found a steaming vehicle lodged in the front porch after all.
The next day, when I returned to view the damage more closely in the daylight, I was surprised to find our huge community Bible, which we had received after our wedding, wedged with a few other books neatly on the office chair as if they had been carefully placed there. The newspaper clippings and family papers, that were stashed inside the front cover, still perfectly intact. I know! Spooky!
That, and the fact that a vase filled with scented oil that had been on the top shelf was sitting upright on the floor without a drop of the oil missing, gave the hairs on the back of my neck another reason to stand up.
In the category of “every cloud has a silver lining” the crash, bang, boom episode provided us with the opportunity to give that massive office cleaning project a new starting date. It also reaffirmed that both my heart and my sphincter are still quite healthy because, Lord knows, I was happy to only have to clean up one mess after the big bang!.
“Courage is the art of being the only one who knows you’re scared to death.”-Harold Wilson (1916-1995).