I like baseball, and I like the ritual of opening day, and I have been following he new season with great interest.

I was planning to hook up with bro Spike and his son in Beantown and go to the Red Sox game at Fenway this coming weekend but I am not sure I can walk to get to the airport and onto the plane and off the plane and into a taxi and then hobble to the box seats in that magnificent ballpark.

But I am getting ahead of myself. I went to Willow, duh, which is how the week arrived at the dramatic fricking denouement. I went over at the usual time after work, which was unwise, probably, but I was meeting some people later and they didn’t show up until after seven, I was feeling no pain- literally- between the happy hour white and the great news about Tinkerbelle. The leg was much better.

Owner Tracy O’Grady came down to work the usual crowd and explained “that is it for the Lenten Fish Fry. Won’t be back until next year,” she said, and that made us all think.

Old Jim tucked into the fish, with luscious fries, and some boiled new potatoes, and Senior Executive Jeff looked envious and did the same. Pretty soon everyone was eating fish and loving it. My son showed up in uniform for a couple beers, and it was magnificent. I was feeling proud and expansive, along with Tink’s big news.

It was the last night of the Lent Fish Fry and it looked so good I almost fed myself, too, but I was feeling so good that I over stressed things coming back from the head to sit with the lovelies and went ass over teakettle near the kitchen entrance. I hauled myself up on the wooden divider to the dining room and wobbled across the slick wooden floor to my stool to finish what I gathered was going to be the last one of the night.

I tipped heavily- Tinkerbelle’s guy proposed the same weekend they found out she was pregnant and I wanted to be generous- and I got back in the Bluesmobile and managed to navigate home without further disaster.

Damn it hurt. I think I made a bulldozer of a vodka to kill the pain and actually made it to bed and was unconscious until after six. Unheard of, and man did the leg hurt when I put some weight on it.

Then the phone rang while I was cooking a lazy broiled-tomatoes-cheese-and-eggs breakfast and got into an intense discussion with an Indian call center who is trying to dun me for the Gold’s gym membership I don’t use, and which institution billed my credit card $20 a month for a couple years on the off chance that I would go and work out, which I didn’t, and when my credit card number changed last December they piled up four months worth of charges and the Indians bought the debt and now call me three or four times a day to try to collect, to which I responded by paying Gold’s direct, those worthless shifty bastards, and I was explaining what I thought of call-and-collection centers in Bangalore when alarm bells started going off and the smoke detector went crazy and explained to the nice man that my kitchen was on fire and I had to go.

I grabbed the cane and limped toward the kitchen to see the cheese-and-tomatoes on fire under the broiler and I wondered where the fire extinguisher was and almost fell again opening the door to the oven and finally got the fire put out without burning myself and then hustled to the smoke detector that was chirping like crazy and I didn’t want the neighbors calling the fire department and stood on tip-toes to get to the box and the pain shot up my leg as I ripped out the battery to shut the goddamn thing off and almost fell again and then limped to the door to the balcony and threw it open and then looked at the black sooty-oily burned bacon mess that had been my pristine white oven and started saying: “Goddamn it” and realized that in addition to dying of the avian flu or lung cancer or something else I might succeed in incinerating myself and that, my friends, is how my Saturday is unfolding.

How is your Easter weekend starting out?

Copyright 2012 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com