My back is in a slump except for the few times I remember to sit up. There’s a trash pile, a file pile, a paid pile, and a tax pile hovering around my computer.

This takes me to days in my mom’s office when I’d walk in like I owned the place. It smelled of her Avon perfume and paper. I’d sit down across from her in roller blades I’d worn while riding my bike the few blocks and one busy street to the campus where she worked, lucky to be alive after such nonsense. M&M’s would rattle in my grubby hands and I’d watch her as she counted money, typed with the click of her nails, and sifted through stacks of documents. She always had a jar of fingertip moistener, what basically resembled fat chapstick. Straighten, sort, sort, dip. Sort, sort, sort, dip. I never had that kind of precision. I was more of a pull it out in a crumpled mess kind of kid.

Our basement was cold, and dark, and all that basements should be. Scary. But with the light on it was manageable. So I’d go down there to recreate that scene. Mom would save outdated and unusable checks for me, let me borrow some stationary she’d cut with an industrialized slicer that gave me nightmares about chopping off my hands. I’d set up our card table and scoot my knees under it with all my supplies: a calculator, a pen, my official business voice, and a professional aura. I would suggest these kinds of games to my cousin. “Let’s play store.” Or, “Let’s play house.” He was a red-headed farm boy who just wanted to use his BB gun on the chickens (which nearly got us both a whippin’ once) and watch the cans turn black in the trash fire near the edge of the woods. He didn’t really have time for my petty imagination. So I learned to sword fight, climb trees, and shoot at rats, and never understood why pretending to buy groceries wasn’t on our adventure list.  

Today I sit paying bills near those piles, uneven and leaving hardly a space for breakfast bowls on my table. I deduct, calculate, and proudly stamp my envelopes with leftover poinsettia postage. It’s real now, this office work. The money actually comes out of the account, the checks must be in numerical order or I get in big trouble with my register, and papers are filed for sanity’s sake. Parts of this I enjoy: great penmanship on those lines and in those boxes, organizing everything into folders, the pen resting in my hand as I search for something. But as I know myself better, clerical work has never been a fit.

So thanks, Cousin, for showing me a few things. I needed a real adventure.