When I woke up on our fourth day in Gulfport, our last day on the roof, I knew that there was really no way that we were going to finish it. I pulled on my favorite shirt, my lucky shirt, my Mammoth shirt that I've had since forever and have worn for almost all of my big tests and bad days. I pulled on my shirt without expecting a miracle: there was just too much to be done, and just not enough time in which to do it before the dusk brought the end of the workday and the promised rain. All day long that knowledge was over my shoulder, pushing me to work harder and faster and to become, at a few points, frantic and obsessive.
I fell in a hole.
Yes, in my hurry to clear the bare baseboards of scraps and equipment so I could begin shingling, I moved a piece of wood that had been covering a large hole so that no one would fall in. With the piece of wood in my hands, I couldn't see the hole it had concealed, and I fell in. Hard. I'm not sure the mechanics of what happened, since, as Karelyn said, "One second you were there, the next you weren't," but I do know that I ended up with a bump you could see through my jeans and a bruise covering half of my right thigh. If you were lucky enough to see me within the three weeks or so after I got back in Long Beach, I probably hiked up my skirt to show you. It was an impressive bruise. And perhaps it says something about my state of mind that I didn't stop to ponder the symbolism of the event. I was on the roof, I was through the roof, and then I was back on it, nail gun in hand. No pause to consider how my drive to accomplish my set goals had blinded me, made me unable to react to the truth of the situation. I didn't think about the difference between appearance and reality, between the roof that existed in my mind and the one that was actually supporting (or not supporting) my feet as I scrambled across it. I had other things to do.
I ruined my favorite shirt.
Yes, it was already well into dusk and we were already loading up the vans, but we still needed to put a seal of tar on the chimney so when the rains came (as they did, with impressive vigor) there wouldn't be any entrance for the moisture. I grabbed the tar and the trowel and started smearing and spreading. When my gloves got too sticky to use, I took them off. And, inevitably, I got covered in tar. We were going to dinner at Westminster Church that night (our dallying on the roof had already made us late), and I was utterly unpresentable, with tar coating my hands and arms, my pants, and my favorite shirt. After scrubbing with pumice soap and using some of the cheerfully offered home remedies from the Gulfport residents, I got my body clean. But my favorite shirt, my lucky shirt, my Mammoth shirt that reminds me of the Sierras every time I pull it on, is ruined.
I bring this up only because today I had a real desire to wear it. I woke up this morning feeling a little sick, and a little tired, and I could've used the extra boost. But I think I might like it better this way. It is, after all, only a shirt. It's a shirt that got me through my APs and my SAT and the grueling hike up to Duck Pass and my Random Voices audition, but it's just a shirt. And I'm not going to get so caught up in worrying about never wearing it again that I'm going to make it into something more important than that. One day it would have fallen apart and gotten ripped and I would've had to retire it anyway. It's just fabric and dye, and it wouldn't have lasted forever. And now it's got Mississippi tar on it. So that's kinda cool too.
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