Broken Dishes

I was in the living room sipping my morning coffee and skimming the newspaper when the dishes tumbled from the shelf and crashed to the floor in a cacophony of sounds--smashing and thudding and cracking and splattering. The cats flew across the room as if shot from a cannon and did not resurface for hours.

I ran helplessly to the kitchen, hoping to salvage a favorite mug or retrieve dishes used for special occasions. But there was little salvation to be had for the occupants of the middle shelf in the second cupboard to the right of the sink. All they could hope for was to survive as one plate out of a set of four--not really a meaningful life for a plate raised in a plate family. The verdict was a bit less brutal for the surviving mugs. They can be loners, never having to let on that they were once part of a mug community.

I swept up the broken pieces and went searching for the shards of glass hiding in corners, under appliances, and clinging to the bottom of my slippers. Apparently I had ingested an insufficient amount of coffee because my mind started to wander a bit. I began to wonder where this incident in my cupboard fit into the so-called natural order of things. Broken dishes are part of the Cosmos too, you know.

The shelf had tipped because it was missing one of those little pegs you stick into the sidewall of the cabinet. They cost about 20 cents. You're supposed to use four. We had three.I have to admit that I knew the dang peg was missing. It just seemed that some of the dishes were counter-balancing the shelf and holding it in place. I figured it would be okay if I just let it go until I remembered to stop by the hardware store.

Enter the Revenge of the Cosmos. Actually, it's not the wages of sloth I'm thinking about here. I'm aware that a little intervention the day before, even the week or month before, would have saved all this grief. That's the self evident piece of learning.

What I'm wondering about is far less evident and not really answerable. It's had months, maybe years, so why this moment to fall? There was no one in the kitchen. No exterior activity that lightly bumped the shelf into catastrophe. In the silence of the kitchen, with nary a warning, the shelf belched its contents onto the floor.

In Africa they say you die for only one reason--your time has come. I never found that comforting when I was in a car lurching over dilapidated Kenyan highways, the vehicle in the control of an African holding those views. What if his time has come, but mine hasn't? Who decides this?

But to follow the point, maybe that shelf and its contents simply had run out of clock. Maybe it's nothing more complicated than "their time had come." But if you buy that, don't you also have to accept that all of us are just hanging out until the Cosmos notifies us to gather up all our worldly belongings? Seems kind of a cynical way to look at one's life. I don't have a clue how to answer that, but maybe this will tell you something about how it played out with me.

Yesterday I went to the hardware store and bought a whole package of those little pegs to secure the shelves in our cupboards. I consider this a triumphant declaration on behalf of life and its meaning.

And anyway, it was only a couple of bucks.