Friday the 13th
© 2006 Mary Lynn Plaisance
The first Friday the 13th of the new year 2006 was here. I can’t tell you how many times that the number 13 has come up in my life, because it’s too many times to count.
This is what happened:
On this Friday morning when I woke up, I didn’t look at my clock in the bedroom. I just got up, walked to the kitchen, and put some coffee on. I’m usually up at about 7:30 am. with no alarm going off. Having no ridged time schedule, because I own my own doll business, I’m not a clock watcher. I open my doll house at 10:00 a.m.
The coffee was started, and I turned the TV on. I like to watch the morning news. I look at the hand clock in the kitchen and it was 9:32:47. I look at the TV, and I see that it’s the news that should be on at 7:30 in the morning.
Confused about what time it was, I go back to the bedroom and see that the time on that digital clock was 7:36:15 a.m. I tell myself, “Good, I don’t have to hurry. I really don’t like to hurry to get dressed in the morning. The battery in the kitchen clock must be dead. I’ll put another battery in the clock later.”
Peacefully, I drink my first cup of coffee watching the usual morning news. It’s never any good news, but I like to keep up with what’s happening as much as I can. Wanting a second cup, I walk to the coffee pot that is near the kitchen clock, and I see that the clock battery isn’t dead. The clock is still running. The second hand is stuck on the 47 seconds. It’s just going back and forth from 46 seconds to 47 seconds.
“So, the clock was stuck since last night,” I say to myself.
Now, since I was a young girl, I don’t like to see a clock that’s stuck! I think it comes from all of the old Twilight Zone shows that I watched. I like to see time moving forward. I give the clock a shake, and it’s still stuck at that time. I leave it alone and get my second cup of coffee.
After my second cup, I take my shower and get dressed to go open up my doll house. The kitchen clock that’s stuck is still bothering me, but I don’t want to try and fix it now.
I get my purse, my car keys, and leave the house. I go up the lane and enter La. 1, the main highway. I see red lights, wrecker trucks and cops all over the road. I stop, and I’m the only one on the main road. There is a bridge behind me and no traffic is piled up behind me coming from the bridge. I can see that the traffic is piled up ahead of me. The whole road is blocked, and I can’t see what’s going on because there is so much on the road.
I get out of my car and try to see what’s going on. I can’t make out anything, except that it was a bad accident! My husband was at the doll house already. One car comes behind me from my lane and tells me that there was an accident at the bridge behind us too. That’s why there was no piled up traffic behind us.
I’m on La. 1 alone, which in itself is odd to be able to walk on the road anywhere I want to. I get in the car to phone my husband and tell him that I’m stuck on La. 1 not far from the doll house, and that I can’t go around the bridge, forward or backwards, because there is a wreck in front of me, and one behind me.
When I get into my car, I see that my digital clock is at 9:32:46 a.m., and I saw it switch to 47 seconds.
?~~~~~~~? Twilight Zone ?~~~~~~~?
When I got home at 5:00 p.m., my kitchen clock was running. No one fixed it. I said thank you to the angel who watches over me! I do have one.
Yesterday was another Friday the 13th.
I stayed home all day.