On the first day, the crock pot stopped working.

“That’s weird,” we thought. “Whoever heard of a crock pot failing? Ha ha! Maybe it’s a bad omen.”

Ha ha, indeed.

Next down was the shower curtain that spontaneously ripped from three quarters of its rings.

“Huh, that’s strange,” we thought. “The curtain didn’t look worn out to us. Must just be one of those things.”

We went to buy Catherine school supplies, but the car died. Fortunately, we had another car so Dave could take me to work the next day, but a tire blew out on the way. We limped into a tire place on the spare. Naturally, the tire people insisted that we replace all four tires or face certain death. We reluctantly agreed and, looking at the bill, deduced that the tires were made of solid gold.

The new tires enabled us to get the first car back from the mechanic. It started, which was an improvement, but now it was making all kinds of new noises. But at least it was running, unlike our computer printer that suddenly went from its normal, minor streaking problem to a major streaking problem. But then the entire hard drive crashed, solving our worries about the printer for the moment.

While we were wondering how to best put the computer to rights, if that was even possible, and also what to do about the increasingly complaining first car, we got a call that a check had bounced.

“What?” we said to the bank. “We never bounce checks!”

“Our bookkeeping is better than your bookkeeping,” the bank pointed out to us.

“Oh.”

Then Dave was bitten by some kind of weird, rabid Houston ant of doom. His whole arm swelled up (after hours of course), and we spent some long, nervous hours in the emergency room.

The next day, it was time for me to make my sleepy way to work. I took the supposedly fixed car, which died in the middle of a busy intersection. I called a different mechanic and added towing and more repair charges to the overworked credit card since there was no more money in the bank.

A couple of nights later, I couldn’t sleep. I was on my way to get a glass of water when I passed Catherine’s room and heard her struggling for breath like a smoker in the last stages of emphysema. We rushed back to the emergency room.

The doctors quickly put her on oxygen and pumped her full of steroids. We kept frantically asking what was wrong, but they didn’t know. They told us that it could be the start of asthma, or an allergy, or the croup, or even just a reaction to the awful Houston weather. They loaded us up with lots of expensive prescriptions to ward off anything from a sniffle to the bubonic plague and sent us home.

The last journal entry for the month said that the muffler in the second car had developed a mysterious rattle and that I was on the way to the dentist. I’ve blocked the results of both of those events out of my mind, but I’m willing to bet they weren’t good.

Really though, in a cosmic sense, what were we supposed to learn from all of that? There was nothing here that called forth extraordinary courage or growth from any of us. I don’t feel any more prepared for calamities that might befall us in the future. Even Catherine’s attack was an isolated event, much to our confusion and relief. Maybe it was a test to see if we could still be good people in the face of frustration? If so, it was a pointless test. Dave was a high school teacher, so he was already good at frustration. I worked in a public library and wasn’t allowed to be anything but pleasant.

The next month, we returned to our regular allotment of minor catastrophes. But even still, these types of things tend to build up over time and I’m afraid our pleasant veneer is wearing thin. It’s been a lot of years since then and I’m afraid that we’re well on our way to a well-deserved, cranky old age.

Anneli Byrd is an academic adviser in Weber State University’s General Studies and Exploratory advising.