My Fifteen Minutes

Here's what I worried about between twelve and twelve-fifteen pm today (in more or less the order that I worried about them):

What if my front left tire pops and the car flips and I can get out but I can't get Lief out and I have to sit by his window and talk to him gently until the firemen come but he cries so hard he faints?

What if there isn't enough wiper fluid in the tank and when that black truck passes, mud spatters thickly across my windshield, and I can't see, and I drive up that hill into the hockey rink at the Hull Home and seriously injure several boys who are having hard enough lives as it is, and some wake up in the hospital and their moms aren't there and they just feel so bad?

What if I arrive at my parents' house and there's been a terrible accident and the first memory that Lief has is of tripping over his grandmother's body and chipping his front teeth?

What if Lief's already-damaged front tooth, from when he wiped out into the hearth in July, is judged to be so damaged, in fact, that the dentist pulls it right out of his head on Wednesday when he goes for his first dentist's appointment in his life and from then on he never wants to return and suffers poor dental hygeine his whole life as a result?

Do people of English descent actually have a better chance of having poor dental aesthetics than people of, say, Czech descent, and does that mean because Lief looks like me that he's gotten English teeth and we'll just have to try to love him anyhow?

Am I slouching?

What if I get one of those osteoparosis humps before I'm 50 and there are pictures of me in medical textbooks and I can never bowl again?

Imagine the kind of germs that are on bowling balls.

Did I underbid that last project?

When I laughed at that project manager's stupid joke, did I sound like a sycophant?

Oh God, did I wash my face this morning? What will my mother think?

Oh God, did I wash Lief's face this morning?

What if spitting on a kleenex and wiping your son's face with it turns out to be what gives people cancer?

Is my prozac actually working or am I just deluding myself and I'm actually insane?