Bored with the monotony of November, the Pickwicks decided to take the week off and have a vacation. Nothing but lazing about, drinking tea, and losing the thermometer and every bottle of cold medicine in the house every four to six hours, round the clock. The problem with the entire family being simultaneously struck down with every combination of viruses known to man is that there is no one left to be a functioning adult, even at just the very basic level we consider to be acceptably functioning around here. However, we are on the mend and Mrs Pickwick even felt confident she could manage an errand today.

Completely out of children’s Tylenol, Mrs Pickwick decided she should run to the store to get some. Opening the car door for the first time in a week she also remembered someone should probably take out the trash. While gathering trash, she remembered another friend was under the weather and she had offered to share some chicken broth, so she collected that too. At the dumpster, she carefully took off her purse and set it on the car to avoid accidentally throwing it in the dumpster. This has Never Happened it was simply a Mere Precaution. Trash disposed of, she set off for her friend’s house. She forgot the road was closed and after driving around the road closed sign to see if they meant it (they did) she invented her own detour that didn’t exactly lead nowhere but it certainly didn’t lead anywhere she intended to be.

Mrs Pickwick sighed and considered consulting GPS, which always seems unfair when she knows she’s within two miles of her own driveway. There was a text from her friend letting her know she was finishing a lesson and would be done shortly. So Mrs Pickwick just retraced her ingenious steps and went back to campus to wait. While waiting, she remembered that turkeys were being distributed to the community across the street and she might as well go pick hers up now. Turkey acquired, Mrs Pickwick then noticed her friend’s car was nowhere to be seen and began to suspect she misunderstood the instructions. Sure enough, her friend was finishing a lesson at home, and had meant she would be able to answer the door shortly.

So Mrs Pickwick set off again with her newly acquired turkey and halfway to the actual detour noticed a weird thing in the road. She drove around it and thought “How odd. It looked almost like a purse. What kind of idiot….” Then she glanced over to her passengers seat and noticed just what kind of idiot’s purse was not there. She had been driving all around without the keys!! Imagine if she turned the car off. Or if the purse had fallen off on the weird detour she’d never be able to repeat!! In any case, she backed up frantically and even remembered to turn on the hazard lights, though only because another car started coming down the road, and she does try to be conscientious about confusing other drivers, no matter what is going on in her own particular car. Or head. She couldn’t see the purse anymore and so just guessed where to stop. She came within inches of hitting it again. So anyway, purse rescue accomplished, Mrs Pickwick continued her errands now with her actual keys and wallet in the car.

She followed the proper detour and delivered the broth uneventfully (how boring), and then spent forever and a day at the store because it turns out the turkey donor only donated turkey breasts and not whole turkeys so she decided she should definitely buy a second turkey tonight, immediately. Then she got distracted buying other things unrelated to turkey or to Tylenol which was quite literally the only reason she originally left the house. And you’ll never believe this, but she actually did buy the Tylenol, too. And that was the ONLY part of this whole story that Fr Pickwick found at all unusual.