I walked into the kitchen and saw one banana pulled apart from the bunch … set aside and ripening.
Smiled.
Emma’s home.
Went back a couple minutes later and she was there, fixing herself a bowl of cereal at the sink. Still in her pajamas. Wearing her glasses, too.
It’s been a long time since I’ve seen her in her glasses. Felt what I feel sometimes glancing out the window just as the sun is waking up through the trees … a riot of itself and all its possibilities.
The unearned gift of catching the fleeting moment just before it assumes its responsibilities for a day that will all but take it for granted.
For some reason, seeing her in her glasses has always melted me.
How they’ve always framed a face that holds all the world can become.
She’s only herself in the morning … all poor eyesight and barefoot … and an abiding love for Lucky Charms.
Her glasses bring her into focus for me, and for a fleeting moment, I catch a glimpse of all her younger selves. The ones she doesn’t like being reminded of because she’s too busy looking forward.
It’s for me to look back.
I find myself wanting to keep her in her glasses in the kitchen for as long as I can.
So I mention the bananas … not just the ripe one set aside, but all the ones in the bunch, which have been pulled apart from each other and are starting to brown in the basket.
“I didn’t pull all those apart,” she corrected me.
I just assumed she had.
“Wasn’t me,” she confirmed.
“And that’s not how you ripen bananas, anyway. You keep the bunch together and put a ripe banana beside them.”
Oh.
“Ripe bananas release ethylene. It’s a gas … which breaks down cell walls and converts starch into sugar, eliminating the acid … which causes the other bananas to ripen.”
When she finished, the sophomore biomed major used her index finger to straighten the right side of her glasses, unconsciously.
A riot of herself and all of her possibilities.
Turned around and went back to her old room to savor her Lucky Charms.
I stood in the kitchen for a moment … in the still warm space between her presence and her absence.
Neither looking back nor looking forward … just awed by the sunrise.
Slept in this morning, which never happens. When it does though, it leaves me in a fog. Operating system has like a half second lag to it. Takes me a bit, but I manage to get the majority of my shit together and out the door.
On an inspired whim I drive uptown to pop into Table for an espresso. Haven’t been in a while. Always good vibes to be had there. Park across the street and look left for traffic before crossing. Outta the corner of my eye, though, I spy a car parked in front of Joe’s Bakery. It’s pushing 9:30, which as any Saturday sinner will tell you, is pushing it for Joe’s.
On my morning’s second whim, I reroute and take the catty corner of Main and Chestnut, catch the Open sign still hanging on the door. Walk in and look left. See one lonely sugar donut in the case, waiting for me. Joe’s at the register finishing with a coupla customers before he walks over.
“I’ll take your last sugar donut.”
“There’s a cinnamon twist left, too if you want that,” he says, gesturing to the other end of the tray.
I’m not so foggy to understand that this is not a multiple choice question.
Ask him to throw in a sugar twist so the three of us are covered.
“Just put $3 on the counter,” he says. “You’re my last customer.”
An honor and a blessing, I say, knowing that under the wire is more than any of us deserve.
As he hands me the bag, he says, “Best donuts in town you got right there.”
… leaving me no choice but to say, “Amen.”
“When you see good, praise it,” Alex Haley once wrote, though I imagine he wasn’t thinking of donuts at the time.
Or, you know, maybe he was.
By the time the bells on the door finish jingling behind me, I am convinced that I just might be their corresponding angel. Walking to the corner I see that the new deli that just opened is open. Whereupon I invest the morning’s third whim.
Order a $2 coffee and take a seat at the long counter by the window overlooking Chestnut that, turns out, was made for writing Saturday morning postcards.
I write to tell her how I am rolling sevens, as my tall cup slowly burns off the fog,
After addressing the envelope, “Kindly deliver to ….” which is also the invisible note that I pinned to my shirt when I left the house, I cross the street and finally make it to Table.
Sit down with my cortado and crack open Jack Gilbert so he can further melt my morning.
And say thank you to and for the lag in my operating system.
Letters for Maggie 