Tag Archives: sundays

Postcards

It’s still good ….

Sunday morning I’m downstairs at my desk when my wife pulls in the driveway, back from picking up groceries after church. 

She likes going to the early service. 

I stay behind and write. 

Both reverent in our pews, attentive to the divine.

Hearing the garage door, I walk out to help her carry in. 

Find her sitting in her car, windows up. 

“You on the phone?” I mouth, making a telephone gesture with my left hand. 

She rolls down the passenger window. 

“I wish you could see your Dad right now,” she says. “His boxers are sticking out above his pajama bottoms.”

She has our daughter on speaker. 

“ ‘Thank you for helping carry in the groceries,’  is what she means to say,” I interject, loud enough for the bluetooth to pick up.  

“And his t-shirt’s too small. Belly’s sticking out.” 

I’m provoked into issuing a statement.  

“I will not be shamed for operating in Cozy Mode on a Sunday morning,” I enter into the record. 

“It’s almost noon,” my daughter chimes in on speaker.

I almost miss being a target of their pile-ons. 

“And, let it be known that Cozy Mode may remain in effect for the next several hours,” I add, which is simultaneously the most defiant threat I can think of, and quite possibly the most pathetic utterance of my life. 

“He looks ridiculous,” my wife adds, grossly overstating the obvious.

Or, overstating the gross obvious.  

“OK, I’ll go in and change, and you can carry in the groceries,” I fire back. 

Was pretty proud of that one. I’m usually not that quick. 

“And I’ll take back the salami I picked up for you.”

She is always that quick. 

Caught me flat-footed. I didn’t see the salami coming. 

Night before, she’s putting finishing touches on the grocery order. Asks if there’s anything I want to add. 

I think for a couple seconds.  “Ooh … do we have any ….”

“Don’t even say ‘salami,’”

In legal terms I believe her asking me the question is what’s known as ‘entrapment,’ but I digress. 

I braced a second too late for what I knew was coming next. 

“I’ve thrown out the last three bags you asked me to get.”

This is true. Not sure I even opened ‘em. 

“I’m not getting it again to have to throw it away.”

Totally understand. So wasteful. 

I feel remorse for requesting salami that I habitually ignore.

I’m not sure why I do this. 

I genuinely like salami. I mean, in between two slices of bread with some yellow mustard? Perfection. Makes salads instantly, you know, fancy. Rolled up with a slice of provolone … it’s like Cozy Mode on a plate.

I have it in my head that salami keeps for a long time. Takes weeks to cure, doesn’t it? You always see ‘em hanging from wooden ceilings on TV. 

So I feel no sense of urgency with salami. Assume it’s always going to be there.

I’m surprised when she throws it away. 

Every time she does, part of me thinks, “It’s still good.” 

I realize I may not be in full command of the facts on the topic.   

Maybe I should start treating it like an avocado. 

Clock’s always tickin’ on an avocado. Doesn’t give you a chance to take it for granted. 

Or … maybe I just like the idea of salami more than, you know, consuming it.

Regardless, the way she kiboshed my request before I could even make it the night before left me convinced I’d have a lot of time to ponder the mystery while living out the rest of my salami-free days.

A punishment fitting the crime.

But … she added it to the order. 

Awwwww.

“She still loves me,” I thought.

At least enough to give me another chance.

I may or may not have placed my hand over my heart after she said it. 

Or, you know, over my t-shirt that’s at least one size too small. 

I mean, she got me salami. 

I’ve come to appreciate that such tiny graces are the wobbly cobblestones that give a marriage a chance to find its fragile footing.

“It’s still good,” I thought.

The fact that I only became aware of her kind gesture when she threatened to take it back was not lost on me.

Clock’s always tickin’ on an avocado. 

“We are such an old married couple,” I said, loud enough for the Bluetooth to hear.

For the record, I was praising us, not shaming us.

Love looks different at 54 then it did at 24.

Says the guy whose boxer shorts are peeking out over his drooping pajamas past noon on a Sunday.

Sometimes you have to put on your cheaters to notice how beautiful it still is. 

I went around back to grab the grocery bags.

Still attentive to the divine.

 

Standard
Postcards

Foregrounding things ….

Got outta bed after a long night of bad dreaming.

Forecast called for rain. Looked like maybe a little pocket this morning before the skies open. Threw on a ballcap and sweats and drove myself to the cemetery. Parked in the usual spot. 

I love visiting on Sundays. It’s so genuinely, and evolvingly, beautiful. 

Quiet enough to hear the crows. 

So many deer — to make clear it’s a shared space. 

Enough hills of varying lengths and grade to afford options. 

Impossible to ignore the seasons.

Took a couple sips of water before locking up the car and easing into my route.

Which starts with a gentle downhill into a left turn with a short, steep climb that takes you up and around a corner. Elevates your heart rate — a good, early systems check to let you know what you might have in the tank — before gifting you a little downhill to catch your breath. Spits you into a roundabout that sometimes I’ll lap a few times for some easy distance before backwashing into a long straightway that takes me back to the crematorium — or as my daughter likes to call it, the “E-Z Bake” — near where my car’s parked.

I circle the parking area a couple times before heading up a nice, easy grade that drops you down to one of my favorite parts — a sloping hill of the cemetery that’s reserved for military veterans.  

On days when my tank’s full, I’ll loop here a few times before continuing on and finishing my first full lap somewhere around three miles. 

This morning … I paused, despite the rain on the way. Was only a couple miles into things.

The flags always get me. 

The hill’s persistent breeze tends to keep them waving.

If the flags weren’t there, I would just look beyond the gravestones to whatever’s beyond. 

So I’m grateful for the flags for reminding me to think of those buried below them.

And their sacrifices, both in the act and substance of their serving. To things bigger than themselves — whether troop, platoon, buddy, family, hometown, country.

Like the deer, the flags remind me that this is a shared space, and by that I mean the cemetery. And the world. 

The flags remind me to listen for what those who are no longer … might have to say to our Now.

To inform our Not Yet. 

I imagine some genuine characters are buried here. Imagine a lot of strong, colorful and varying perspectives represented. Imagine all made their share of mistakes. Imagine that they learned some things along the way that they tried to pass on. Probably saw some things differently at the end than they did at the beginning. Probably were buried with some messy regrets, just as we will be buried with ours.

This morning the leaves got me, too. 

Foregrounding things. 

A reminder that that this, too, is but a season. 

No more and no less. 

As ever.

The bare tree in the background, a reminder, too. 

That in our falling, we only fall so far from where we start. 

Pretty much the whole mystery of it all, right there.

Quiet enough to hear the crows. 

And long enough to hear them fading in the distance. 

After just a couple minutes, I took a deep breath and continued on.

Going as far as I could until the skies finally opened. 

Finished where I started, not far from the E-Z bake. 

Took note of the fact of that, too. 

Kept the windows down on my short drive back home. 

So I could smell the rain on the pavement.

And be reminded that the rain gets us all wet just the same.

By the time I got back home, I was hearing the words of Kurt Vonnegut.

Wondered if he, a veteran of the firebombing of Dresden, was spending this gray Sunday buried under a waving flag somewhere. 

How he pretty much summed up all of the above some sixty some years ago in a couple lines from Cat’s Cradle. 

“Life is a garden, not a road. We enter and exit through the same gate. Wandering, where we go matters less than what we notice.” 

Clear as the crows.

Only took him 25 words. 

Took me 800 to try and say the same thing.  

Sometimes I take the scenic route.

Standard
The Girls

Pluck

The girls are out for errands after going to church. Peter’s still sleeping. I’m alone at the dining room table, looking out through the screen door on a rainy Sunday morning. The poblano plant is finally starting to sprout. “Look at them … they are mutants!” Emma gushed when she went out to inspect earlier this morning. Until she said it, I hadn’t noticed. But they’re now the size of chubby toes, and have finally caught up to the jalapenos we’ve been enjoying the past couple weeks. 

The porch garden was foremost among Emma and Karry’s experiments this summer. My wife suppressed her pessimism born of past failed backyard garden attempts sabotaged by the gluttonous cemetery deer who, for years, have roamed and ravaged our neighborhood as expectant as tourists with lobster bibs. Her youth nourished by lush family gardens in the country, Karry fully indulged Emma’s initiative. As my wife is a resigned realist, I found her sanguine act significant. 

So they rimmed the perimeter of our porch with seeded planters of tomatoes, lettuce, green beans, jalapenos, poblanos and onions. Neighbored them with basil, oregano, spearmint, and cilantro. For months, Emma dutifully tended her little green village daily. The monitoring of progress has elicited from the girls consistent spasms of giddiness. I know this not from direct participation, but through the evening glee that wafts through the screen door back into the house. Admittedly, some subjects have fared better than others. But even the humblest of harvests have brought small joys.

Continue reading →
Standard