What a morning! You welcome
the ten hours sleep from the day before,
when four is plenty for your old self, still
you know good and well it's going to be, for you,
a day of distractions due to all that sleep, the various
degrees of which can scatter the brain and leave the body
it's attached to mumbling to itself. You used to teach self-talk
and you remember there's no mumbling in self-talk. Here's the way
the morning goes.
The sleepiness from oversleeping lasts
throughout your breaking of the night's fast--
fruit, tea with caffeine and a bit of carrot muffin from
the night before when son elder shared a film he wanted
the mom and the dad to see, K-19: The Widowmaker, with
the brilliants Harrison Ford and Liam Neeson and a cast of god-
awesome players, and you virtually fell asleep celebrating the whole
family scene and went to bed early, rare these days but as you say,
welcome.
So with breakfast you have the paper and read
of a study that concludes 10000 steps daily, about a five
mile journey, are just right for the average person to get
in shape and stay fit and you wonder, being fit's one thing but
what shape would you like to be today, there are so many? Then
you notice mud on your shoes, as you've dressed first thing to be ready
for errands and get an early bird's jump on the day, which is unusual for being
in your retiring days when you are allowed by life to ease into the day.
So you decide to clean the shoes but you
can't tear away from the paper which goes on
to say that a pedometer to measure the steps you take
in a given day's wandering can show you just how sedentary
your life is, and you right then and there draw a direct link between
movement and living. Having seen a corpse or two when you served as
hospital chaplain--not to mention the many funerals you "conducted" as a pastor,
which was an activity on occasion not altogether different from conducting a train
wreck, with all the drama thereto appertaining--you are well-acquainted with the habit of a corpse
to lie still and not move, not in the least, so you decide to move some.
Breakfast being at its end you go to clean up
and find it almost impossible not to notice certain
details, like you get the dishes in the washer, including
the tiny Plastic cups You Bought when you were supposed
to get paper and you can't bear to throw them out so you keep
recycling them in the washer. So there the cups sit, anchored by
various other dishes to keep the flimsy fraternity from bouncing around
in the wash.
Then for the second time that morning you notice
the muddy shoes on your feet, but the birds are by now
chirping your ears off so you turn to feed them, a sacrament
you would not give up today unless you by more than the imagination
became one. You select the select crumbs from the morning dishes, naturally
placed aside prior to placing the dishes in the washer, and you notice that you get
every crumb, every last one. It's as if you cannot withhold a single tidbit since every
grain's got goodness birds like and who's able to say just precisely which grain will make
the difference.
You place the crumbs of delight in another
Plastic device--you recollect The Graduate--
that once held scrumptious raspberries but now harbors
the berry dregs and you place the whole container on the rail
of the deck and this reminds you of the porch banister you used
to ride as a kid in Mulga, Alabama about 50 years ago now and you
can hardly believe that!
Next you notice the ants that have methodically
traced a trail along the rail, by a method known to ants
alone and you presume taught to them by old ants in some
ant school they go to deep down in the ground prior to setting up
housekeeping on the very top of your used-to-be lush lawn of Z52 zoysia
that appears to you right now to be struggling, possibly from too much water recent
as the Rains have fallen on Alabama like stars evidently did sometime around the time
that song was written. So you think of the ants in their industrious endeavor and wonder
as if to self-talk, how very angel-like they are in their care taking but then you consider that
not that many would fit on the head of a pin. [Click here for Part II.]
