Sunday morning is already gone, slipped out the back when I wasn’t looking. I did walk the river today—and up the monster hill—for the first time in months. My body seems to be recovering slowly, or maybe a momentary reprieve. I stand up from a low chair without using my hands, a symbolic gesture of defiance on my part. I remember an old 1960s Playboy cartoon image of a mouse giving the finger to a raptor as its shadow, talons spread, looms over mouse and the brick wall behind him. I feel that way sometimes.
I sip the bone broth made yesterday. Then coffee. An interesting combination of taste.
A friend tells me she doesn’t read my “literary” post, so I will try to refrain today. I watched college football almost all day yesterday, the UT game while I was waiting for the Subaru service department to reprogram my car’s computer so the alternator will charge the battery on short as well as long drives. They also replaced a dead battery. UT lost. The whole day seemed lost. Weekends during football season feel more and more that way for me. It’s as if I were addicted to a drug that no longer supplied the highs I remember but still had its hold on me. I wonder if the highs were real, or was it some illusion shared with people who have lost themselves in the mythology. I think the high was more from watching the girl in the brown coat walking across campus during the fall, the wind blowing her hair. Somehow the image of her dark brown hair merging with the sounds of the band playing at the stadium. The truth though is I am no longer sure she was wearing a brown coat.
Barbara wore a brown coat when I first meet her, but that was years later.
The remaining two oaks outside my window look as if they are dying and recovering at the same time. They drink the waters from Harvey’s rain. New shoots with leaves sprout from the thinker limbs while the old branches are bare. Searching for metaphor.
Myra posts about my grandfather on Facebook. There are just some people you don’t get over missing.
A cold front is supposedly coming next week. Barbara tells me she wants us to go to California after my rheumatology appointment on the 15th. I have obligations, but the whole point of being retired was to be able to go somewhere on a whim. There are people to see both here and there. Let’s think about it, she says. Of course that will depend in part on what my rheumatologist tells me. Or it may not.
Love,
Brady