Good conversation all day, excellent food at home, a drive out to a great park to see trees and dodge crowds and mark a pal’s birthday, and even a quick blitz to get in karaoke (David Bowie’s “Time,” for his upcoming birthday, and Neil Diamond’s “Heartlight” for another singer’s belated birthday last week). The highlight may have been prying a bottle capped bottle with a nail clipper and some persistence.
It rained a little today, but not like last year’s last day. Both days, I got in a grocery store run for organic collard greens, then got in a walk. Last year, we hit the local greenway; today’s was along Grand Avenue in Oakland before the box office opened for a movie. It looks like gas is 30 cents more this year at my local station. At this hour, we’re waiting for the fireworks to start before cracking open a bottle and toasting our exit.
We made the most of a quiet day at home, only leaving to pick up a takeaway, putting our heads together briefly on a Thing and companionably focused elsewhere on Other Things, some involving about a dozen Web-ish tabs and some FTP tinkering.
Things can’t go on the way they have, not with rejection of outside choices and rejection of inside values leading to all-too-obvious tragic consequences. I’d had something like it on my mind since noticing a certain anniversary on Christmas Eve, and here it came today, for all of us.
I know there’s little balm for so much of the trauma and lack that surrounds me. Some folks hold signs by highway ramps, while others cope with levels of crimes, public safeties and private discretions. Still, it spooked me to notice someone doing Something Like That in my rear view this afternoon.
The day starts easier and better if you know what you have to do at the beginning, getting out of bed, out of the house, out of the car and out of your feelings, and continuing on until it’s time to get up and leave and get into the car, into the flow of traffic, into your town, into another night.
We got in a little wander along a side road behind the cemetery after a semi-usual midmorning creekside greenway lap. Up the road, it was hilly and remarkably quiet for being close to the interstate: deprecated wooden stairs behind backyards, a random free library box, a few big eucalyptus trees.
A quiet day, doing what I know how to do from experience, vigilant and diligent, fueled by snacks and the stillness of the room, and waiting for shift end before turning up speakers and racing my worries back to my side of the bridge, my corner of the country, past full parking lots at the spot.
Paid for a series of yesterdays, with futile and fruitless trips to the newsroom, a store and the post office, and now I’ve got a box I might as well open tomorrow. Also ahead: a shift, and then another day away, and then rinse and repeat next week with time away. Sometimes work covers a few costs.
Company came with skills, carrying uncanny resonances and telling stories about gifts for kids, financial twists of fate, military service and memories of the neighborhood from decades ago. Suddenly, there’s a new vanity, kitchen shelves and a random hallway shelf, with even more space to come.
