I announced yesterday that I was taking a day off.
I'm not going over the mountain today to the hospital. I'm not carting my mother around on errands. My brother is there to do that, and if he's not available, his wife is all about donning a halo and working her way to the top of my mother's esteem--and that's fine. I quit playing that game years ago.
So, I envision sleeping till ten. I think about lazing away in bed, watching cop shows. I figure I'll finish my book, the last Anne Rice installment of the Mayfair Witch trilogy, a book in which the marker hasn't moved for weeks. What do I do? Sit up in bed at five a.m. and listen to the birds waking up with me.
You know, hearing those birds that early reminded me a little of living in the projects. There was a certain time of the morning that was busy, busy, busy there, and in a way, I miss that. Stepping outside my door with my coffee cup, hung over from the night before (I don't miss that), I'd see certain souls shaking rugs on their stoop, little kids in various form of dress or undress playing on the sidewalk, a few headed off to work, and others, stumbling out the door to return to their other lives on the more civilized side of town.
Those were crazy days, for sure, but there was a purity to those mornings that's hard to explain. Those were my last clear mornings before I fell into the abyss, and though I was wrenched back out of it, years later, I think part of my youth remained back there. I was in my twenties then. I could do anything then. If I wanted to get up in the morning and repaint my entire apartment or grab a shovel and start digging a new flower bed, I could do it then.
These days, some old woman has come to possess my hips and knees, has squeezed herself into the spaces between my toes, and I have to walk at her pace. The pace around me, with the birds and the Amish buggies clip-clopping along, is slower, too. A reflection. I'm at peace here, but there is that occassional longing for the zip and zing that I used to have.
Oh, who am I kidding? That longing for zip and zing is ever-present, but not enough to fool me into thinking that it's still there, still recoverable. It's a Polaroid picture in my mind. It is bordered by a thick white frame, frozen, and the young woman living within those boundaries exists only there, with her coffee cup, watching the welfare mothers shake their rugs, breathing the scent of well-tended roses in a housing project and dreaming of being me.
Till later....
I'm not going over the mountain today to the hospital. I'm not carting my mother around on errands. My brother is there to do that, and if he's not available, his wife is all about donning a halo and working her way to the top of my mother's esteem--and that's fine. I quit playing that game years ago.
So, I envision sleeping till ten. I think about lazing away in bed, watching cop shows. I figure I'll finish my book, the last Anne Rice installment of the Mayfair Witch trilogy, a book in which the marker hasn't moved for weeks. What do I do? Sit up in bed at five a.m. and listen to the birds waking up with me.
You know, hearing those birds that early reminded me a little of living in the projects. There was a certain time of the morning that was busy, busy, busy there, and in a way, I miss that. Stepping outside my door with my coffee cup, hung over from the night before (I don't miss that), I'd see certain souls shaking rugs on their stoop, little kids in various form of dress or undress playing on the sidewalk, a few headed off to work, and others, stumbling out the door to return to their other lives on the more civilized side of town.
Those were crazy days, for sure, but there was a purity to those mornings that's hard to explain. Those were my last clear mornings before I fell into the abyss, and though I was wrenched back out of it, years later, I think part of my youth remained back there. I was in my twenties then. I could do anything then. If I wanted to get up in the morning and repaint my entire apartment or grab a shovel and start digging a new flower bed, I could do it then.
These days, some old woman has come to possess my hips and knees, has squeezed herself into the spaces between my toes, and I have to walk at her pace. The pace around me, with the birds and the Amish buggies clip-clopping along, is slower, too. A reflection. I'm at peace here, but there is that occassional longing for the zip and zing that I used to have.
Oh, who am I kidding? That longing for zip and zing is ever-present, but not enough to fool me into thinking that it's still there, still recoverable. It's a Polaroid picture in my mind. It is bordered by a thick white frame, frozen, and the young woman living within those boundaries exists only there, with her coffee cup, watching the welfare mothers shake their rugs, breathing the scent of well-tended roses in a housing project and dreaming of being me.
Till later....
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