Yesterday was so nice it temporarily made me think nothing’s wrong.
Festivities opened at my mom’s breakfast table with cinnamon roll and coffee. Fortified, Nicole and I hiked around Monett, Missouri’s gorgeous park. I knew the city pool where I’d worked for a few years while I was in college had been closed, but I was shocked that it’d been “disappeared”–the space where it was would be perfect for a sandlot football game now. We saw several woodchucks, Nicole practiced identifying trees, and we sat with our ancestors and our dematerialized friends and pets for some meditation by the pond.
When we returned, we made a honey crisp apple run to Marionville, Mom gave Nicole a lesson in homemade chicken and noodle preparation (a family legacy) and I hauled the recycling to the city processing center–that doesn’t seem too exciting, but my brother Brian had ingeniously organized the receptacles in the garage and they hadn’t been emptied since he did so in August.
As afternoon unfolded, we had cocktails and played three hands of Canasta, I got some reading in, and Mom and Nicole talked about some family history. We wolfed down the chicken and noodles (two helpings for me!), then watched a drive-in(side) double-feature: Kingpin and Pride and Prejudice (the Joe Wright and Keira Knightly version). You can see how those go together, right?
That was enough to convince me all was right with the world until I started thumbing this out a few minutes ago. I’ll take any respite at this point.
Streaming for Survivors:
Speaking of the dematerialized, we might have invited this one.
The Overeem Farewell Tour: Dispatches from the Public School Trenches 