Morning music

Thursday, January 09, 2014

The change of routine – going to Hoboken instead of Bayonne – each day, hasn’t yet become fixed in my mine.

I’m like an old LP record in which life is inserted in grooves that allow me to function. I start my day at one point and let everything run according to plan, reacting to any sudden bump that might deviate me and cause me to skip something.

Yesterday, I nearly went straight down Summit Avenue rather than turning back north after the stop at the train station in Journal Square.

In my trips to Bayonne, I knew where I could pause and purchase coffee along the way. But with the shorter, but circular route back to Hoboken, I’m still confused, partly because I never know what to expect on the lack leg when the streets converge and we all flow down into the mile square city along one of two routes – any traffic back up at the Lincoln Tunnel creating a nightmare of uncertainty.

During back ups I try to look out over the landscape, but the route is clouded with the outstretched limbs of trees, so thick that even in winter without their leaves, the view is obscured.

I constantly ache for the river and the simplicity of an earlier life when I jogged a long the waterway each morning, getting my fill of nature before civilization imposed its will on me.

In Bayonne, this was an easy stint, a stop in one of several parks before making the trip to the mid-town office. This became a little more complicated a year or so ago, when the office moved farther south, and though only a mile farther away, it changed everything.

Small alterations have huge impacts, and I was at a loss for how to make it up in my routine.

Sometimes, bigger changes like the one that transpired at the turn of the year are easier to accept, because they are so abrupt that I’m not lulled into an old, out of date pattern and shocked when at the end, it is no longer valid.

For several years, I stopped to pick up my editor before making the trip south, a routine that allowed me to write in my notebooks as I waited. When she moved on, I struggled to fit that little bit back into my life, and did, but lost that, too, with the extra mile of travel.

The trip is shorter now, and though the job is tougher, a new routine will emerge that will allow all these pieces to fall back into place, providing a season and a time for everything necessary and everything that I need to have, a new record running with new grooves, the music of which only I can hear.