The coffee that didn’t spill

Monday, January 06, 2014

The fog fills the dark so thickly that it seems light outside – a wall of mist that rises from the wet ground where the snow has been.

I can hardly breathe as I rise and make my way to the kitchen to perform the morning rituals.

After so many days on and off duty, it seems strange to face a week in which there will be no break – nothing but the newness of a new beat, filled with unfamiliar faces and issues, and this idea that I am the same person who must deal with each.

We live our lives in constant change.

Over the weekend, I talked to a sister I didn’t know I had until recently, and a best friend with whom I had not spoken in years, and this is part of the change of habit – like that old favorite Elvis movie with Mary Tyler Moore in which the change at the end is unresolved.

Love being love means it can’t always been easy.

The man Angel Market where I get the papers each Sunday warned me when I left not to slip on the ice, a bag in one hand with Times vision of the world, and a container of coffee in my other hand to deliver consciousness so I can face the world.

I slipped on the ice anyway, and landed on my back – uninjured. I didn’t even spill the coffee.

But it brings back all the old routines of that time when I made my way through the world in such a condition, for months a few years ago even with a patch over one eye, and prior to that, the daily routine in Montclair of walking to the bus stop, and eating breakfast of buttered roll and coffee while waiting for the bus to arrive for the trip over the Orange Mountains to the warehouse where I worked.

The talk with my friend reminded me of that, too, and how simple life was when we kept thinking there was something to look forward to, some aspiration to drive us, some mission we needed to accomplish in life.

Yesterday reminded me that these subtle things are still important, because at the end of the day, they are what life is: the coffee that doesn’t spill, the buttered roll devoured while waiting for the bus, the unresolved mysteries of the universe only emphasized by the ending credits and the holy-moly Elvis song sung as the film fades.