What is a good day?

When I wake up in a foggy swirl and find my mood reflected in the mists outside I hold up little hope for the day. But another perspective to be had is that its all uphill from there. Sure, there is unfinished business. There always is and I guess there will be when I die. Still, there are memories and friends ahead and even some work. The Thursday Times puzzle falls to my piercing trivia store and I drive into work like a semi ploughs into a Volkswagen. Today I am lucky. I am able to access my work computer and print out a paper I’m working on for digestion. It will be cognitive critique with an eye to how the flow hangs together. I am editing, thinking about what I’m saying as a reader and thinking about what I still have to do. Three hats in one seat. I hold the crisp pages in my hand, palpable with tangible print, and go down them like the farmer goes down his rows; intent on my eventual harvest, but looking over each seed for signs of imperfection or asymmetry in the planting. Leaving the last page with chicken marks and a small list to fill my ‘real’ workday tomorrow I am caught in the waiting game for phone calls I expect. I mutate around the house avoiding lunch, playing a computer game of solitaire or two and then outside for exercise and follow-up lunch. I have to deal with David coming home loaded with anger over his increasing expression of dissatisfaction with not feeling welcomed at home, beset by this or that indignity I perpetrated on him. Still, I am able to express my desire to change my dynamic and he confesses that I don’t seem to notice things that he does. This is hard stuff and I take lunch of leftovers and a couple of chapters of my latest biographical visit, this time with ‘Empress’ Josephine, who captures my sympathy and imagination as well as curiosity. I leave home in David’s car and head out to the cat hospital for stuff for the cats fleas. As I leave the sun decides to pay us a visit – first with puffy but indistinct clouds, then with clear sun with fog hanging around the edges of my vista, and finally with full late afternoon sun, with barely enough heat to be out there comfortably. I go down to the lake park and amble along the moist paths to the water where I read and muse over gaggles of diving ducks – scaup with their big zebra stripes, bufflehead and maybe a goldeneye. These guys are diving fiends. Then home again jiggedy jigg, with just enough sun to feel I’m not trapped in a fog bank. At home Dee calls and I settle to a good chew of the fat. We really stroke the words, with no agenda. David is on the list as he so often is for me. I pull together dinner talking with Nnenna, whom I enjoy interacting with and I feel optimistic on the day and life. It is her world of relationships, work, thought and thoughtfulness and family ‘reunions’ in our conversation that brings me home to myself. A brief blast from returning David, petulant in his hunger and seeing scallops which he tastes and spits out and bitches about not getting a decent meal when I cook. This could bring me down but I’m off to Tertulia where I talk with John and Tim and Matt about books I read and Tim’s recommendations, Matt’s job as a landlord and where they learned Spanish. I am still tongue tied when I try to say things significant. I make mistakes, but I do understand well. Tim suggests I read without a dictionary and maybe I’ll try that tomorrow except for words I see for the third time. It is a good enough day. There will be better. There will be worse. But there is still mystery to come and a visit with chatty Judito.