Saturday, 30 May 2009

• Currently Bid Time Return By Richard Matheson see related

  Saturday, in the Park - wish it was the fourth of July

  Saturday morning - 6am. A telltale flashing of bright light precedes a lazy roll of thunder outside my window. The dog is whining. He hates to pee in the rain, which means before I make it back into the house, someone is bound to spot me in my bathrobe. Ah well. The old days of sleeping in have been reinvented. Late now means something like - what - 7? I walk back into the living room, making my way through a dark dining room while vaguely recollecting my husband’s predawn kiss goodbye. He will be working in Al Capone territory today. The last time we were there, we stayed at The Elms (the place where Harry S. Truman famously held up that paper declaring Dewey Wins) and looked for ghosts while waiting for a swamped, Valentine’s Day-partying hotel kitchen to bring us a very late night filet mignon. It was our first. We ate it over a hobbling, 1930's table previously dined on by mafiosos while watching LOST on my overused laptop - and we’ve never looked back to overcooked steaks since.

  I hate that he works on Saturdays.

  Still, it will be - was a couple of hours - before my daughter wakes. The house is already in a mild state of soothing shabbiness from all my recent reading. I blame the rain - and do so with a smile. Coffee cups are scattered here and there, reminding me of chapters I read in those corners before setting my cup down high enough that the dog can’t reach it. He has a weakness for dreggs. And raw onions, it seems. Books, open, closed, shuffled through, tabbed and marked, are in stacks. A page of Barry Manilow (you read that right) sheet music lays open on the piano - the latest in my attempt to relearn a lost art. And, as a buffer to what I hope is a real breakfast before 10 o’clock, I’ve been eating the last of the yellow cake with chocolate buttercream frosting (made from scratch with my recent gift of a pro stand mixer - wheeeeee!) straight from the pan and wishing to high heaven that I had something in the house besides decaf.

  In short, it is a sleepy, saturated Saturday morning. I am looking at the cozy bottles of Jeunette Rouge and Labelle and thinking they will have to wait a little longer if they are to be paired with the sunshine and summer salad they deserve. Hopefully, only a little longer.

  I glance through my tiny kitchen window down to the garden. I have not even planted my basil and tomorrow is June! And - hush - I may - I am contemplating - yes! - to skip the gardening altogether this year and just allow the summer to abuse my roughhewn beds with weeds while my daughter and I enjoy those last weeks she has before starting school. Our wild days are almost over. Soon it will be all tidiness and number two pencils around here.

  Won’t that be nice? For a while.

  I think, in that Provencal sense that brings visions of trufflehunts with pigs, that perhaps we here were born to be wild.

  The planned lazy day at the public pool will have to wait. All is Seattle today - Edinburgh in the fall - all rain and galoshes - mudpuddles and espresso. In some parts of Missouri those last two have no delineation. So...

  Off! Off with the deplorable news! Off with the...shoes - perhaps? Off to an unknown - indoor - parallel universe we go! And by that, we most likely mean a bookstore.

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