Today was just a beautiful day. The wintertime gets old, as everyone knows. But I'll never forget when I was a baker, how after I was done baking, it would be like eight in the morning, and my workday was nearly finished. The last thing I did every shift was take out the trash. And it was a rare day that there wasn't a little sun in the midmorning I walked out into. Your body would feel limber from the effort of baking (considerable), and your breath would come out in clouds like steam, and you were feeling the cold, but enjoying it. Then after my shift I would walk or drive the seven or eight blocks home, and man the morning looked so beautiful, in its crystalline, shimmering loveliness. Times like those it was hard to imagine what it would be like to walk those same streets and feel any sort of melancholy. Lucky me, I suppose.
After supposedly the sixth largest snowfall since folks began measuring such things (occasionally I think I can see why they waited so long; I mean, who cares how the weather ranks; though I know that's practically a crazy thing to even suggest) we immediately received a string of days in the fiftyish degrees category. The animal tracks disappeared from the surface of the snow, and water dripped from everything. It has been so nice.
Then this evening I went down the street to eat some Chinese, and while sitting and eating looked out the window at two storm clouds that looked like they were dancing, so twisted and beautiful were their movements. They were backlist by the sun, so their edges were in flame, and one cloud was closer than the other, so the sun bounced off the back side of the close one and lit one of the bottom facets of the other giving it such a beautiful glow. I stared and stared. Water surely cannot realize how lovely it is. It cracks me up to imagine a schoolteacher telling his class, "Statistically, there is guaranteed to be at least a little of the Water from Julius Caesar in that cloud." The real question,I suppose, is whether that is significant or not. My guess is not. Leave it to Caesar.
Well, sad to say, but my eggs are nearly done. I only have time for one or two more things.
My Grandfathers funeral was the other day. It was a real shock when he passed away so quickly once he went into hospice. It seems like he was truly ready to die once he realized there was almost nothing that could be done for him. The funeral was a huge surprise due to the fact that the current Priest at my Grandparents long time Church is not only from India, but also fantastically well spoken, mellifluous, and balanced in his handling of my Grandfathers memory. He actually called my Grandfather a saint. You would figure such a statement would not go over very well with Catholics, but nobody stirred. My Grandfather was something else. The big joke the whole time we were at the viewing of his body (in the funeral home next to the house my Mother grew up in) everybody recalled holding Grandpa's hand and walking down the street in our respective childhoods (we all had done it). The wall in front of the funeral home was just the sort of wall that can't be resisted by kids. We all loved climbing on it. Most of us apparently had asked Grandpa at one time or another, "Grandpa, what is that building." And in the classic colloquialism of Grandpa, he'd reply, "Oh, you don't wanna go in there." That's right Gramps. We didn't want to.
Egg Timer Ringing
Andy
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