Every Day

Wendell Berry, “Be joyful, though you’ve considered all the facts.”

What I am about to tell you is a brand new experience for me. Never before have two photographs of mine bookended a story, I hadn’t even thought about telling. It is kind of misleading to refer to them as photographs, because they are counterfeits of two incredible images I saw, eliciting surprise emotional reactions. The truth is they are pretty lousy replicas of what I saw both times. So, I am going to share, or probably have already shared, two pretty shitty pictures. Blame the spontaneity of writing for the prior, dumb content. I haven’t tried to do it yet, but I will.

This morning, I was thinking about what I might possibly write about for my weekly entry into the Journal of Compulsivity. I definitely was not sitting on some story i was busting to tell.

After my first morning drill, the Zen sit, I made a cup of coffee and sat down at my particle board, triangular computer desk, wedged into its corner. I sit here every goddamn morning of every goddamn day. OK? To call this routine familiar doesn’t come close to doing it justice.

I’ll be damned, I looked out the window at the morning sun, from the exact same perch I occupy each morning. I always throw my right leg, which likes to swell a little, up on the arm of my couch. The first thing I do after that is sip the coffee and make sure it is very, very hot. You know, the idea that I can see the sun rise above the horizon and elegantly glide into the sky is a privilege and I guess that’s what hit me this morning.

I looked through my morning-sun window and I stopped right then and there. Instinctively, I reached for my phone and took a picture of what I saw and I didn’t have the vaguest idea what I was going to do with it. However, I immediately thought of a title for the story, “Every Day” and that was it!

Nothing was working for me during day, but I kept seeing that photograph and wondering how a story was going to grow out of it. At the end of day, I was fairly tired. “No, wait, that’s being too kind. Let’s just say I put in a good day’s work. On my drive home, I was distracted by the end-of-the day sun. It was an all engulfing white light, the bright, searing light that turns to gauze, when you think you can see through it.

I pulled on to the land where I live, an earthbound astronaut looking for a familiar landing zone. In some psychotic break of extravagance, I recently decided to use my A/C. I don’t know why, but I grew up thinking A/C was an option for the wealthy only, plus cars didn’t come with it for quite some time. I have a 20+ year old Lexus and it is a stupendous piece of equipment, like a metallic cat, purring on all four paws. It has an astounding, cooling capability and a really fantastic sound system, no kidding. What I have just shared may sound like a crazy person, but I am sharing this with you with the full confidence you’ll take me at my word. This afternoon, I was blasting both the A/C and the sound system, a symphony of self-indulgence in my world of simplicity.

I parked my car, a practice I have decided to mix up a bit recently. If you park in the same place everyday, your car is going to kill its grass shadow. I know it probably sounds stupid, but I don’t want to leave those kind of fingerprints on the land. I now move the car around, because I want the grass to grow everywhere, without any idea it is being covered by some metallic dinosaur.

I kid you not, I looked over at the mirror, just on the other side of my very dirty, closed window and there was a little bird, sitting on that mirror. It looked at me and I looked right back. The split second I looked away, it was gone. I shit you not, this bird, or a very close relative, kept returning to the side view mirror perch each time I looked back. So, I took a phone picture of that bird, sitting on my left side-view mirror.

When I have finished this “between two photo’s” story, I will then see if I can open it with that awful, through the screen, photo of the rising sun and then close it with the cloudy image of a bird, sitting on my side view mirror.

When I started off the morning, looking at the rising sun, I knew I wanted to write about it, but I didn’t know what to write. At the end of my day, there was just something about the bird, basking in the white light of the afternoon sun, perched on my mirror, waiting for me to pay attention.

Every day, since before words, the sun has been coming up and then settling down at day’s end, shining blindingly bright. If you choose not to pay attention, it is your loss, because another day has just burned on by and you have been too busy or distracted to look.