A small life has its own distinct moments

The Column: 12.21.23

I walked down Columbus Avenue the other day and passed a young woman talking on the phone just as she said, loud and clear, “There is a reason for everything,” and it sticks with me, rationalism proclaimed publicly. I wish I’d stopped and asked her for some context; she seemed to be one of those bold women you could engage in a colloquy, unlike other women who shrink at a “Good morning” as you hold the elevator door for them. New York women tend to be bold, Minnesota women faint of heart and a man would do well to avoid eye contact, although in situations of mutual suffering — e.g., the long line at airport security at 6 a.m. — some sweet conversations with strangers do occur.

I lead a small life and think small thoughts. I read a long essay by a former colleague explaining how comedy works and was awestruck. I study the workings of a coffeemaker. I take my meds from a handy container with two little compartments for each day, one for morning, one for evening. Someone thought of this. An older person on a regimen of pills. Perhaps a postal clerk like my dad, who sorted mail into racks of little boxes, and what if he had invented the Med-O-Rack? We’d maybe have moved from north Minneapolis to a horse farm called Meadowcroft and I’d have competed in equestrian events instead of reading novels by flashlight and gained great confidence to go into venture capitalism and become a king of crypto and wind up doing time for fraud.

I sit and eat my breakfast waffles, the kind that come frozen in a box and you toast them in a toaster, a great invention, not as great as the drug Levetiracetam, which has guarded me against brain seizures that might’ve left me unable to figure out how to put the waffles into the toaster slots, but nonetheless an advance for those of us who are counting our blessings. Other columnists deal with the national debt, the threat of autocracy, man’s inhumanity to man, and I eat my waffle and remember what we did before this modern wonder came along.

In my parents’ home, waffles took time so they were saved for Saturday morning; you had to locate our waffle iron, a big clunky appliance kept on a high shelf in the laundry room, and we washed the griddle while someone else mixed the batter, and we put Mazola oil or margarine on it for a lubricant, and someone said, “Not too much,” so not enough was put on, so as the waffle baked, it stuck to the griddle, and we had to pry it loose with a fork and it tore into chunks and slivers, which we slathered with syrup and ate, though they were doughy inside, and from this, we got a feeling that life would turn out to be a disappointment. This waffle I’m eating this morning is crisply baked and the syrup is genuine maple from Vermont, not merely maple-flavored, and the waffle is a seven-grain, which is surely a good thing.

I eat my breakfast and my beloved appears, cellphone in hand, and plays back to me the audio recording of me snoring last night. It’s an aspect of myself I’ve never previously encountered, a primal quality, growling, like a mature cougar guarding his cubs, claiming his territory, warning predators. She thinks it’s funny, and I suppose it is, but there is a ferocity there too.

I put my dishes in the dishwasher and walk twenty feet to my desk and she follows and shows me a new photograph of the great-nephew in Connecticut. Almost four months old and he is quite focused on the camera, just as I was on my waffle. He seems to be on the verge of speech. The world moves ahead. Public interest in Taylor Swift has waned somewhat. Finally, after reading a thousand times the phrase “X, formerly known as Twitter,” we now see it referred to simply as X, no footnote. We bury the dead and life goes on. The woman on the street was talking to a friend who’d suffered an unexpected setback like my father’s failure to invent the little medicine chest and I want to grab that phone and say, “Trust me, this is going to come out well in the end. It looks bad now but tomorrow is a new day and the story has yet to be written. Press on.”

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