This morning when I got up, I opened the frosted glass window of our bathroom and breathed in the cool, damp air. The gray day was misting and had made the cars shiny, the pavement dark. We didn’t have winter this year, as it’s been voted down with increasing regularity of late, so this cool but not frigid breathe-in-the-morning ritual has been the routine, usually minus the gray skies.
My youngest was stirring, but not quite up, and the rest of the house was still quiet, in that sometimes miraculous way of weekend early mornings. And as I turned down the stairs, the light still muted, thoughts still just placidly eddying, I thought…. “Goddamn cats.” Because there, in the middle of the carpeted stairs, was a highly usual pile of cat yack. From sometime during the night. But a good while ago, it seemed.
I changed my course. Got paper towels and the pet spray. Which, as I picked it up, I noted was pretty light. Time to put it on the grocery list. Because we do this every. single. day.
I readily acknowledge there are first world problems, and first world privilege and first world guilt. Clearly, cleaning up cat puke from the carpeted stairs of a suburban Denver house is definitely the first, layered in the second, my irritation notwithstanding the third.
And yet.
My very first self-motivated music purchase was Aerosmith’s Get a Grip album on cassette. It’s the cow udder one, for anyone trying to place it. I’ve been working back in time with music lately, and remembering that since the days of my father’s vinyl collection, music has never failed to balance me and give me the words I lack. But I’d pretty much forgotten that first cassette until I heard it playing around the edge of my mind this morning. The #1 song from that album, which I’m sure Rick Dees brought through the airwaves into my early-teen bedroom for weeks, was Livin’ on the Edge.
There’s something wrong with the world today I don’t know what it is. Something’s wrong with our eyes. We’re seeing things in a different way and God knows it ain’t his.
It’s been weeks since I sat down to write anything. There’s a general unease in me that seems at odds with the creative process. Sometimes there are words. Sometimes there are not. It’s easy to set the blame for it directly at the door of the new administration. And certainly, that’s a part of it, though their own ineptitude and buffoonery has helped quell some of my fears of their effectiveness. But part of it is cat puke and the three dirty snack bowls and dirty glass set out in a sloppy four-points circle surrounding my daughter’s blanket, pillow and stuffed animal nest that was supposed to be cleaned up last weekend. There are probably actual field mice living in there now, who she’s probably named and is tending to them like the Cinderella she claims to be every time we suggest basic cleaning or hygiene.
It’s getting home at 6pm, making dinner and doing dishes while still in heels because I’ve forgotten to simply kick them off in the march of daily scheduled events. It’s being late to Girl Scouts because the Lone Tree Municipal Building is not the Lone Tree Civic Center. A very Google-able fact that occurred to me to Google only after the fact. It’s my youngest telling me with her very most serious I’m-not-angry-just-disappointed voice, “Mommy, I just wanted to tell you that you didn’t pack any dessert for my lunch today.” It’s looking up recipes again this week and wondering how on an entire Internet, we always end up with the same four variations of dinner.
Such little things, such problems that aren’t problems, and yet like the pile of shoes and backpacks and homework folders in our entry way, they seem to be creating a small mountain. My favorite vacation destination right now is to Alone. Just … wherever. But could I be by myself, with my running shoes (just for walking these days but I swear I seek out hills) and a pile of books and maybe a food delivery service on call, but just leave it on the porch. I don’t otherwise want to know anyone was there. (And please leave disposable plates and silverware, because there are no dishes to do in Alone. It’s one of the laws there.)
I know that these are the best of times. That quiet mornings will pile up after another 10 years. But like Dickens said – in 1859 – everything has its opposite, naturally or created. It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us… in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only.
It’s a reminder we’ve been here before. It’s not so much that the world is on fire. Or that the world is so many identical days stretching out into infinity with only a new grocery list to mark today’s cat cleanup from yesterday’s. It’s more that life isn’t a Disney movie. It doesn’t wrap up with a magic wanded “The End”, in part because traditionally Disney’s The End is just the beginning of actual life’s sleepless nights and dirty dishes and school lunches and piles of shoes in entry ways.
Some days I feel superlative. Some days I feel like the entire world has gone insane. Some days I open the frosted window of the bathroom and am struck absolutely dumb (if anyone were there to hear my thoughts) with the pure beauty of a sunny morning, pink sunrise reflecting from the east to the mountains in the west. Some days I feel like I’ve lived the same routine so many hundred times, it’s almost a miracle that I could forget to put dessert into a lunchbox at all.
In the time that I’ve been writing, the gray has partially disappeared and the sun has come out. I don’t think Nature thinks of it as superlatives. Just cycles. Just as a vacation to Alone would be a welcome diversion, I hear the taxes and airfare are terrible. Not somewhere you’d want to retire.
So as the pavements dry and the mists burn off, I’m a little more centered again, and ready again for a bit of everyday routine. To convince Cinderella to relocate her field mice outside. I may even play a little more Aerosmith as I do the morning dishes, meld the last time the world was on fire with this one.
But seriously. Those cats, though.