A Good Day
A Good Day (see in Gallery / Store)| Image by Bruce Harris
A good day for some might include a trip to Costco and errands to the local hardware store, rare as the merchants are, and to the grocery store that is more local to Ohio than it is to Illinois. It just happens to be located in my town with its embarrassing abundance of food competition. Only one store is actually local, and I should go there more often. But it isn’t as convenient to my errand running, and it’s generally more expensive. By more expensive, do I mean that I’ll pay five dollars for a gallon of milk instead of four? Or the asparagus is that same dollar more? I guess so, which leaves me just a bit more searching for my good day. Especially when a man in line with a cart full of big-boxed goods, the total of which is likely equal to a mid-size luxury car payment, interest rate rise included, says he forgot something and waddles into an oblivion of freon-lit space. Too many painful minutes later, he shows up with a near keg-sized bottle of whiskey and mentions it was on sale as if I would parachute from the line now three aisles deep. Finally checking out, the man looks to be at his usual seat munching down one of his three $1.50 hotdogs. I wonder if he cracked open the whiskey to top off his tub of Coke. That may make a good day for him. For me, the day is half gone.
But the sun is out. If I expand my gaze into the blue beyond the parking lot’s light standards, it’s a damned miracle the eyes in my blood-filled cranium wired to my jiggling brain can even begin to comprehend the distances of where such things may end relative to this utter mystery of my sometimes miserable self. My good day still waiting. My choices of time teetering between want and need. My locality and me in it.
At home, late spring has brought these peonies to a hallelujah bloom. This is after a rain that soaked the previous day, weighing their awakening in a glum slump that turned their hopeful faces toward the mud. Now they rejoice. And more are coming. Until the next rain. Until their petals dim. Until the days accumulate into sleep.