Of every other day of the week, Sunday should really smell like bacon and coffee. Really. About a year ago, I let go of my frantic grasping of vegetarian eating with the startling realization that even adherence to that noble gastric discipline takes lives. This morning I stand quietly in my kitchen peeling the wrapping off a package of sulfate free strips of impending deliciousness. And with my fill of breakfast I sit down to satiate my next appetite at the keyboard. Right now, it is time to write; now, since it has been a while. I will play some piano later on.
Back to Sunday morning and the past 5 years of living alone, this has been my day to accumulate my stuff from the week and attempt to write something that I will like reading afterwards. The book of short essays that masquerades as a memoir is ready enough for me to make a call to an editor or two. I almost think it would be easier not to stop writing it than to say it is “ready” because I know it will morph into something else once a more astute eye looks at it.
So obviously, Sunday mornings will need to become Monday mornings and spill over into Tuesday and Wednesday. Thursday has always been my favorite day of the week so I don’t want to exclude it. Fridays I should go shopping and out to lunch or catch up with friends over good Mexican food. Now that the inevitable has transpired I will potentially have Sunday mornings all week, sans bacon but always with coffee. You see, my corporate gig is over, at my choosing, with some encouragement pointed towards my bank account.
All the mornings spent getting dressed for work, standing in my closet thinking, wishing, hoping, “If I get a package....” are now history. Surreal as the day the last of my five kids packed up, took her sweet dog and moved out of the house, the package actually arrived, the eagle landed in an email. I am ready to fly.
With all of the joy that I feel in the closure of a fruitful 19 years with the same company, I am burdened with the realization that many other employees were not given a choice to leave. We knew. We waited to hear. Some would be taking their last walk to the exits and we knew the day was coming, but for me, this foreknowledge did not dampen the shock.
It is not the change that was shocking. Granted, passing by cubicles with random items left behind by employees that had been let go was a downer. Change is constant. Even my dad, by whom one could set a watch, changed over the years and not just by aging. What I find more disturbing is how far the human response will go to obtain a desired object. Grasping for a desired outcome, or goal is not a bad thing unless it becomes necessary to trample others in the process.
To be fair, a certain element of grasping is at the heart of any for-profit business venture. Grasping in some degree is likely at the heart of just about anything initiated by a living being. The animal kingdom is a food chain and I inhabit a link somewhere in it. I can feel bad about that if I care to think about it much but without it would I have been born? There is something to the whole survival of the fittest, circle of life thing, but road kill is just gross.
This might be a bit too long for a blog post. I feel a new essay coming on. I’ll make some more coffee, but that’s enough bacon for today.
