“You can’t have guns. You can’t walk with guns.” ~ Donald Trump
Hey MAGA voters who only wanted their 2nd Amendment rights: the government just shot and killed a white male American citizen for legally carrying a firearm. Multiple ICE agents took him down for filming them, beat him, grabbed his gun, then fired multiple shots at him, point blank, instantly killing him.
Sitting down to a cup of peppermint herbal tea, still scalding hot and sweetened with just a spoonful of honey, I would normally send out a volley of texts with the photo you see here, captioned simply, “This is cafe culture.” A silly and foolish way of staying in touch with friends.
Today, it feels pointless and stupid and too sad to do such a thing, as our own government just ruthlessly murdered yet another American citizen on our own soil. Watch the video and see for yourself; don’t listen to the media or the White House at this sad point.
You wouldn’t know it here in the sanctuary of a cafe. The staff still serves its coffee and tea and food stuffs. Clients still find their friends and sit down amid laughter and bonhomie. Talk of football, snowstorms, and the typical winter banter spills out from other tables. Because really, it’s just another Goddamned day in America, and this is what we supposedly voted into office. Well, not me, and not most people I know, but too many to stop what some of us knew was coming. Here we are.
And so I pause.
I read. I sip tea. I meditate.
Selfish self-preservation, because no one seems to care.
What’s important is that I’m here, sitting in the cafe, honoring ritual and tradition and carving out a new set of habits to see me through the winter.
These words are mostly hollow and empty – vapid vessels that give my hand something to do in pushing pen across paper – and it’s good, it feels good. There is joy enough in physically writing, in finding the flow of letters, slowed in my head for having to write them all out. Writing, in its physical hand-wrought form, is becoming a lost art, and a favored indulgence.
At one of my early jobs with the state as a Keyboard Specialist (now called Office Assistant) I remember the head Secretary (now called Administrative Assistant – we have come so far!) being given something to type out, and the person doling out the assignment asked somewhat sheepishly if she would mind typing it out.
“No, it’s been a while since I got to do straight typing, and I kind of missed it,” the Secretary said.
I understood exactly what she was saying, how good it felt sometimes to execute a routine, especially one at which you excel and do well. Going through such physical practices can be soothing, almost meditative in a way.
There’s a similar feeling I get as I write out these words on lined paper. It is structure, it is order, it is ritual – all at a time when those things move further from comfortable reach. Most of all, it is a process – and I’ve always loved the process and the practice more than the result and finished product.
The little pockets of time in which humans sometimes have to wait have always fascinated me – and I usually attempt to make them mean something more than the killing of time. What an awful phrase and concept – killing time. I’ve always hated the expression, as time is one thing I’ve genuinely valued, perhaps more than anything else.
When given a time window – for furniture delivery or furnace repair or that hour for letting a batch of cinnamon rolls to rise – how do you prefer to spend the minutes? While I say I’m going to read or write something, more often than not I simple pause and let my brain roam wildly, recalling all those other suspended hours of waiting – the day I waited for a new bed in Boston, watching th sun slowly pass over the hardwood floors – or the morning I spent in the waiting room while Andy had his most recent medical procedure. Losing myself in thoughts is how I spent those moments, and a little philosophical exercising is good for the mind.
(PS – The featured photo shows the average number of spam calls I get of a day, which is why the ringer is always off. It won’t even vibrate because I don’t want to know.)
I happened upon two knitting clubs in the span of three days, surely a sign that I need to get back into the yarn game. The first was at a yarn store, the second at my usual cafe. The yarn store group seems a bit more serious – the members sat quietly and intently at their work, the leader guiding them with a general stitch comment, while the cafe group seemed looser, with food and drinks and more talking.
My knitting journey will likely not be part of a group, and will actually not be knitting at all, but crocheting, as I can barely handle one hook, much less two needles. The loose and gentle plan is to improve and practice technique with the basic granny square and grow from there. My first project – this blanket that took literally forty years to complete – was too long and too ambitious to be a good starting point. In the end, I conquered it, but I’m not going to do it again; I don’t have the years left. So granny squares it shall be for now. Baby steps, baby stiches… they pass the days of winter.
That’s a bitter little pill to swallow, and I’ve had a persistent and lifelong prescription for it because I make as many mistakes as anybody else. The most difficult lesson for me to learn has been in acknowledging those mistakes, and then learning from them. The learning past has been easier than the acknowledging, but both have come a long way these past few years.
Life teaches you when you are ready to receive the lesson, and it will keep trying until you get it.
How much of our lives are simply about being busy? Whenever I wax philosophical about human beings and what occupies our time, I’m struck by how silly and trifling our pursuits are when presented in context with the basic requirements for survival.
Take sports – and the mass hysteria for events like the Super Bowl or World Cup. If some alien from another planet were to study humanity, and why we do what we do, how would one explain something like the Super Bowl – or the celebratory parade that follows in the days after?
Or take sports out of it, since so many will be offended by any criticism of their favorite past-time, and think of any parade. How ridiculous it would appear from a place of distance and disinterest. Animals don’t parade around without purpose – they do so to get somewhere, to stay safely together, to protect themselves.
Humans parade for arbitrary dates, self-imposed days of import, man-made holidays. We are a strange species, and I often think our subjects for activity and celebration, perhaps even purpose, stems from a fear of not being busy, not having to something to occupy our time – when really we should be embracing moments of not having anything to do.
To simply be.
To breathe.
To exist.
Why is that no longer enough for us?
The business of being busy is like a hamster wheel for humans, and too many of us are afraid to get off.
I have a friend who only eats the tops of muffins, leaving the rest in the wrapper or cupcake tray in which they were baked. When he visited us once, we awoke to find a pan of muffin bottoms only, like some wild animal had come in and ravaged them in the night. I don’t want to embarrass him by naming him outright, but it’s Chris and he knows it.
Happily we have reached the one-month mark of our season of slumber – that means only two more months before spring – and February is the shortest one in the calendar year. Happy thoughts all around, and rather than focus on that faraway future I’m taking the morning as slowly as it comes – the gray, barely-there lightening of sky, the slow warming of the house as Andy gets up and clicks on his coffee, the comforting hug of a hot shower while those who don’t rise as early sleep unaware and unbothered.
My own little covenant with the break of day, when it’s just the two of us – dawn and me – each deciding what sort of day it will be, each in perfect control of it in our own way.
Andy says that when you hit one red light after another and traffic is backing up in the late afternoon, the light cycle is out of sync. It happened the other night, and by the fourth red I just let out a deep sigh, reminded myself there was no rush to get to cafe culture, and proceeded to hit three more.
Some days you just get all the red lights. Rather than rail against it bitterly and pointlessly, I’m doing my best to take it as a friendly reminder to slow down. Being that I usually run on the earlier side of my schedule, very rarely am I in a genuine rush; shaving a few minutes off an errand is never going to make that much of a difference.
Channeling moments of frustration into opportunities for mindfulness and possible pockets of meditation, is one of those challenges that a younger version of myself would have laughed or scoffed at; this older me rises to accept the gauntlet.
