" Towards evening the lazy person begins to get busy."
-German Proverb.
What's that sound outside?
*wait for it . . .
It's . . .
a leaf blower.
Imagine that. Every . . . single . . . morning.
This time it's the official city leaf blower, creating a pile so this giant vacuum truck can cruise along the curb sucking up the leaves.
And yes, that's a dusting of snow on the roof across the street. It's been lightly snowing on-and-off for the last hour or so.
You can't really see it in the photo, but trust me it's out there.
Dean refuses to go outside in such chilly conditions.
Every morning he trots out the door after breakfast with the other two, but lately he pauses on the back porch, breathes in the frigid air, and decides to go back inside and find someplace warm to sleep. A wise cat indeed.
Sitting here after eight in pajama bottoms and sweatshirt, my daily uniform. I probably need to come up with a wider sartorial variety in the mornings, lest P start getting bored or begin wondering if I ever take off this uniform to wash it.
Life is so very different from those days before March 20, 2020, when we crawled into the Cardinal and flew east to Wyldswood as the first of Peg's coworkers was cooling in the morgue after an encounter with Covid that the hospital denied, even as the chief of nursing was refusing access to PPE because she knew the wave was coming and needed to ration N95 masks.
In the weeks before that moment, P would drive east to Gulf Coast Hospital, or northwest to FWB Medical Center, and do her ten hours in the operating room and an hour each way in crawling traffic. As I do now, I'd fix her a cup of coffee in the predawn darkness and help her get out the door, then scribble a little in a notebook or go to the gym, then clean myself up and drive maybe a half hour to my office next to Watercolor, usually arriving by eight. I'd work until 5:30 or so, taking a twenty minute nap during lunch, then slog back through traffic to straighten up the house and uncork a cabernet before P got home, usually in a wretched mood brought on by listening to an operating room full of MAGA people and having to crawl home in a river of cars.
It seems like a lifetime ago, all that. I certainly could've never predicted this moment, this protracted solitude. Just me and the cats most of my time, with a little time together with P to bookend my days. And remarkably, I've billed and collected just as much time as any other work year, maybe a little more than in 2019 or 2020.
But it's a constant battle not to fall into utter sloth, without a commute or live hearings and mediations, without an office staff that notices when you're not there, or that you're asleep at your desk. My gym time is already slipping dramatically, and I'm sure P has noticed my boobs getting smaller as a result. This body's natural state resembles ET a lot more than Rambo, and I'm always in danger of slipping back into that.
Maybe I should sign up for a race--it's been a while since I ran a marathon, and having a target event is always a great motivator. Then again, I don't see myself stepping out into twenty degree weather for my long training runs, and without those a distance running event can turn into a disaster. Maybe some other time.
Enough of all that. What's on my mind this morning, besides confronting this lethargy?
Well, my beloved other team, the USC Trojans, will end their wretched 2021 season playing the despised UCLA Bruins at the Coliseum tomorrow. I may even watch the game. It has always made me feel closer to my late grandfather, who once attended UCLA before he left for the war--he even raided the SC campus before the game in 1939 or so, sloshing blue and gold paint all over Tommy Trojan. It seems he also encouraged his brother Bill to join him there, in a note my cousin Scott discovered the other day.
Then after the war Grandpa came to his senses, got a degree from SC, and became the football team's biggest fan.
For years, whenever there was a family gathering at my grandparents' house in Placentia, a moment would always arrive when Grandpa would pull out a videocassette and ask no one in particular, "Who's up to watch the Notre Dame game?"
That would be the 1974 classic, in which the Fighting Irish blew a 24-0 lead to lose to the Trojans 55-24. Grandpa would pop a beer, hit the play button, and relive that afternoon, over and over, looking away only to scold one of my cousins for running in front of the screen.
SC has become sort of the family school. I earned my bachelor's there, the only poor kid at a very rich school, it seemed. Mom's doctorate is from there. So is my Uncle Guy's.
And the rivalry with UCLA is different in a lot of ways from the other big college football rivalries that will play out over the next week or so. UCLA is public, SC is private. When I was there in the '80s, a popular t-shirt for UCLA week proclaimed, "I used to go to UCLA, but then my father got a job." They called us the "University of Spoiled Children."
UCLA was much, much bigger than USC. While UCLA had a progressive student body and vibe, SC had no campus Democrat organization but two student Republican clubs, each thinking the other wasn't sufficiently conservative. Their campus was in beautiful Westwood; ours was in the ghetto--if you watched the Rodney King riots on TV, you probably saw in the television helicopter footage images of my old apartment building. Our surroundings led to yet another taunt, naming us the "University of Surrounded Caucasians," but I'm guessing that one is verboten in this more racially sensitive age.
Auburn-Alabama, Clemson-South Carolina, Florida-Florida State: all of them have always felt like two sides of the same coin, disliking each other because they're so similar. Not the Trojans and the Bruins, however. We really couldn't be any different.
So yeah, I'll probably watch if I can find it on TV. P will likely sit that one out--her disdain for the University of Second Chance (another taunt by the Bruins) is thinly veiled indeed, so I'm guessing she'll be in the kitchen drinking wine with Anne Marie while Tommy and I watch two very bad teams pummel each other. Wondering if I have any cardinal and gold here at Tara.
The Centerway Clock Tower is chiming nine. Time for this three-toed sloth to find a shower and some clothes, then dive into my day.
Fight on.
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