Just a perfect day

Coming down the stairs in this house, you can see the driveway out the side window, and out the front window, the metal railing on the porch and the gravel walkway through a hedge from the street.  As your foot hits the floor, you can see Ann Street and just across way, the clapboard-sided Methodist Church across the street.

And so it was as I descended the stairs and looked in vain out the window for the familiar sight of the Sunday Times, rolled in its clear plastic wrapper, waiting for me by the steps.  I didn’t see it.  Sometimes the paper guy pitches it wrongly, and it ends up on the other side of the hedge, so I opened the front door and peered through the hedge trying to locate the paper.  Still couldn’t see it, so I walked down the steps of the front porch and through the hedge, looking left and right. 

It wasn’t there.

Cursing the paper guy, I went back into the house and went about my morning business, thinking that maybe he’ll be along in a minute.  I pushed the “on” and the “strong” button on the coffee maker and listened for it to begin to gurgle.  Onward past the laundry room, into the sunroom where we keep the cat boxes and feed them on a little table by the window where four little empty saucers waited to be washed and put into the dish drainer to wait for Tracy to come downstairs and crack open a can of wet food to feed the kittens. 

I checked out the living room back window to see if the squirrels had finished their tray of peanuts we put out for them on a little screen I taped to the top of the air conditioner.  It was about half full, so I filled a measuring cup with peanuts and went out the back door and around the corner of the sunroom and grabbed the little tray from the top of the air conditioner and filled it and stuck it back on top where we can watch the squirrels eat and tussle with one another over the peanut tray, a great source of entertainment for the kittens and our dog Ruby, incidentally. 

Back inside, I grabbed a banana and a fresh Jersey peach from the Creamery, a local place that sells ice cream and pastries and fruit pies and frozen pot pies and local produce like onions and new potatoes and this time of year, fresh zucchini and corn.  I peeled the banana and cut little slices into a bowl.  Then I sliced the peach and chopped the slices into bite size pieces and sprinkled some blueberries, also from the Creamery, over the top. 

I took a few slices of rye bread from a loaf we keep in the refrigerator and dropped them into our four-slice toaster and hit its levers to start the toast and took the lid off the butter dish and got it ready.  Then I buttered the toast and poured myself a cup of coffee, and making two trips, carried the whole breakfast setup into the living room where my desk sits in front of the other living room window and sat down and started checking my email.  After I had a few sips of coffee, I stood up at my desk and looked out in the front to see if the paper had arrived.  It hadn’t.

Tracy came downstairs and poured her coffee and sat down across the living room behind me as she does every morning.  I complained that the paper hadn’t been delivered.  She asked if I had called the Times for another delivery or a credit.  I hadn’t, so complaining at great length about what a pain in the ass it is to make my way through the Times’ phone tree, I dialed the phone and began the process of reporting a missed paper.

There was something wrong with their 1-800 system.  They kept asking me if I had missed the paper on January 8, or March 12, and I kept answering “no” in a louder and louder voice until I hung up and dialed into their system again.  More strange questions about dates earlier in the year.  Finally, Tracy suggested I ask for a representative, so I did.  “You are next in line,” the voice said, so I put the phone down next to my computer and waited for the guy in Pakistan or India to come on the line and reported my missed paper and said “yes” when he asked if I wanted a credit. 

Grumbling and mumbling and complaining to Tracy that I had never, ever, in my life had a rapid, successful 1-800 call experience, I launched into a complaint about the number of times I’d been through fast food drive-throughs and they got my order wrong, or the car in front of me changed an order for six people at the pick up window, causing a five minute wait.  They set up this stuff like 1-800 numbers and drive throughs just to drive me up the wall with frustration and craziness.  Tracy did her best to sympathize, but she had heard it all before.  Poor, put-upon me, the perpetual victim of systems out of his control.

Tracy went in to feed the cats, so I walked Ruby almost down to the end of the street where it meets the river and back to the house.  Finally, a success!  She did her business, it was a gorgeous morning, about 70 degrees and sunny.  Things were looking up.  So, when I got Ruby back home, I figured that I had a credit for the failed delivery, so I decided to jump in the car and drive over to Walgreens to get the paper.

Excellent!  A parking space right by the door.  One of the women who works at the front counter was outside, so we stopped and talked for a moment and she asked me where Ruby was, because everyone at Walgreens knows and loves Ruby.  It’s her favorite place to go in Milford, and she is apparently their favorite dog.  I told her I’d already walked Ruby, so I left her at home, and we went through the doors into the store.

The newspaper rack is just to the right against the wall as you come in, so I scanned it quickly to see which level they’d put the Times, and there it was on the left, two levels down from the top.  I thought it felt a little light when I picked it up, so I checked the date to make sure it wasn’t yesterday’s paper.  But it was today’s, Saturday.  No wonder the Sunday Times hadn’t been delivered.  Sunday was tomorrow.

Just a perfect day. Lou Reed went to the park and fed the animals at the zoo, I went to Walgreens, and thinking all morning that it was Sunday, and it wasn’t, I had gained a whole day at a time in my life when every one of them is precious.