I clean the messes I let fester on days when I couldn’t be bothered.
The air is biting when I pedal to work. Just a little above freezing. I listen to a faculty discussion, of this, of that, I meet with students, and then it’s time for me to go home.
Almost evening. Late enough for the band to be out again.
I’ve gotten to like these guys. They know their music and they keep in step, and if anyone wavers -- it all falls apart and their leader (the peppy Professor Leckrone) is not one to like it when it all falls apart.
They appear not to notice or mind when I drop the bike and walk over to their marching field to watch, time and again. Weird woman with the bike helmet over a cap is here again. Ho hum.
The day is closing, the band marches, more perfectly now than back in September when I first saw them on my late rides home. Or, is it that I know they should be better and so they appear thus?
I want to not go out again today, but I have a dinner meeting off the Square, at the cooler than cool Underground Kitchen.
The moon’s out, sort of.
The Kitchen’s warm. I think about how my condo was built around the idea of the kitchen being warm and central. In my grandparents’ village home in Poland, back in the 1950s and 60s, most everything happened in the kitchen. It was not until electricity dispersed everyone, and a TV was put into one of the other rooms, that we lost our family meeting ground. By then it didn’t matter. The cohesiveness of family was lost, for reasons having little to do with food preparation.
In Madison’s Kitchen restaurant, the crowd is surely half my age. I take it all in appreciatively. The food is comforting but not ordinary or banal. There's always a twist to it, a sizing, a mixing of flavors that is very personal.
After dinner, I run to catch the bus home. A quiet ride. I take out my neglected New Yorkers and huddle in my warm space, nearly missing my stop.
