I’ve mentioned, at length before, that I love men. I think they’re adorable creatures, especially the ones who are comfortable in their skin. I like men who can be tender and soft, funny and uproarious, sober and serious. I like a man not so full of himself that he can’t play restaurant with a toddler or hold my pink purse when I’m digging through my suitcase looking for something at the airport.
Give me a man so secure in his masculinity that he doesn’t have to wear it like a sheriff’s badge to keep me guessing at his motives. Or to keep me in line.
I’ve been blessed with good men in my life. A father who didn’t hesitate to shed his Marine Corps officer’s uniform to crawl around on the floor with kids, an ex-husband who found the funny in just about everything, and a boyfriend who is simultaneously strong and tender.
There are good men everywhere.
Many men are feeling as if they are being attacked. As if masculinity is being attacked. It’s not. It’s toxic patriarchy that women are complaining about. The same brand of masculinity that tells men they can’t cry, can’t be tender, can’t show a gentle side. This is what we are against. We are wildly in love with men who can escape that trap and just be themselves.
The other ones would make fun if they could see me. My top rim is crimped and stained with lipstick. The bottom is dented and misshapen from trips through the Keurig which is just a tad too small.
I was intended to be a single use with retirement then imminent. This chick has poured at least ten cups of coffee into me. I feel so used. And dirty.
But yet.
I should be in a landfill somewhere making conversation with pods, coffee filters, and wadded-up paper towels – all of my single-use kindred – but here I am with some sort of demented environmentalist who assuages her guilt at using me, by using and using and using me. She’s a demon.
She says she likes the way I fit into her hand. Hell’s bells. I’m just a 20 oz foam coffee cup. Made for take-out and advertising – Waffle House in cheerful black letters on yellow squares. The slogan is “America’s Place to Work” – when did I become a help wanted ad? I’m not suited for such. Who digs through the trash looking for tips on places to work? Is that the sort of person they want?
I hope not. I liked Theresa and Tony. I watched them from my place in the tower of cups next to the Bunn coffee machine. They were fun. Easy banter back and forth. Theresa giggled a lot. Tony looked at her at every opportunity. I wondered if they were having a thing. I knew my time was getting closer as my vantage point got closer and closer to being at the top of the tower of cups.
And then I was next. I could feel the breeze from the air vent on my nether region.
I heard her say, “Oh, and a large coffee to go, please.” With that I was pried off of my neighbor and filled with the steaming hot substance that keeps them going. A lid smartly slapped on. She carried me to the car and then she carried me into her home.
I was sipped until emptied and expected to find myself in a waste can, but no. Next thing I know, I’m being mashed into a too short Keurig and am filled with more coffee. It hurts my rim when she does that. Not to mention my bottom. She may be saving me from the landfill, but must she torture me in the process?
From my point of view, the landfill is not so bad once you get there. The journey through waste receptacles, garbage trucks and that frightening dump from high in the sky is traumatic, but no more traumatic than your average human death.
Time in the landfill, the recycled ones say, is sort of like retirement. You just sit around shooting the shit and playing silly games. Not so bad.
Not so bad here, either. I’ve got a new group of friends here on her desk. The stapler, I’ve never met one you know. As long as he keeps his sharp points to himself, we’ll be friends. The tape. The pen. I understand that at some coffee shops the waitress writes names on the cups. I think I would like to have a name and not just be part of a lot number. The pen and I are brainstorming on how to make that so.
She often names some of her belongings. I daydream that I’m special enough for a name, but refills go by and nothing. I am trying to be content with my lot in life wondering how many more times she will use me. She’s an addict. I wonder who she will replace me with. Will they have a name. Mortimer, maybe? I could be a Mortimer.
Dawn is the sacred hour. We move from one world to the next accompanied by a dramatic lighting of this world.
Old Window in Finland by Helena Turpeinen, poster to View From My Window Facebook group
It wasn’t until my late 40s I was able to appreciate or regularly meet the dawn. If my sleep schedule ever regulates, I will miss these holy hours. I wake in the dark and cast off the stories my psyche told me while asleep and head for my beloved roll-top desk.
Dependent on the time of year, it could be some time before the dawning or just minutes.
But as I write the stories and sip coffee in silence, I glance over my shoulder through the atrium doors to look for the first arc of light.
It usually begins as a soft peachy pink rising with the fog over the hills and peeking through the trees. Dependent on weather and time of year, the color will sometimes intensify, sometimes wane, but always is a hearkening.
Here we are again. We made it to another day.
The silence is important.
Soon, the birds will start and the world will begin its hustle, but for a few minutes it’s just light and the creation of a new day, the creation of a new story to be told. Color on the silhouettes of the mountains bring me such contentment.
In twelve days, I will be on the shore of Lake Okeechobee in Florida. I’ve never been there before but I’ve seen sunset photos–another sacred part of the day. I am eager to nestle with my lover before leaving our bed to sit on the dock with my mug of coffee and journal. It won’t be silent – the lapping of the tide should, will, create its own sounds of peace. I am eager to see the Spanish moss hanging from the trees light up as the sun begins it ritual.
I’m sure I will photograph the scene in order to remember it, but I hope it imprints on my heart.
This is the sacred hour. Rejoice in the silence and witness the light. Turn to a new page and tell the story.
Writing Prompt: What’s Your TV ‘Comfort Food’? “Gilmore Girls”? “Friends”? “NCIS”? What show do you turn to when you are stressed, tired or just need a lift? Why?
I don’t watch television or stream shows or movies. I’m not visual and that sort of media doesn’t engage me for long. I might be tempted if there was a Silly Symphony or Looney Tunes channel I could get.
I did go through a spell where I watched Law & Order, usually SVU, for hours at a time. And I have no idea why. But it certainly wasn’t to give me a lift. It was an avoidance tactic. And it left me with disturbing images and cynical thoughts.
I’ve written elsewhere about giving up Law & Order as a New Year’s resolution one year so I won’t bore you with that story again, but I will confess that now and again – many months apart nows and agains mind you – I might turn on Law & Order while housecleaning. I don’t know why I do that either.
I do, however, have comfort music and comfort books.
When people I loved started dropping dead around me like raindrops in the April Appalachian Mountains, I developed what I call the Grief Quartet of CDs. It was actually 5 CDS as one was a double album. These were Raising Sand by Robert Plant and Allison Krauss, The Essential Leonard Cohen, AJ Roach’s Dogwood Winter, and The Cowboy Junkies Trinity Sessions. These 5 CDs have been in my CD changer of the Big Stereo since several days after Doug died in June of 2013. I managed through trial and error and stupid luck to attach an Echo Dot to the Big Stereo and then network it so that when I fire up the Big Stereo every Echo in the house (and I have one in every room) plays the music.
I crank it up. I pour coffee or wine or champagne. And I wallow on my Beloved Sofa, and I sink intently into listening.
My grief at losing 4 dogs, a father, a best friend, a partner and two co-workers within eight years of one another has morphed into sweet memories of days gone by. I have beatified the dead – forgotten their flaws and celebrate what made me love them.
My time with this music is now enjoyable. Music, for the most part, and this music in particular is never just background music. I listen with intent. One CD after the other. Sometimes I will use the remote to repeat a cut. Sometimes two and three times until I have wrung every drop of comfort out of the lyrics and notes that I can.
I will listen to all five of the albums. Dependent on how I am feeling as I finish the last one, I may fire up Mozart’s Jupiter symphony. I love that piece. I’ve had the CD since CDs first came out. I first listened to it with a Walkman and cheap headphones.
I also have comfort books. There are a few particular books – The Secret Garden. Skinny Legs and All. Time in its Endless Flight. The Princess Bride — That I will flip through. Or my collection of children’s pop-up books.
But every book in my house is a comfort book. I enjoy my walls of books. I like looking at them. Knowing they are there. I inherited many of them from two of the folks who died and they are mostly as of yet still unread. I don’t read like I used to. I hope to get back to it, but writing takes up a lot of my reading time.
My books are legion. I say, and people think I’m joking, that I think the only thing holding up the barn are the bookcases. It’s not a joke. The bookcases reinforced walls and the roof. I have far too many and I can’t part with any of them and I don’t need to. I live alone. There is no one to fuss about the piles of books everywhere.
But mostly I have comfort coffee.
I love sitting in this room on a quiet snowy day listening to the furnace hum as the steam from a hot cup of coffee bathes my face. I hold the cup like it is the Holy Grail. Unlike music and books, I can do other things while I drink coffee. I can think. I can write. I can make a to-do list. I can read. I can listen to music.
But I particularly like silence with the first few cups of the day. My brain is a noisy place and I sometimes can lower the talk radio in my head to a low murmur if I sit with the coffee lot enough. Multiple cups of coffee.
I always come out the other side refreshed and ready to get on with things.
You can have the noise and chaos of a television show. I’ll just be over here, sipping this coffee, letting my mind quiet and my spirit nestle like a dove who has returned home to her nest.
W. Va. Fur and Root 