A morning squirrel outside my door…
We all have them, I think, mornings when we wake up and go, uh oh, something’s not quite right. I had one yesterday morning, not feeling quite right when I got up to go to breakfast with Comrade Vlad.
We met at the Edgartown Diner, where both of us are known, had a convivial breakfast and went our separate ways, he to The Paper Store, me to the bookstore. I had a conference call about a non-island project of mine and went up to the office and did it there.
It was the kind of day where nothing seemed to quite fit the way I wanted it to. Nothing was really wrong, but everything irritated me. After picking up my shirts at the laundry, I went next door for a haircut, getting in just before the rain fell and people decided it was a good opportunity to do indoor kinds of things, like haircuts. In other words, I was lucky and didn’t have to wait.
For twenty, thirty minutes, I sat, staring at myself in the mirror while my hair was cut. And I wasn’t happy. Who was this old man I was looking at? And that set off a whole round of not happy thoughts as I drove back down toward Edgartown. I have to have cataract surgery on my left eye when I get back to the Hudson Valley, I gained two pounds, I am almost always the oldest person in the room when I used to be the youngest. My freshly cut hair is thinning. My muscles ache more now when I do things. Etc. Etc. Etc. Yadda, yadda, yadda…
Before entering Oak Bluffs, as I was going the long and prettier way, I stopped at the used bookstore on the road between Vineyard Haven and Oak Bluffs and introduced myself to the proprietor, while buying a book on coffee for a friend.
There was a small scheduling kerfuffle at the bookstore, not major but as I was feeling old, ugly, cranky and in bad humor, I did my best to handle it simply, without doing too much because I was afraid I would overreact when overreaction was not called for, just laying low.
Work needed to be done on a couple of other projects and I just wasn’t in the mood but did it anyway. I texted Joyce I was feeling cranky and old and she told me to take a nap, which I did.
Sleep is medicine, as my friend, Larry, always says and it was. After a short nap, drifting off to Nat King Cole singing softly in the background, I woke in a much better mood. I played a game of solitaire, read some news and then stopped as what I was reading was about to cause crankiness to sneak back.
I ran one more errand, came home and continued my current read, “The Parisian Seamstress.” I am a lucky man, and while the hair is thinning and the muscles might ache a little more and, while I am undeniably older, I am a pretty good older, I think.
Letter from the Vineyard 
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