This morning is blustery and cold. I look out the French doors into the backyard, with its dusting of snow, its wind-bent boughs.
It’s a familiar view, a treasured view. But for some reason this morning I notice how the bare tree branches across the street come together to resemble a peak. If I didn’t know better, if I looked quickly, I could be staring at a mountain.
So now I’m dreaming of mountains I’ve seen — and the views they’ve given me.
Midway through January and resolutions are falling away like petals off a full-blown rose. Stretching — I do that about half as much as I should. The perennial “don’t worry so much” — there’s a reason it’s a perennial.
But one resolution snuck up on me — giving up caffeine. I didn’t make it official on New Year’s Day because I didn’t think I could. Give up the cups of strong black tea that wake me every morning, the Diet Coke that revives me in the afternoon or the iced tea that refreshes at dinner? Water, sparkling water, juice — what are those? For me, for years, it’s been caffeinated beverages from morning till night.
But on January 2 I woke up with yet another headache. I perused the dietary chapters of Heal Your Headache, by Dr. David Buchholz, which I’d read in the fall but hadn’t the nerve to try. I saw the list of triggers, including some of my favorite foods — yogurt, nuts, chocolate, even sugar snap peas! But one culprit stood out above the rest. If you can banish anything, Buchholz wrote, make it caffeine.
And so I did. Quit cold turkey. Haven’t had a cup of “real tea” in more than two weeks. I limp by with two cups of de-caf black in the morning and a mug of herbal brew in the afternoon. In between I drink water — more than I used to.
And … so far so good. After four or five days of feeling jittery and headachey, a worse withdrawal than I’d expected, I emerged relatively headache-free. The verdict is still out, but I like the way I feel, which I can best describe as “clean.”
I sit now with my second cup of de-caf. It tastes far more like cardboard than I’d like it to, but that doesn’t bother me anymore. It’s what comes next that matters.
Here is a brief hymn to the body in motion, a passage from the memoir Winter Journal by Paul Auster. I read the book a few weeks ago and marked this page:
Your body in small rooms and large rooms, your body walking up and down stairs …
leaning back in chairs with your legs propped up on desks and tables as you write in notebooks, hunching over typewriters, walking through snowstorms without a hat …
feeling the different sensations of putting your feet on sand, dirt, and grass, but most of all the sensation of sidewalks, for that is how you see yourself whenever you stop to think about who you are: a man who walks, a man who has spent his life walking through the streets of cities.
To which I will add … and along woodland trails, suburban lanes, the paved paths that run beside busy roads, the strips of sidewalk that show up unannounced when I least expect them — and across streams on cylinders of concrete, the water rushing beneath my feet.
Yesterday’s lunar encounter happened later than Monday’s. I found the orb higher in the heavens, no trees or clouds to hide it.
A thick fog was swirling up from the ground, but it didn’t obscure the sky. So when I went outside after dark, the moon (the “wolf moon” I later learned), was throwing striped shadows across the backyard. There were bars of darkness and light and I stepped through them, like rungs of a ladder lying flat on the ground.
Venus was rumored to be in the neighborhood, but I didn’t see it. Only this moon, alone in a field of black.
This week’s warming pattern has brought us back to November: The air is raw but not frigid; the trees are bare but not icy.
We’ve not yet crossed the boundary where a warming trend feels like spring. Instead, it feels like fall with all of winter yet to come.
Last evening, stepping out of the car to get the mail, I paused as I turned when I spotted this moon. It was a Halloween moon that was late to the party. I looked for the witch on her broomstick. I saw instead today’s clouds moving in on a freshening wind, and a blur of light both wan and enigmatic.
The Golden Globes have happened, Oscar nominations will be announced soon — and yesterday I saw two movies back to back. It was a double feature of my own making, made possible by an art house theater that happened to be playing several of the films I want to see. The movies were “Nebraska” and “Philomena,” but that’s not important.
What’s important is that in that darkened theater there was no past or future, only present. The elusive present, so hard to reach. The present filled with motion and sound.
It was a present that took me out of myself and deposited me into the lives of others, where, for four hours, I lived quite happily.
Movie-going doesn’t take away our problems; it’s more like respite care. But sometimes, that’s enough.
It often attacks me this time of year, the organization bug, as if I’m seeing the house for the first time.
Why is this basement bookshelf filled with children’s books? The children have grown up. Do I still need that (fill in the blank) jacket, lamp, stack of magazines? Wouldn’t life be easier if there was a place for everything and everything in its place?
When this impulse strikes I try to seize on it immediately. It usually doesn’t last for long. Let’s just say I’m hoping for a bumper crop of trash on Monday…
Speaking of single digits, we come today to the last single-digit date in January. This is cause for cautious celebration.
If today is the 9th, then tomorrow must be the 10th, and next Wednesday will be the 15th and we will be halfway through the month.
Not that I’m wishing my time away. Don’t get me wrong. But these early dates of January have always had the look of lone, lean pioneers. Leave them alone, let them pass.
They are the brave first days of the new year, sharpened and wary. They are simple and unadorned, one digit only. They are traveling light.
Yesterday I awoke to a temperature of 1 degree F. This morning we are basking in a relatively balmy 5 degree F. Which has me thinking about digits, single in specific but also digits in general.
When I studied “new math” in the old days we called them “tens and ones.” Maybe I’ve just forgotten, but I don’t think we used the term “place value.” Then again, the “new math” I studied in grammar school was discontinued by the time I reached junior high.
The word digit, though — it’s been around a while. And I thought of it yesterday not only because the temperature was in the single digits but also because the temperature most affected my digits. My fingers and toes were aching with the cold after my single-digit walk (nine minutes, tops) from Metro to the office.
So this post is a paean to digits, to the fingers and toes, the most exposed; to the basic unit of measure, the original abacus; to the root of digital and all the good things (!) that derive from it.
We start with the body and move ever outward. Just think how far we’ve come.