Black & White

Woke up and felt almost instantly like sitting this one out. The thought of Lucy in the O.R. for a third time in as many months left me wanting to retreat beneath the covers, snuggle up against Happy Wife — who was anything but this morning, understandably, for the same reason as me — and wish the day away. Eventually I caved, rolled out of bed and paused at the window to stare at the blackness outside. Some people think black represents the addition of all colors, I know I did. When I was a kid I once took a colored crayon from the box of 64 and scribbled on a sheet of paper, then took the next crayon and scribbled on top of the first scribble, and kept going like that until I’d used every crayon. The result wasn’t black, not exactly, but it sure as hell wasn’t white, the sum of all wavelengths of visible light, the color of purity, cleanliness, enlightenment. Black means portents and I wanted none of those this morning, so downstairs I went to throw on some lights.

By the time I’d made Happy Wife her latte — Egg Nog infused, it’s that time of year — and got her and Lucy out the door and on their way to the vet, the sun had fought back the dark to reveal a constipated sky, which, had it let loose and cried like I felt like doing, surely it would have come as snow. Snow white snow.

But it wasn’t to be, no white snow, not for us, not yet anyway. I settled into my morning, got some meaningful work done, then called a close colleague who lives in Cleveland. He told me it snowed there late last night/early this morning. He and I co-published a number of papers together back when I was in grad school, so earlier this year when I was invited to contribute a chapter to a book to be published by Springer next year, I thought I’d invite him to be a co-author. Reason being that we’d already written a book chapter together, a book that never did get published for reasons unrelated to our contribution, and so we figured we could re-purpose the effort for this book. That was back in June; the due date for our contribution is December 1st, something I was gently reminded of this morning by the book’s editor.

By then Harry was anxious for a walk. I gulped back the last of my second coffee, changed clothes, and together we piled into the car and drove to Kincaid Park to our usual trails, under the cover of bloated clouds, me with hands in pockets scuffing along, missing the company of Sweat Pea and wondering how she was faring.