Running for that Morning Light

I'm so tight right now with anxiety, I squeak worse than The Tin Man after Dorothy rescued him. Depending on what time you read this, I may still be tossing and turning and sleeping fitfully for ankle reconstruction surgery slated for eight o'clock this morning.

I could be duded out in one of those gowns with no back sprawled on a gurney in a hallway waiting for my number to be called or perhaps I'm already done and sleeping off whatever it is they give before Dr. A. makes an incision on the outside of the right ankle and peels the skin and muscles back to have a better view at a fibula or tibula or spatula, some bone that refuses to grow back and reattach to my ankle while getting a good look at the torn tendons and ligaments she believes are beneath it in the MRI, blocked by the bone.

As impressed with her as I always am I must also admit she scares the bejabbers out of me because I have been unsuccessful in charming her at all so far. I can usually put people away if I have to or want to and work hard enough. Not this one. Oh, she smiles wanly and sometimes more fully at my attempted humor and comical expression but then goes right back to what she was talking about before I tried to lead in a chorus of Hark the Ark or whatever the song was. She is relentless and thorough which is why it's even more  foolish that I am uneasy.

And yet I am still.

I'm not scared or skeered as the kids say nowadays. But, coming home yesterday I realized I had forgotten my eyeglasses at work and prepared to head back to the salt mines to get them. I was about halfway there when I took a turn slightly faster than normal and all the CDs on the front passenger seat slid towards the center console and there, under that pile, was my eyeglasses case because that's where I'd placed it when I gotten in the car earlier so I'd know where it was. Mission accomplished.

I'm getting a little dotty as I age less than gracefully and let my look linger a moment longer over many more things that even five years I might have simply looked and not seen. That's why I'm sharing this picture of the sky as I saw it last night on my all too brief last walk in probably a couple of weeks unless things go incredibly well or badly in which case my mileage may vary and nothing else may matter.

So much casual beauty brazenly transcendent and yet so easily unnoticed.. "Tracing our steps from the beginning until they vanished into the air. Trying to understand how our lives had led us there." And here and to whatever place in whatever space it happened and will happen again tomorrow, with or without you.
-bill kenny