A Day in the Life
One Early Spring Saturday
My I-Phone alarm went off at 7:45. I know this because my wife told me it was going off. It was blending right into whatever dream I was having. I didn’t have to be anywhere in particular until 9:00, so I reset it for 8:00. This time, I heard it, and reset it for 8:10. I was just resting so comfortably in my half awake state, I didn’t want that to end. But, the day called, and so by 8:08, I’d gotten up and turned it off.
As I lay there, before I got up, I said the words to a prayer I try to remember to say every morning upon awakening. “Take my will and my life, guide me in my recovery, show me how to live.” It’s called the 3rd Step prayer in the 12-step fellowship I belong to. A friend of mine wrote it many years ago. It reminds me who I am, and what I’m about. I need to be reminded, sometimes. It also helps to head off any fears that might be tunneling their way into my psyche. I try to replace fear with faith whenever it rears its ugly head. This usually works pretty good.
I let my 2 dogs out to take care of business. Daisy and Chloe. Daisy is a 7 1/2 year old yellow labrador retriever who we’ve had since last July. Chloe is a 12 year old white yorkshire terrier (a “white yorkie”) who we’ve had for about 7 years. Two dogs couldn’t be more different than these two. Both pretty much keep to themselves and have very little interaction with each other, other than when I’m putting them out together. Then, little Chloe needs to really watch herself or the much bigger Daisy will barrel right over her as she charges out the door. She’s like that — she charges wherever she is going. She doesn’t walk — she doesn’t run — she “charges”.
Then, as soon as she gets outside, she begins to spin — always counter-clockwise. She will spin around in circles three or four times on our back deck, then she charges down the back steps and performs three or four more spins before she squats to do her thing. She always looks to make sure I see that she’s really doing it. Then she charges back to the deck, where she spins one or two more times before she waits impatiently at the sliding door, ready to charge through it as soon as I open it, charging right into her box, where she’ll wait for the treat she knows is coming to her.
Meanwhile, Chloe slowly putters her way to the side step off the deck, where she ever-so-carefully picks her way through the grass until she finds the perfect spot, then changes her mind and picks around some more, then finally finds it and goes. The other day, she was still picking her spot off to the one side as Daisy had finished her business, whereupon she came charging back, jumping right over Chloe and clipping her on the way, damn near knocking her over, completely unaffected by what she just did. I gave her hell for it, as she waited impatiently by the door, but she didn’t seem to know nor care what I was rattling on about. “Just open the damn dear so I can get my treat,” I could hear her thinking. She would have to wait a little bit before she got her treat that time. I’ve noticed, since then, that she goes out of her way to avoid going anywhere near Chloe, now. So, I guess maybe she heard me.
First time out in the morning gets rewarded with their food for the day. Daisy’s will be consumed, more like inhaled, within about a minute. Chloe will pick at hers all day, usually leaving a little left over for the next day, or perhaps a midnight snack. She eats in my office, and Daisy won’t come near the office, so it works, and Daisy doesn’t eat Chloe’s food. Otherwise, she certainly would. She’ll eat anything. She’s a good lab like that.
I made my way to the kitchen where I fixed my coffee and Kathy’s breakfast. I knew I’d be tied up for the next 2 to 3 hours on Zoom calls down in my office. Saturday mornings are usually spent working with people I sponsor in the aforementioned 12 step program.
Tom’s a relatively local guy who lives about 30 miles west of here, but we always meet on zoom. Since Covid, most of my program interactions are through Zoom or WhatsApp. We were working on the 6th step. He knew I was going to be talking to some Russians after I was done with him, so he taught me how to say, “Hi, how are you?”, and “Thank you, very much” in Russian. I’ll probably get the spellings wrong, but the first one sounded like “Zdras Weecha”, and the latter was “Spiciba Bollshoya”.
Once I was done working with Tom, I let my Russian friend Leo and his fellow Russian friends into my zoom room. They all live in Turkey now, and had started up a Russian speaking meeting there. Leo had asked if I would come talk to them about my journey, and the first three steps. He translated my words into Russian for his friends. They were very impressed with my “command” of the Russian language, as I said the two things I knew in Russian. It turned out to be a great meeting. They had some very interesting questions for me, and seemed to get a lot out of my share.
After that, I did a couple loads of laundry and dealt with the guy who is trying to install a scooter lift in the back of our mini-van for Kathy’s scooter. It’s turned into a very complex installation. He told me his plan for it, and I told him to go for it. This will give her a lot more independence, if she knows she can go somewhere without needing me there.
This need hit home when I was taken to the hospital in an ambulance last month and she couldn’t really get herself there. Fortunately, a neighbor offered to drive her over, and our son came down from DC to bring the car over and drive her back home when it became clear they were keeping me overnight for observation. I’m doing better now. I had just had a stent installed in a blocked artery, and something in there had started acting up. My health has been on the upswing since then, thankfully.
After that, I started to play a game of stratomatic baseball. I have been replaying the entire 1964 baseball season with that game, since December, 2021. That’s a lot of games — 1567 of them so far. I’m in the very last week of the season now, and the races in both leagues have become intense.
Right now, I’m just a little obsessed with the games. Each one has some significance on the final outcome. In real life, it was one of the closest pennant races of modern times, and is proving to be just that, and more, in my stratomatic play. My hometown team growing up, the Pittsburgh Pirates, were in the race right up until the last few games. They’re now out of it, but sure were fun to play, and to see them do so much better than they did in real life.
1964 was the first year that I seriously followed baseball, and was also the year I first played stratomatic baseball. Playing that season has been kind of magical for me, and helped me get through these past 3 years, since Covid changed everything about how we live our lives. I never get tired of playing that game.
Speaking of which, it’s time to get back to the game I was just starting to play. The San Francisco Giants, in first place and one game ahead of the Philadelphia Phillies, are squaring off with the Houston Colt 45’s, a team that would become the Astros the next season, when they opened the first domed stadium, the Astrodome. In fact, the first game I ever went to live, in Forbes Field in Pittsburgh, was against the Colt 45s in 1962, when I was 7. I still remember that game. I love baseball.
A little later, I’ll cook dinner, we’ll eat, then we’ll host a zoom meeting at 7:00 — that is, if anyone shows up. No one has for the last 4 weeks, so that meeting might have run its course. As more and more people are getting comfortable going back to live meetings, fewer are attending the virtual meetings on Zoom. We are still not comfortable sitting in a room with a bunch of other people, so we still do Zoom meetings. If no one shows up, I’ll just get back to the laundry and play another game of baseball.
That’s a day in my life, today. It’s a good life. I love Saturdays!
