The first thing I do every morning is look out at my backyard. Since I don’t have my contact lenses in, I am mostly looking to see if the sun is shining. The other day I walked into the yard and was dismayed to see what I thought was a dead duck lying under the little table in the back corner. On closer inspection I realized it was a very motley stuffed animal. I don’t know how this thing got under the table. The yard is fenced on three sides, reached only by a long driveway. I looked at my backyard pictures and found that it doesn’t appear until January 20. Possibly this solves another mystery for me. One day, after a snowfall, I noticed that someone had walked down the driveway and a short distance into the yard. The footsteps made an oblong loop into and out of the yard. I couldn’t figure out why anyone would do that. Maybe they noticed the duck from the street and came to look at it. I never noticed the duck until I walked into the yard.

When I lived in that large apartment building in Fort Lee I threw my small bags of trash down a chute, put large items and the recycle stuff in the appropriate bins in the service room. Since I got it out of the apartment very quickly I was never really aware of how much of it there was. Now my situation is entirely different. The trash can is in the garage. Trash gets picked up every week, but the recycle stuff only gets picked up every other week. I am aware now that I have very little trash but a lot of recycle material. This has become a management problem. My kitchen is not big enough for those fancy containers which allow you to sort and store. I keep trying to get less recyclable material, but the food industry won’t cooperate with me. Maybe it’s the way I eat but almost everything I buy has both inner and outer packaging. I don’t usually get a newspaper. I get my news from public radio and I read the New York Times and Pittsburgh Post Gazette over at Robin and Steve’s. Then they can recycle it. I try to find someone else who wants to read my New Yorkers. I hate to throw them out. I’ve done my best to minimize the junk mail, but it still keeps coming. At least we can recycle it here.

In addition to watching my contact lens go down the drain, I destroyed one of my bathroom rugs in the washing machine and I knocked the TV off the stand. I was lucky; none of these events was catastrophic. I didn’t destroy the washing machine (only had to clean it and replace the filter on the drain hose), and the TV did not break. Each of these things was something I thought about ahead of time and ignored. The rug was old and I knew I shouldn’t wash it. I knew the TV was too large for the stand and I knew it might fall, but I did nothing about it, until now.

Before I went to the airport to pick up Renee last week I stopped at Ikea and bought a new, large, heavy TV stand. Of course it comes broken down in a large heavy box. I wrestled the box into the back of my car and left it there until after Charna’s play. Fortunately my family did not need chauffeuring that night. When I got home I wrestled the box into the garage and there it sat. The garage is under the apartment and I did not want to ask anyone to carry the box up the stairs. Wednesday was a nice warm day so I went down to the garage, opened the box and carried the pieces up the stairs, one at a time for the big ones. I spent the last two nights putting it together. I actually enjoy doing it. I get a great sense of satisfaction. Also, I admire the Ikea directions. They are almost entirely visual, using only parts numbers. As a former technical writer I can really appreciate the person who creates these. So the stand is all set up and in place. The TV is still on the floor; I can barely shove it, let alone lift it. Now I have to ask for help.

Sometimes conversations in the locker room strike terror in me. Twenty-some years ago I was in a locker room at a YMCA in Chicago. An older woman (seventyish), looking exhausted, came in and sat down on one of the benches and announced she had just come from a terrible hour with her mother, who, I assume, must have been in her nineties. I was always having terrible hours with my much younger mother, and I had this terrible look into the future. Fortunately, it was not a prescient moment.

Today I went to exercise for the first time in a week. As I entered the locker room one woman said, "I have to call my parents and remind them they have a party to go to at 11:30." Another woman asked if they couldn’t remember by themselves. First woman said, "They don’t know what day it is. Every day is the same." Another day I hope I never get to.

Last night we went to the Kuntu Repertory Theater at the University of Pittsburgh. They were doing a play about Mahalia Jackson. It was well done–lots of gospel music, interesting structure to the play. Everything seemed to be rhythmic, even most of the informational bridges between the music. We were in the minority in this largely African-American audience. That was part of the experience also. Not that we aren’t more alike than different. But there were a few things I didn’t understand and would like to know more about. I took a class in Intercultural Communication and I’ve spent  much time traveling, exploring the cultures of Europe, Asia and Israel. It never occurred to me, until last night, that I ought to find out more about my African-American neighbors. After all, they understand how to be white, I should try to understand more of what it means to be black, besides the oppression.

This is my granddog wearing the sweater I made for her.