One Fine Day
It’s nice sitting here in Pablo’s coffee shop, looking out at something not my house. Although it’s also nice at home looking at my house. One of these days I’ll get up and go to look at someone else’s house—Josephine’s at Malmaison, FDR’s at Hyde Park, the Queen’s at Windsor. But for now it is nice sitting here in Pablo’s watching people who are not reflections of myself enjoy coffee and tea and conversations and each other’s company. Just as though the world were alive. 
Which tells you how my days go, walking from the study to the kitchen, walking from the kitchen to the easy chair in the sitting room, walking to the front porch for the mail, walking to the back porch to throw most of the mail in the trash, walking to the study to check the e-mail, walking back to the easy chair where I accept the cat on my lap because the sun has gone in from his window seat and I must do something for someone else sometime today. I cannot spend the whole blessed day attending to me. I’m old, I have few needs, what’s the fuss about anyway? I know, I know, I know. One fine day I will open the mailbox to find three gold ingots. One fine day I will learn that I have won the Nobel Prize. For a novel still in the planning stages. One fine day I will open the back door to find the backyard at 201 Alden Road in Pittsburgh: the hammock strung between the elms, the asparagus patch going to seed, Daddy setting in his tomato plants. One fine day I will open the door to everlasting joy. Till then it is good to sit here in Pablo’s. Here I see colors that I have not put on canvas, hear music that I have not put on the player, see people whose names I do not know. Just as though I am a member of the world as it is, not a ghost of the past as it was. One fine day. Oh yes, one fine day. You just wait: one fine day we will all go home.
