The Sound of Silence

Here is a cow that I met on Sunday, warily eyeing me.

So, today turns out to be that day - the day you take your car in and walk to work in the morning on the path that runs by the river. As you pass the Dairy Queen on Riverside, you get a little nostalgic thinking about when your girls were younger and every Saturday afternoon you all went to the pool, then to the Dairy Queen for ice cream cones and then home for a nap in the air conditioning. Since you worked two jobs back then, you usually dozed off with them.

Back at work you get the call from the muffler place. The guy asks you how you are and you say, "I'm not sure. It'll depend on the estimate you give me..."

"Oh. Then I think you'll be doing pretty good then. You had a crack in your tail pipe. So, we can patch it for $48.15 and I should have it done in less than an hour..." You thank him and then extend your lunch break, so you can walk back to the shop, get your car, drive it home and ride your bike back to work. You find your afternoons are a little nicer, after you get some exercise in the middle of the day.

After work you run your 6 mile route and contemplate whether you should take one or two days off of running before your race on Saturday morning, without actually reaching a decision.

When you get home, you plan your evening. There are things to do around the house, but you got most of the gardening done over the weekend and you aren't due to mow the lawn until tomorrow. This is when you decide to make it THAT day - the day when you try out the new reading chair on your porch.

You grab your book and a drink and get all set-up. Ahhh. You think the chair is perfect and you put your dogs up on it and commence to reading sentences like, "Gary struggled to think of something undepressed to say, something reasonably unhostile, but he was rather drunk."

You realize you left your phone in the house. You consider going in and getting it, but then decide against it. Both your girls are safe and busy and you don't really feel like being accessible to anyone else. Then you remember you were going to listen to your iPod and left that in the house as well. You are suddenly aware of how loud it's been this whole time and you hadn't even noticed the dueling buzzings of cicadas and lawn mowers. "How pleasant," you think. What a nostalgic soundtrack of every Midwestern Summer you've ever spent and how odd that you rarely notice it until it stops in the Fall. How like you to focus on the absence of a thing.

The sun finally starts to set and you reenter your house, happy with your decision to make it that day...The day to try out your new reading chair. It was exactly what you needed.