Science fiction, fantasy, mystery and what-not
He removed his toothbrush. Then he remembered that he wanted to wash his hands before he brushed his teeth. Hands washed, he reached for his toothbrush in its holder.
Gone.
WTH?
He looked around. There was the toothbrush, where’d he set it two minutes before.
So it was going to be that kind of day.
When we began hunkering down, my wife used it as an excuse to clean out the freezers, frig and pantry. (Yeah, she’s one of those people who said, “Now I have time to clean things,” and then cleaned, making the rest of us in the household (which is me and the three cats, so, really, we’re talking about me, because the cats don’t care) look bad. (Yeah, I’m over it, okay?) While doing that, she found some lemon and blueberries pancake mix.
We’d bought it a while ago at a locally famous mill, famous because it’s been there a long time and still does things the old fashioned way, and there’s nothing else like that in the area. Called Butte Creek Mill, it burned down in December, 2015. Because it was local and famous, we visited it and the pancake mix about six years before it burned down. So, it’s old stuff.
There wasn’t any date on it. My wife wanted to pitch it. “It can’t be good.” She opened it. We smelled it. Everyone knows that smelling is the second best scientific way to check for freshness. I let one of the cats smell it, but he just walked away with a bored tail shrug.
“Smells good to me,” I said. Then said, “Save it. I’ll make us pancakes on Easter morning. It’ll be fun.”
That brings us to today.
I rose, made breakfast and ate it (oatmeal with cranberries, walnuts, with granola on top), made coffee, and started writing. My wife came out a little later. “I thought you were making us pancakes this morning.”
This morning? Today? Oh, yeah, Easter. “Sorry, I was writing in my head and went to auto-pilot and forgot.”
She gave me a glare that made the sleeping cats wake up and leave (that’s why they left in my mind — they were sensing danger). I proposed to make the pancakes for brunch. “You don’t like eating this early anyway,” I said, like that made it all okay, because I was really thinking of her.
“Fine.” I could tell she wasn’t pleased.
Fast forward a few hours. I made the pancakes. We don’t have cow milk so used vanilla almond milk. One egg refused to leave its perch in the carton. Instead of taking one of the other thirteen eggs available as a sane person would do, I tried pulling it out and put my thumb through the shell.
Stupid egg.
Now I had an egg mess to clean up. I also wondered if it was a bad omen for the eggs, because these things must happen for a reason, and the reason could be as a warning, “Don’t eat the pancakes.”
(In hindsight, though, that one egg was the only one on that side. I’d wondered why it’d been left alone on that side. Now I suspect that my wife set me up. She can be diabolical.)
But the pancakes were made, and we haven’t died yet. They were delicious. Even though the blueberries seemed like pea stones in the batter, when they cooked up, they were moist, and looked and tasted just like real blueberries.
The package made about twenty-six pancakes about six inches in diameter (because that’s how I like them). We ate some and froze eighteen with wax paper between them. Now we have something to look forward to finding when we clean the freezer again.
It’ll probably be during the next pandemic.
Today’s music choice began with a Billy Collins poem.
I don’t know what neuron decisions forced the stream of a Billy Collins poem to intersect with a 1989 song, but after a bit of that music, the Billy Collins poem moved aside, like a little Fiat 500 moves aside for a semi-tractor bearing down at seventy-five, its horn blowing like a child with a toy.
Wondering about the switch, I wondered if it was about faith and expectations running up against experience and reality. Maybe that was far-fetched.
For the record, the Billy Collins poem is “Nostalgia”. I can’t say that it’s my favorite B.C. poem because I like so many of them so much. I think that if I had to recommend just one B.C. poem, it would be “Forgetfulness”. It begins,
The name of the author is the first to go followed obediently by the title, the plot, the heartbreaking conclusion, the entire novel which suddenly becomes one you have never read, never even heard of, as if, one by one, the memories you used to harbor decided to retire to the southern hemisphere of the brain, to a little fishing village where there are no phones.
h/t to PoetrySoup.com
Love that poem. Anyway, here’s the song, “Personal Jesus” by Depeche Mode.
“Keep the change,” he said, turning away from the cashier.
“You always say that,” his friend said as they walked away as the cashier put the coins into the tip jar and said, “Thank you, sir, your order will be right up.”
“Habit.” The other shrugged. “I don’t want change.”
“But it adds up.”
He was about to reply when his friend said, “Hey.”
As he turned, his friend flipped a silver coin at him. He caught it without thinking, mostly as protection to keep it from hitting his face. Within a second, he raised the coin and looked at it. Seeing it was a nineteen seventy-eight quarter, he said, “Fu — ”
Then he was gone.
Puzzled, his friend blinked at the empty space. He’d lost the thread on what he’d been doing. He’d had a quarter and he’d been thinking…something…
Rubbing his head, he tried to remember. There’d been something there, but where that something had been, it seemed like there was now a hole.
Sighing, he told himself, it’ll come back to him. He was getting old and forgetful, like his parents. Turning, he hunted for a table, sure that he’d forgotten something important, growing less certain that it would ever come back.
He put his dirty clothes in the recycle and tossed his used tissue in the laundry.
Returning to his study, he reached for his coffee, and remembered, he’d gotten up to get his coffee.
Leaving his study, he realized he put his dirty clothes in the recycle. Getting them out, he found the used tissue in the laundry, blew his nose into it, and threw it in the trash.
Then he fed the cats a few treats and went into his study to read, where he reached for his coffee.
Remembering, he’d gotten up to get his coffee, he laughed at himself. At least he was getting a lot of steps in today. He checked his wrist to look at his Fitbit —
Where did he leave his Fitbit?
Getting up to go find it, he left his study, went to the kitchen, and made a cup of coffee with his Keurig. Satisfied, he returned to his study with his coffee to read, and then checked his wrist to look at his Fitbit —
Where did he leave his Fitbit?
Then, he remembered, he’d put it in his shoe.
Leaving his study, he went into the other room, fed the cats a few treats, and made a cup of coffee.
This was going to take some time. Coffee would definitely help.
Michael Seidel, writer 