Monday Morning

From time to time people have asked me for more of my blog.  I stopped once and then again because I grew tired of the tyranny of having to compose a new one each day.  I was often asked "why do you feel compelled to do this every day?"  Well, that is my nature, is the obvious answer.  For someone who was required from early boyhood to be standing behind his chair at the breakfast table to await the moment of his mother's arrival at the table, and who cannot recall one single time that he or any one of his five siblings failed in that obligation, I guess writing the blog is just another hoop through which to jump.  I have been inching forward to resuming the writing, but my compulsion to frame things is so strong that I had to find the appropriate day.  It would have to be a Sunday.  Why?  Well, the week begins on Sunday.  Says who?  Some little voice in my brain still alive to serving as altar boy at the early morning service at our Episcopal Church.  Oddly enough in the years of retirement the days of the week have lost any significance except Sunday which is now marked only by the greater size and variety of sections of the New York Times delivered to my doorstep daily.  Like the Dowager Countess of Grantham I really have no sense of "weekend" anymore, although unlike Her Ladyship I once did indeed look forward to the weekend like a shipwreck sighting an arriving naval patrol boat.  Sunday April 10th was to be my debut in a third incarnation of blog writer.  Another opening, another show.  This Sunday, as I sat with my Times in my big comfy chair, there came out of the sky blue morning a strange crack of what I could imagine was lightening, and the lamp by my chair went out.  And thus my computer was stalled, and thus the blog was not about to be started, and thus the rhythms were off, and . . . . .Well, here it is Monday.  I shall start the blog, and pretend that Monday, the start of the work week for millions of people, is a good moment to begin another installment of what in my idleness I shall call a simulacrum of my life's work.  After all, in addition to teaching, I did write a lot.  In any case, this lovely Monday is a new beginning for someone whom I shall style a New Person, having just come through open heart surgery a few weeks ago.  As a raconteur I know that the phrase ought to guarantee the immediate attention of your audience except here in Sarasota open heart surgery is rather much a ho-hum procedure.  What else could one expect in a community which supposedly has the highest percentage of over eighties in the nation.  Eighty, now that's a word to conjure with!  A daughter just visiting remarked enthusiastically that it was like a miracle to look at me.  "You look eighty again!" she exclaimed.  Hmmmm . . . .