With the time that a holiday morning brings, I took a skillet out and turned on the burner. Leaning my glass bowl over the sink, I brought the wire whisk down into two eggs and beat them steadily with the milk. Later I chopped parsley that had stayed fresh enough from its purchase earlier in the week and sprinkled it over the eggs in the skillet.
Two slices of multi-grain bread went into the toaster. The small exhaust fan over the stove whirred.
At what I guessed to be the right moment, I grasped the handle and tipped the skillet, first this way, then that. The eggs, puffy and just dry, slid this way, then that. Spatula ready just in case, I tipped and tilted the skillet until it hovered over the plate. I jiggled again.
The yellow folds of the eggs slid onto the plate, the parsley a creamy green under the surface.
Nothing had stuck. My simple meal, the first of 2010, was simply fine.
Finishing the last bites of buttered toast a few minutes later, I thought of the lunch a friend had taken me to this week. In a Chinese restaurant that was new to me, the meal and the company both just the easy-going thing for the final week of the year, I joked when the bill came with fortune cookies.
Would the eerie appropriateness of the fortunes that had punctuated my lunches this past year in a Chinese restaurant near work follow me here?
“Today’s a day to nourish yourself. Feed yourself well,” I read aloud.
“I have,” I said, smiling up at my buddy, “and I will.”
Winter neighborhoods through which I rode later that day put me in mind of the approaching turn of the year. I know I welcome this one, despite the snows and the cold, with a greater readiness to be nourished and surprised than twelve months ago.
On the desk in my bedroom is another recent lunchtime fortune: “Believe it can be done.”
All right, 2010, I do believe.
Just let me know what “it” is when I’m ready for it.
4 comments:
This made me sit up and pause -
"Believe it can be done"
This made me be still. What a marvelous gift you gave me on this first day of the year.
I am glad to hear from you at the start of this year, great as it is with possibilities.
Yes, someyimes we might not know what "it" is, and sometimes we do not know if we are ready for it, no matter what "it" is. There is mostly something missing in the equation... I believe.
The something missing, though, gets our heart beating. Fast.
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