Gray Sunday

Morning came early today.

The young daughter of the man I’m seeing awoke before eight and the combination of her energy and the volume by which she operates ensured that the rest of the house do the same. So instead of hoisting the covers over my head and falling back to sleep as I have done on so many of the Sunday mornings of my twenties, this particular Sunday morning was spent on a kitchen stool with a plate of pancakes and The New York Times.

It was nice, padding down his steps in my bare feet to fetch the newspaper before the night cool had fully lifted. Nice, but different. On this morning one year ago I was living in a dingy studio apartment near Union Square feeling a little bit lonely and wondering how many months it might be before the proverbial bullet would be bitten and I would move “home” to Chicago. But a whole year has happened since then and I am still here. More here, really, because the days feel more like living than waiting, as they had. Thinking on it, I cannot say why that is, exactly, except that perhaps now I know more people and there are Sunday papers to be fetched.

In the early afternoon I went to the bookstore in my neighborhood to buy something that might help pass this gray Sunday. After I had made a selection, something in paperback by Joan Didion, I went to the counter. The cashier, a man in his fifties, took my credit card, looked at it for a moment and, not recognizing the bank, asked where I was from.

“Michigan originally,” I told him.

“But you live here now?” he asked.

“Yes,” I told the man. “I live here now.”

He handed me back my card and I walked out of the bookstore, feeling those words to be true.