"Monday Morning at My House" by Rev. Thomas Schade

Tue May 13 13:59:13 EDT 2008

M I N I S T E R’ S   M E M O

“Monday Morning at My House”

It’s Monday morning, and I have a lot to do, including writing this memo.
Writing the memo is the most crucial task of the day. At the same time, I
have several tasks that I have to do around the house. My brother-in-law is
coming to stay overnight, and that means I have to clear a place somewhere
in my office for him to lay his head. Somewhere under my traveling
suitcase – never fully packed and never fully unpacked – is a sofa bed he
can use. I need to get the rest of the laundry off the sofa. The three books
need to go as well.

And I need to go grocery shopping: last night we ate that bag of souvenir
soup mix that one of us brought back from somewhere, and today we made
coffee with a stray bag of freeze-dried coffee grounds that came in a gift
basket. Extended freeze-drying of ground coffee appears to preserve the
coffee in every way except taste.

Coffee, no matter how it tastes is an essential part of our life here. There
is a story going around about a man who was told by his doctor that he
needed to eliminate coffee from his diet. Panic filled the patient’s eyes.
“Even coffee?”

The doctor asked, “Well, how much coffee do you drink?”

The patient, “About two pots a day, one before lunch and one after

lunch.”

Doctor: “Doesn’t that keep you awake?”

Patient: “Well, it helps a little

.”

So, it’s Monday morning, and I am drinking a curiously flat tasting cup of
coffee, one in which I can distinctly taste the tap water, and I have a memo
to write, an office to clean for a houseguest, and a grocery trip to make.
The memo is essential, crucial to my job. The housecleaning is a very high
priority, because who wants to reveal the squalor of one’s daily life to
relatives. The grocery store trip: likewise essential to daily life and
normal functioning.

In addition, I am doing Internet searches on where to rent a bass clarinet
to play during my sabbatical, and also doing research on writing workshops
for my sabbatical. These two, of course, are not essential to today’s
activities, but could be delayed until tomorrow. But time is running away,
and I have delayed them already for days into weeks.

Plus, I have not yet caught up on the daily news as delivered by various
blogs that I read. Everything I have read already in the Boston Globe this
morning, I already knew from reading the blogs yesterday, so I cannot fall
behind.

And what’s this? The dog wants to play with a ball. She always wants to play
with a ball. And once you start tossing that ball down the hall, she will
brook no wavering of your attention regarding ball throwing. She is 100% on
the case of the ball; so you should be too.

So, I start the memo; let’s say that I open up the word processing software
on the computer. Staring at the blank screen, waiting for that inspiration
to come. Might as well put a few things away while thinking. As I take an
old water glass into the kitchen from the office, I open the refrigerator
(why? because it is there!) Nothing in there, so I start a mental list of
what I need to buy at the store.

The dog, of course, is following me closely, and in a moment of distraction,
drops a ball very close to my feet. I kick it (the ball, not the dog) away
down the hall. With nails aclatter on the tile floor, she is off down the
hall, and triumphantly returns with the ball that almost got away.

OK, we throw the ball a little bit.

Oh My God, I am no further on the memo than I was 30 minutes ago. I rush
back to the office. Jesus, is this place a mess! Looking through my open
applications on my computer, I check some news and then a bass clarinet, and
then how many miles it is to a writers’ workshop in Southern Ohio, stare at
the blank page of the memo, try to concentrate, take a sip of now lukewarm,
flat, stale coffee and think that I need to put coffee on the shopping list,
and do we have any coffee filters, better go check in the drawer, and Pepe,
where’s your ball? Oh, it’s under the couch! That’s where that other sock
went! Do we need laundry soap, too? Kitchen, office, ball, bass clarinet,
memo, calendar, email, writer’s workshop, refrigerator, snack, coffee,
shouldn’t I be calling someone?

Time’s slipping by, and not a word is written. I’m working hard not getting
anything done.

      I have a vision sometimes of God resting the palm of His hand, big,
warm, soft, on my forehead. I can feel it. But I can also hear everything
going on my head, as a wild, frantic, discordant, jumbled cacophony, and
just like each member of an orchestra stops the little runs of notes, played
to limber up the fingers, and plays the one note that is the tuning note,
slowly, all the noises in my head begin to subtly shift, sustain themselves
and then resolve into harmonious sweetness.

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://mail.firstunitarian.com/pipermail/firstumemo_firstunitarian.com/attachments/20080513/636c119a/attachment.html 
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Type: image/gif
Size: 728 bytes
Desc: not available
Url : http://mail.firstunitarian.com/pipermail/firstumemo_firstunitarian.com/attachments/20080513/636c119a/attachment.gif 