We decided to forgo our routine Saturday morning excursion to the Golf Club for breakfast today even though last evening over dinner we had talked of the possibility. But I knew when I rose from my lair at ten past eight this morning, the opportunity was unrecoverable. It was just too late to capture the moment.
No doubt Wendy at the Club kitchen would still have been frying her crisp bacon but getting to the Club at a reasonable time presented a hurdle. What with the skies threatening rain, and the weather forecast predicting rain, we had to capitalize immediately upon the current dryness for our daily bicycle ride, a mandatory commitment which we dutifully fulfilled. So we contented ourselves instead with a healthful bowl of fresh fruit and a cup of black coffee before commencing our matutinal exercise.
Sleeping until after 8:00 o’clock this morning would normally have disturbed me. I have however done it so often recently that I have adjusted to the once perverse anomaly. I regret however that the length of the day is considerably shortened by such a tardy beginning. There was a time when I arose with equal regularity at 3:30 a.m. and set off to wash my car and listen to BBC Word News Service. But as I can now wash the car at any time of the day I apparently no longer have the early morning inclination. Yet those somnolent hours between 4:oo and 8:00 a.m. seem extravagantly squandered. I used to enjoy getting a cup of coffee at the gas station, sometimes chatting with the overnight attendant (upon whose mysterious provenance and fate I privately speculated) and still being home in time for a six o’clock breakfast and more coffee before going to work. Sometimes now when I sleep late my conscience is bothered by whether I am avoiding life by remaining in bed (though I can’t imagine that getting my car washed and having a gas attendant’s coffee is a great accomplishment).
As a result of this morning’s torpidity by the time we visited my elderly mother (and brought her a Starbucks Mocha Frappuccino® that she relishes) and afterwards toured the aisles of the grocery store, it was approaching 3:30 p.m. The topic of the preprandial cocktail was astonishingly by then already on our lips! Even more boggling to me was that my subsequent late afternoon congress with Charles Dickens in my soft green leather chair soon ended in my head drooping upon my chest and my hands collapsed with my book on my outstretched legs. It wasn’t as though I had gone to bed late last night! And yet here I was, asleep once again! Anaesthetized by a comfortable chair! It was only the sharpness of the air-conditioned breeze from the ceiling vent that finally awoke me. And by then it was time for hors d’oeuvres and dinner!
Once again the paradox is that while advancement in life is almost imperceptible, time goes whizzing by.