And Then The Day Shifted

I was up this morning before the rain. It was my usual time. I prepared breakfast, read half the two newspapers I have delivered each morning. I’ll read the front sections later, during breakfast.

I made the bed, washed up, put on my walking clothes, put the two bags of bird food in my shoulder bag, took my morning pills, put on my raincoat and camouflage cap and headed out the door.

I started down the front steps and suddenly the rain came down like an ambush with such force that it drove me back up the stairs.

Normally, I drive my car to the two areas where I feed the birds. The whole circle takes about 20 minutes to complete. Then I return home, park the car in front of my apartment and then go on my daily two-mile walk along the greenway and through the Yale campus.

But today’s heavy rain put a stop to that. The birds would have to fend for themselves. No peanut pieces, no hulled sunflower seeds. They would have to rely on their wits.

Of course, they always have to rely on their wits. All wild animals do. My food is just an extra gift they add to their diet. I make it easy for them to eat good food that sustains them. But I never have enough for everybody. The ones in the know wait for each morning’s miracle: food they never get to eat elsewhere and laid out for them to just walk around and eat. They will have to rely on other sources for today.

So I took off all my walking clothes and put on my inside clothes and made my lapsang souchong tea and poured almond milk on my multigrain flakes, and brought my tray into the front room and ate.

And I remembered Hemingway and the way he began his wonderful book, “A Movable Feast.”

“Then there was the bad weather,” he wrote. “It would come in one day when the fall was over. We would have to shut the windows in the night against the rain and the cold wind would strip the leaves from the trees in the Place Contrescarpe. The leaves lay sodden in the rain and the wind drove the rain against the big green autobus at the terminal and the Café des Amateurs was crowded and the windows misted over from the heat and the smoke inside.”

I read those words this morning in my copy of the original 1964 edition given to me by Joan a year before she and I would travel together through Europe.

She wrote inside the book: “A pre-birthday present — a bit of one man’s magic for a person with more.”

We were together for three years, before going off to live dramatically different lives. She would live in Italy for many years before coming back to the States married to a man from the Italian cinema. She would die 20 years after she gave me the book.

The rain is still falling. I’ve given up on the idea that I can take my two-mile walk. I will hunker down, instead, and pretend that today is just an ordinary, rainy day.

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