Fiat Lux

This morning about 6:45 as I stepped out onto the front porch to head to the coffee shop (my wonted and wanted walk), I noticed something odd: I didn't need the porch light to help me descend the front steps (a process that's a little bit more ... dicey ... in my dotage--especially in the winter).

It's no glimmering insight to note that much of the dreariness of winter is its oppressive darkness. December, January--it's dark when I get up, dark when supper's over. It's as if the land itself can't abide looking at all the ice and (apparently) dead vegetation.

But today--as I said--the sun was edging up, and not long after I arrived at the Open Door Coffee Co., I had to lower the sunscreen on the window in front of me, for Old Sol was pouring a river of light through that window, a river that splashed me, full in the face. I was simultaneously grateful--and annoyed. (Hard to concentrate on my reading when Apollo's chariot is flaring in my face.)

In the kinder months when the sun lingers in the sky in the evening, Joyce and I like to run an errand after supper--"errand," usually, meaning a stop at Mickey D's for a Diet Coke. Or whatever. ("Fries with that?")

And until very recently, we even went out in the winter evenings (unless Frosty the Snowman and his ilk prohibited it), though our brumal evenings usually involved merely a stop at a Starbucks drive-thru in Aurora or Stow-Kent.

But this year ... I've wussed out. We eat supper, clean up--then I head upstairs to read for an hour or so until it's time to stream "our" shows. (I usually watch a Rockford Files episode before Joyce joins me; some of you know I've watched those episodes, in sequence, countless times; I quote lines coming up as Joyce enters the room--hard to tell if she's charmed, annoyed, impressed, depressed, regretful about a certain event that occurred on December 20, 1969).

So our evenings, I'm saying, have become even less exciting than they used to be. I mean, when a quick jaunt to Marc's or the grocery store or Kohl's or Mustard Seed Market qualifies as a Dyer Adventure, you have a pretty good understanding of the dimensions of our lives.

And--as I've said--it's even more constricted and restricted in the winter.

Nothing used to daunt me in my younger (dumber?) days. We'd head off to see family in Massachusetts for Christmas in a blizzard. We'd decide at the last minute some summer week to drive out to Oregon. When I was in my mid-forties, I thought it would be cool to hike over the Chilkoot Pass from Alaska to the Yukon because I was teaching The Call of the Wild to my eighth graders, and that pass figures a bit in the story. And so I did.

In the summers Joyce and I would drive all over the country looking at sites with literary significance--writers' homes, hangouts, graves. No problem.

And now? An evening trip to Bed, Bath seems a bit ... much for me. And Joyce--bless her--never hassles me about it. She'll just head to her study, work on her next book--or read, read, read until it's time to walk in our bedroom and hear the man she married quote lines from a 1976 episode of The Rockford Files.

Ah, romance!

But, as the Beatles once reminded us, "Here comes the sun"--and I am ready (more than ready) to embrace that nuclear ball of fire.