I had ulterior motives. For a few years, whenever I had a blood pressure check, as soon as I felt the cuff tighten, I waited for the look. Perched on the examination bed at the doctor’s office, my arm in a nurse's hand, or on the unforgiving folding chair at the Red Cross donating center, my arm in the nurse’s hand, I saw the same look coming as soon as the device began to exhale or once the Velcro patches were ripped apart.

So I had to get something.  Buy something. My wife and I were on the ninth day of a ten-day stay in Italy. She had visited her cousin’s boutique in Pesaro.  And her favorite shoe store and bookstore and her favorite herbalist in Rimini. And a great toy store in Bologna. And her scarf and headband lady in Santarcangelo. She was pretty loaded.

“I don’t like the word cheese,” my wife says. We’re driving home from the grocery store, where we have just bought a couple mozzarella balls to slice and lay over tomato slices at lunch today. I am surprised and delighted. Forty-two years of marriage and I never knew this about her. I tell her cheese seems like a perfectly good word.  

I was first in line at the Lahser and Maple Kroger yesterday morning, a Sunday. The doors would open at 7:00. I’d been waiting in my car for fifteen minutes, cars pulling into the lot after me, first one, then two or three at a time, killing headlights, engines. I was there more out of curiosity than immediate need. The day before I’d been to Lowe’s, Home Depot, and Menards at 7:00 a.m., checking on what they were out of. 

Tizi says, Hey why don’t you Google the local stores and find out if they have special hours for senior citizens?   And I think, But why would I do that?  And then I remember. I haven’t developed the habit of thinking of myself as a senior citizen. Then it hits you, like a pie in the face. A week ago, talking to my son in LA, I described our distancing regime during the pandemic. 

I’m feeling good about our ditch. Between our house and the house next door, running from the street to the back of the lot, this ditch conveys water to a large storm drain. Surface water drains into this ditch. Our sump water is pumped into this ditch. The water from the long ditch across the street, a major tributary, flows under the road through 12-inch pipe and into our ditch.

I look over my shoulder at the clock on the oven, 11:19 a.m.  Not yet, I think. A few more minutes. These are counting days. We count the deer we see on our morning walks, the orphan gloves dropped and lying at the edge of the sidewalk; the coyotes and vultures, one each yesterday. We count the days we’ve been sheltering in place, peruse the daily Covid-19 statistics in Michigan, in the US, and around the world.

Three times in the last week I’ve seen “welp” in print. Like this: “Welp, now O.J. Simpson thinks Carole Baskin from ‘Tiger King’ killed her husband.”  And this: “Welp, I can die happy now. Chocolate cake stuffed inside this pup-cone!”  This morning, I was scrolling through articles on Flipboard and saw this lead from a publication called Well and Good, an article by an anal surgeon:  “Welp, I hate to break it to you but isn’t the best way to keep your butt clean.” 

“Your Bruce Jenner shirt,” my wife says, “is on the ironing board downstairs." It’s a Thursday morning in Coronavirus time. We’re having coffee in the kitchen. Later today I’ll go to the grocery store, an outing that used to occur daily. Now I go once a week, if that. For these trips, along with gloves and mask, I wear clothing I don’t care about, shirt and pants that might accidentally rub up against virus and will need to be washed right away.

One Sunday afternoon in March of 1976, I ran into Dave. I was in a beer store in Durham, North Carolina, standing at the cash register, pocketing the change from my purchase, when this guy stepped up to the counter beside me. He looked familiar. “Are you Dave?” I said. He gave me a wary look, like maybe he was, maybe he wasn’t.

“Go ahead and toss a few,” he said. I told him I was no pitcher. We were on the local elementary school ball diamond. It was a Saturday, a few days before little league’s opening day. Fifteen boys, some eager, some not; two dads, one competent, one not.

In a saucy Washington Post opinion piece on February 24, 2012, columnist Alexandra Petri made fun of Mitt Romney. Campaigning for the Republican nomination, he was visiting Michigan, a state he’s sort of from (his father was the State’s governor from 1963 to 1969). In a speech he expressed his affection for Michigan by noting that “all the trees are the right height.” Petri let him have it, noting that his comment “bears a resemblance to what on TV sitcoms is called chuffa — something that sounds sort of funny but isn’t an actual joke.” Romney’s attempts at humor she describes as “verbal clockwork oranges.”

At the edge of our driveway, next to the rosemary bush in our herb garden, is a flat rock, suitable for sitting on. We call it Aunt Fran’s rock, named for a dear soul who used to perch on it when she looked after our three-year-old son. I was sitting on that rock a few days ago when our six-year-old grandson started showing off his hoverboard.

Car Seats: A Love–Hate Story of Safety, Parenting, and Time It’s not uncommon to get the call, from a friend, a relative, a neighbor in need. “Do you, by any chance, have a car seat we can borrow?” Their adult-age kids are flying into town, and they’re bringing children with them. And when they get here, they’ll need to secure said kid or kids in the back of a car, in specially engineered containment units. 

The fall of 1967, every morning before school, we listened to AM radio. My brother and I were both in high school, which meant we were on an early schedule, up before 7:00 a.m., grouchy and silent, worried about how our hair would look that day, about whether we had something cool to wear to school. While we ate cold cereal for breakfast, our mother got dressed for work.

“I’d like a pound of ground cicadas, please.” I can imagine a world in which I might make such a request. Right here at home. Cicadas are in the news. They’re coming.

In Italy they say, “Non c'è due senza tre.” Which means, roughly, stuff happens in threes. The expression comes to me tonight. I’m lying in bed with my wife in Mariposa, California, where we’ve come to visit our son and his wife. Behind the barn where they make cider, above which they have a comfortable one-bedroom apartment, there is a big backyard.

I feel a trickle of earwigs in the palm of my hand, then running down my arm. Under ordinary circumstances, it would be a revolting sensation. At home, on warm days when I open the mailbox down by the road, I search for these pests. I shake the mail before I go in the house, knowing they might be resting between the pages of junk mail.

The sign, an improvised advertisement, takes me by surprise. Cash for cats. It’s a Saturday afternoon in November. The sky is a smudge. I’m driving north on Old South Telegraph Road, past a Home Depot, past a UHaul and a long-term storage facility, past a place where you can get your crashed car fixed. At one time there was a party rental outfit on this stretch of road: tables and chairs, dishes and glasses and flatware, tents and dance floors.

The physician will ask–if I see one–was there any trauma? And I will have to answer: I was lying in bed. I hurt myself lying in bed. Suffered an injury to my shoulder. Two days now I’ve gotten out of bed lame. It’s a lame excuse for a shoulder, not doing what a shoulder is supposed to do, assist with the raising and lowering of one’s arm.

March 19 is St. Joseph day. Father’s Day in Italy. March 20 is Spring Equinox. We're celebrating. Sort of. We’re cleaning the garage. Not something I ever imagined doing in Italy. Three floors below us is one of two parking garages. Each of the ten apartments in this building comes with a designated garage space, complete with a locking door, behind it an area just large enough for one very small car and some garage-appropriate junk.

I’m cursed with the gift of waking up early. It’s morning in Matera, in a cramped hotel room whose main redeeming quality is the view. I always leave a hotel early in the morning, before Tizi gets up, before the breakfast service. I leave with a “biglietto di visita” in my pocket, so if I get run down by a car or knocked out and robbed, whoever stumbles upon my body will know what hotel I belong to and inform relevant parties of my temporarily compromised condition or, worse, my demise.

I need a can of Pam. The thought occurs to me every year on a day like today.  We’ve just had our first snowfall, 2-3 inches of heavy wet heart-attack snow. A few hours from now, our wise-ass weather man predicts “snain” will start falling, which will become, by tomorrow, an icy, bumpy, frozen mess. I’m outside at 6:00 a.m., clearing the driveway old-school–with a shovel– because my snowblower is in the shop having its carburetor rebuilt.

Sometimes the snow is just so beautiful. Today the flakes are big and fat. Not falling. They’re floating. That should be a meteorological term. Let’s go outside this morning and enjoy the snowfloat. The chairs we might fold open in the summer, taking a seat at the edge of the driveway to enjoy the sun, we could do that now, put on sufficient clothes, go outside and snowbathe.