Monday, January 12, 2009.
Being Daddy, Year Nineteen.
Up at 5:45 a.m. Ordinarily, I'd roll over and go back to bed, but Mary Leigh would soon be up to get ready for school. Mary Ann usually shepherds her through that. In the absence of Mom, I figured it was my duty to be in loco that particular parentis. On the other hand, I asked myself: didn't I get myself going without assistance when I was sixteen, almost seventeen? Mary Leigh couldn't figure out why I was up, either.
Tomorrow I'll stay in bed. Because it's cold out there. Frost covered the lawn when the sun rose high enough to see it. Twenty-nine degrees, said my thermometer out on the edge of the woods--and that's a warm spot. Well, surely we couldn't expect all of January to go without a freezing morning. Things must be going pretty well for me to give this lack of perfection even a second thought.
My Monday routine of broadcasting from home meant that my little girl would not come home to an empty house. And that, once off the air, we could go out to dinner at our favorite Monday-evening restaurant: the Acme. Wedge salad for her, red beans and hot sausage. Yum. Mary Ann has been checking on us, and inevitably chides us for eating out too much. But she's on the West Coast, and there's not a damn thing she can do about it. We will eat wherever we want as much as we want until she gets back. At which time the pressure to eat leftovers will once again become intolerable.
