Routine Blessings, Special Ordinariness
Therapeutic Journaling #4
What a great afternoon and evening. Started out with rearranging the furniture along the front wall, which included finally hooking up the sound system after many months of not getting around to it. Made possible by Amazon kindly bringing me the splitter/switch I needed to run the sound through the receiver/amplifier. A complicated chore for me, trying to keep it in my head which cables come from which source. But got it done, with only one snag, which can only be fixed with a new RCA male/female adapter for the turntable. I’m sure Amazon will help me out with that in the near future, too. Meanwhile, we have the CD player and Bluetooth streaming from our devices.
So we celebrated, popping the cork on one of the new bottles of wine that Fedex brought us yesterday, courtesy of cousin Nellie. A Spanish Gran Reserva tempranillo. Pretty good. Light, easy to drink, and, at 13%, relatively low alcohol, which is what I tend to like anymore. Not so much of a mouthful as the high tannin and higher alcohol wines of central Italy and Southern France, but easy to drink without feeling an obligation to concentrate on each sip. A welcome contrast to the glasses of wine we had for Christmas.
The wine went well with the music streamed by a Pandora Radio channel I apparently created at some forgotten point in the past and found today after I signed in. It’s named “Kris Kristoferson and Patti Griffin,” but of course the algorithm goes wherever the numbers tell it to. And within that Kris and Patti framework it did well. Started out with one or another John Prine song, I honestly can’t remember exactly which one. But then it went through a long litany of songs I really love. Willie and Merle doing Pancho and Lefty; Emmylou singing The Travelin’ Kind; Bobby Earl Keen singing Paint the Town Beige; Mark and Emmylou doing All the Roadrunning; Kris with his original versions of Loving You was Easier than Anything I’ll Ever do, and Sunday Morning Coming down. And others, it just went on and on with blessings of sweet nostalgia. That algorithm had my heart’s number tonight. Brought a tear to my eye.
And all the while we had one of those special evenings of conversation, about our lives, our failures and weaknesses and regrets, as well as accomplishments and blessings and hopes. Running through the years in a way that gets more significant every year, at a point in our lives that long term plans take on a certain sense of urgency. And reinforces the outstanding decision to spend our lives together. I can’t imagine having done it any other way. One of those days that reminds me of how blessed I’ve been and continue to be.