Meditations on a Work Day
Each
Northern Californian evening my husband drives back
to our new
construction home, the one with hardwood floors
so shiny and
slippery our puppy slides when she tries to run.
Our pup has
learned to take any opportunity we are not hunched
over the
damp sink, the stagnant laundry, the catalog mail
to paw our
knees or lick the Adam’s apple of our ankles to play.
My husband
saves lives while I make PowerPoint slides.
I picture
him often – between my perfectly aligned text boxes
I’ve
arranged like a Neiman Marcus holiday store display,
sometimes
after I’ve recolored bar charts in a cascade of
Benjamin
Moore blues, I imagine him a chef before dinner rush,
getting his mise en place of IV bags and patient
literature.
He’s not
afraid to cut or glue, to blow-up X-rays, to second guess.
His hands
are as sturdy as a surgeon’s, and on the seldom occasion
his stack of
intake forms and medical records falter and flutter,
his papers sing symphonies and confetti to the ground.
What is our
puppy doing all this time? She is learning to tell time,
defying the
laws of gravity, and studying the origins of the universe.