Most Mornings

Most mornings, but not all, after I heat the kettle to make coffee with the French press we picked up in Marshall’s for half the cost of a bodum in a store like Macy’s, where I’d sometimes shop but haven’t been in one in many years and I still have the wool duffel coat with a hood I bought there about thirty years ago and it’s still is in great condition except for the thin leather loops that hold the toggles in place and which I fix with a needle and thread from time to time, I steep the coffee for exactly four minutes and pour a cup for myself and one for my wife and we sit in bed for a while, maybe ten or fifteen minutes tops, before she has to get ready for work at the college, and I take the morning pills I need for blood pressure and cholesterol, and my prostate and then I shave, except in the winter when I let my beard grow but even then I shave around the edges so that it all looks neat, and it saves on the cost of new razors though now there are those cheaper plastic ones that work okay and last for maybe a month or so before they get a little rough on my skin and I need to take out a new one and feel bad because never really know if I should put the old one in the trash or in the recycling bin which I usually do but then I wonder if the people (if there are actual people) who go through the bottles and cans and clamshell boxes that the day-old doughnuts and blueberries they call bleuets come in, might cut their fingers on if they pick them off the conveyor belt the wrong way and that’s why I don’t put the tops of the baked bean or dogfood cans in the recycling anymore but I think a lot of people still do, which of course reminds me that there are lot’s of folks who don’t recycle anything and they just throw paper plates and cans and light bulbs and batteries, some of which you can recycle and some not (and I never can remember which) and leftover or moldy food in the same plastic bags and have them carted away or dropped off at the transfer station and I think that maybe they might not care about recycling so much or maybe they don’t know what should be recycled anyway or maybe they just think that recycling is a waste of time because it’s really the huge pig farms and cars and trucks on the highways and the deforestation of the Amazon and whatever goes on in China that we don’t know about that causes all of the air pollution with fossil fuels and greenhouse gases and so I can’t really blame them for the way they feel but then you see Greta Thunberg on TV and you know that you should really be doing more about the environment like turning down the thermostat in the winter same as I do but then it gets so cold in the house and it costs so much to have the old windows replaced and I keep telling the Pella window people who call me twice a year and ask me if I want to have them come out and give me an estimate on new windows and I tell them each time that I really can’t afford how much it costs for new windows and if I had all the windows in the house replaced it would cost as much as a used hybrid car, which I need more anyway, and if you don’t replace all of the windows at the same time the cold air just comes in through the ones you didn’t replace and if you try to put that plastic they sell in boxes in the hardware store which you tape up around the windows and then use a hairdryer to make the plastic sheets shrink up really tight and which works pretty good unless the window frame was not clean enough and the tape peels away and the cold air finds its way through anyway and makes the plastic flutter or the cats start to climb up the plastic and rip it down anyway only an hour after you had cut it to the right size and fit it just right around the window and used all that electricity with the blow dryer to get them up, which I just read in the Reader’s Digest, still sucks up electricity even when it’s turned off but you still keep it plugged in the outlet like the phone charger and the TV even when you don’t have a phone attached to the wire, costing you more money that you never considered before and that no one tells you about unless you happen to come across the article in the magazine which will probably go out of business when people my age die off and everyone is using their devices for everything like getting the news, most of which you can’t tell is real or made up by someone or even a by computer, and you can even use to see who is at your front door and tell them to get the hell away from your house or you’ll call the cops, or even turn on your lights and TV before you get home so it will be on when you get there or record the program for you if you get stuck in traffic and get home late and maybe even defrost the chicken ala king for you, so then I rinse the coffee cups and take a shower and I look for a job on the SimplyHired website which someone who also got let go back in 2008, told me about at a job fair, and says people like me need to work but nobody wants to hire a man as old as me to do things I know how to do pretty good but no one needs done anymore anyway, even for fifteen dollars an hour, which I would probably do in a New York minute, unless it requires heavy lifting or two years of experience with the use of excel spreadsheets which they didn’t have back at my old job.