No theme weaves a grateful path

I have nothing to say—at least that is what I’m typing at this very moment. 

A wise editor once said to me, “Write about the most important thing first.”

I heed his wisdom.

I have nothing important to write about.

My excuses for said nothingness, pathetic at best, are piled up and stuck to each other like the anti-inflammatory medicine capsules I accidentally knocked into the kitchen sink, slick-wet from a wash of dinner dishes.

The gelatin skins, once independent and full of joint pain relief, conjoin and morph into an orangey-white sludge worse than melted creamsicles. 

I manage to save one or two pills and set them aside with intention. I then forget about them until weeks later when I find them covered in dust just like all the hours in the last week that I’d planned to set aside to write.

The next budding column’s theme eludes me.

Deep down in the heel of my winter boot, it is wedged underneath the orthotic insole, seated in glue slapped in there by an underpaid shoe factory laborer from a third world country, who was thinking about how many other jobs he could take on to make ends meet while building my footwear on a hot and sticky humid-thick Sunday afternoon, that also was his wife’s birthday.

Once again, I wait to the last possible hour to compile my thoughts and the last possible minute to write them down.

It’s a time when the people with true intention, who completed their goals well before deadline, have showered and crawled snugly into their electric blanket laden beds.

I pour over the chicken scratch notes on ideas for this column. Oh, the computer memory I have sacrificed for these ideas and yet nothing in them strikes me to task.

The clock ticks on and it’s cold outside.

After fidgeting like a six-year-old I drag my creative side kicking and screaming from inside myself, out through the ends of my fingers and reach for the last eight squares of fruit and nut infused chocolate sitting on my desk. It’s nearly 9 p.m. and eating chocolate at this hour is sure defeat of a good night’s rest.

And just as I was filling my diet quota with the last two morsels, I hear a voice on the radio say, “And how was your Blue Monday? Did you feel like the rest of us today? Did you feel like you’d hit rock bottom, cold, miserable, in debt, out of shape, and feeling like a loser because you’d flushed your willpower from the New Year down the loo?”

Suddenly I had my theme.

Cookies baking in the kitchen, tea with my dad, a swift winter’s sprint down the frozen creek in the sunshine of a Sunday afternoon, the soft light at my parents’ house down the way, a kiss for someone special whom I hadn’t seen in nearly a week, a laugh with a grandchild, a connection, a hearty meal, gratitude—lots of gratitude.

Sometimes I forget how good I have it.