Indulgence

The remission, before God, of various sins. Or a couple of toasted biscuits with sausage gravy. Or catching the fire just before it dies. Three in the morning and it's cold outside but the house is almost warm; no wind and the stick trees are quiet, no bugs, no wild animals rooting in the compost. No traffic, no trains over in Kentucky, no barges on the river, no chainsaws in the distance. Just the creak and groan of cast-iron heating and cooling. My all-occasion celebration is to get a drink and roll a smoke. Not answerable, and I've earned this, to any other set of dictates: I choose to ignore almost everything. B and I were talking, the other day, about disassociation. We have a similar attitude. He plays music, the stand-up bass, in a couple of different bands, so he has contact with people, on a regular basis, playing songs, and I envy him that; he's more fit and older, and I envy that. But we agree it's odd we should cross-reference so many books. We have the same translations of early English text, and we agree the Bach Cello Suites are sublime. I wish I played an instrument, my greatest failure is that I don't. But I was pleased, when we last met, that neither of us knew what day it was. I can call TR, because he always knows what day it is. Weekdays, at 4 PM, the overly cheerful announcer on the Athens NPR channel, says what day of the week it is and gives the date, and usually adds what special day it is, like National Jelly-Donut Day. I called Mom, to see how ornery she was, with the holidays looming, and we talked about gravy. She's the gravy queen because Dad considers it a beverage, and I was after her technique for making red-eye gravy, which one has on biscuits when one is eating ham. Mom was a very good country cook, but the only time she ever measured anything was when she was making a cake, so getting a recipe from her is a lot like reading a Faulkner short story. Essentially, red-eye gravy is rendered cured ham fat and coffee, doesn't sound like much, but it's in that class of liquids that penetrate completely and immediately whatever they come in contact with. Turns an opened biscuit into a religious experience. That almost insubstantial top note of cured ham and then that sultry after-note of salty naughtiness. The crows were jeering (where did that word come from, why did I remember it right then?) when I came back in from determining that the ice made it too dangerous to work outside. Thank god, I can just read, imagine commas rampant on a azure field, and think about what I might cook for dinner tomorrow.