Maybe it happened a few times a year, maybe only once. I can't remember. But I can still see the flickering light of the screen, my father looking as if he had won the lottery as he sat in a folding chair with his trademark cigar hanging out of his mouth. It was a rare and glorious tweak in his evening routine.
Last night, I sat alone on my deck watching the flickering lights of passing cars flash through the narrow gaps between slats in the fence. The air was still, the sun was down, and the night was making those sounds it makes that are just loud enough to remind you your ears work. If I listened carefully I could almost hear the din of the spotty reception on my father's portable television, the rich thwack of a bat connecting with a ball, an announcer's voice escalating with the excitement of a line drive, a crowd collectively holding its breath as a fly ball sailed toward the fence. The simple pleasures of baseball and a summer evening. The sheer exhilaration of monotony.
He was a master of simple pleasures, my father. Humble and hard working, he came home every evening tired but content. He would drop his keys on the piano bench, give me a hug, wash up before dinner. Once in a blue moon he would defy my mother, push back her tight schedule for fifteen minutes so he could have a Scotch on the rocks. Usually not, though. She was not a fan of tweaks in the routine.
It was the time after dinner he enjoyed most, when he would sit in his chair in the living room and light up his cigar and unfold his New York Times. The television was always on for background noise, and I would often sit with him. That's when he taught me how to do the crossword puzzle. In pen. How to fold the newspaper just right, how to pick a section and just go at it. How to make sure you had a few solid across words and down words figured out before you inked anything in. Somehow, the answers would come.
This weekend was all about simple pleasures for me. Lazy afternoons in Midwestern lake water finally warm enough to swim in, a stint at "stand up paddle boarding" -- the closest I'll ever come to surfing, nasty food at a beach concession stand, and an afternoon wandering through the local annual art fair in punishing heat. I watched couples holding hands and young families bickering, chatted with artists trying to keep cool in their stalls, kept my eyes out for something extraordinary, a work of art that didn't remind me of something I had seen the other day at Target. My friend and I each settled on wearable art, pieces we could hang around our necks rather than on our walls. More bang for our buck.
It was a tweak in my routine, this weekend. Time spent outside, away from chores that beckon from every corner at home (whether I do them or not), watching the flicker of people passing by and listening to noises that seem to have no purpose other than to remind us that our ears work. Less monotonous than exhilarating, I suppose. I felt as if I had won the lottery.
This would have been a perfect weekend to unplug the television and take it outside, fiddle with the rabbit ears, watch the flickering lights of the Mets game. Or, if they were not playing, to sit in the living room doing the Sunday puzzle and listening to the white noise of my mother banging around in the kitchen. To inhale the delicious aroma of my father's cigar and enjoy the simple pleasure of a routine tweaked only because it's summer, and summer doesn't last very long.
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