Matins

8:30 AM


First thing in the morning. My depression reminds me that, while I thought of myself as proceeding heroically at every point yesterday, the day was actually painful.

"Going through all those hothouse emotional states!" sneers Mobojobo, which is the name I give my depression. “You call it therapy, but it is not like you're achieving anything. It was painful, and today is going to be just like that again as the process continues -- if we can call it a process.

“I call it hell," continues my dolorous fiend, expert on the underworld as he presumes to be. "You can try to fool yourself all you want, but you're in a terrible way. Everything is terrible."

In response, I say, "Hey, Mobo, let me pick out all the downers with which you’ve seeded your account. You are telling me I do not have the courage to continue. Or you're telling me that I have the courage but its exercise will not lead to anything good etc. etc. “

I will no doubt do silly things and think silly things and be bothered by thinking obsessively about the woman who’s known as Lou some more. That will be a waste of time. And I will be down on myself with what a waste of time that is too, and I will worry about whether I can concentrate on Stewardship Campaign business when the Chair of the Committee and I meet to discuss team captain assignments at 1:30 this afternoon.

On the other hand, I note I have got out of bed. I stood in the hallway and spoke with my daughter for a couple of minutes as she was gathering her books together before leaving for school. She was out the door in good time so she could talk with teachers before class. She was determined to make up for the time she missed yesterday. Actually, she missed only one class, but it was her Advanced Placement English class. I am mildly ambitious for her there.

Just mildly. Some of the things they do in that class are exciting. For example, they reverse engineer professional revisions. They take competent though hardly outstanding bits of literary prose and pull out "special" words that may have been generated during the revision process by the writer. They try to guess what the common garden variety diction of the previous draft would have been. In this way the students are alerted to the world of reading vocabulary, for there are a pile of words we read but don't produce -- like arabesque, I remember arabesque. Tara knew the word from the ballet she took, but in the description of moldings? She probably had never paid attention to moldings before.

The chair she sat in like a burnished throne

I put on the coffee and opened the window to bring the temperature in the apartment down from 23 to 22 or 21. I made my bed. I walked the monthly bank statement that came yesterday to the three-hole punch that lives on top of the old gray filing cabinet at the other end of the living room. Then I brought it back and filed it in the appropriate gray binder, which lives on a shelf beneath the CD player at this end of the room. My apartment is neat enough but, the way I have the furntiture arranged, manoeuvring from one end to the other constitutes significant exercise—for somebody my age anyway.

From the bank statement I note that last month my expenses totalled a little less than $4,000. That includes the $736 Peter and his mother get. About the same amount—about $4000 I mean--came in during the month. It would be great if, now that government pensions are flowing for me, that were going to be the typical situation. I could live off investment income without touching principle. I had not thought that was going to be possible until the kids were through university.

It is not likely to be the typical situation however.

Looking more closely at the bank statement, I see two instalments of the old age security pension have been entered -- one right at the beginning of the period and the other right at the end. That inflates my income for the month by $516. But if we are only running an annual deficit of $6,000 we are in good shape! That's just a hundred bank shares. I got five thousand.

In conclusion, I can scrape along at the bottom of the class to which I was born for another ten years at least.

Amen.