Six in One, Half Dozen in the Other

I throw up my hands and give thanks to the man who picked this watermelon. I give thanks to the driver who delivered this. I give thanks to the owner who witnessed this. I do so because sometimes my purism blocks me from joy. Sometimes my purism stops me from buying a watermelon from Wal-Mart. And would I have let this happen those days before, this chilled joy of now would not be mine. We do the best we can in this life.

My eighty-five-year old friend said, “Does any giving man need fine tuning?” He also told me to look up the significance of green in the psychic world. This after my telling him the joy of finding a box of pens once thought lost, how I bought forty instead of four to save on shipping over Christmas. How I gave some as gifts. How writing feels different with this color. How Neruda wrote this way. I guess I told him a lot about these pens.

And one of the things I like, especially, is when he calls me old man.

I like opposites. I like juxtaposition. I’d like my house to be red that it might accentuate all the green. 

I found over a dozen eggs today. Six or eight just in time. And six or eight too late. Sometimes I see what is cute, and sometimes I see nature for what it is. For that first batch of eggs sit on my kitchen table. The second in the belly of a black hen who gobbled up the shells and embryos after my weed whacker hit them. 

I wonder about what M. Scott Peck said of the times in our lives where we just barely missed being hit by a car. I think of spinning in snow and ice and how the car stopped sliding less than a foot from a fifty-foot drop off. I consider the time the Australians stopped the Irish from throwing me off a boat on the Tonle Sap River in Cambodia. Peck would argue that this is beyond coincidence.

If this be the case, what might he say about the two collections of eggs. And how might the ones I saved taste. If that black hen could speak I would know without needing to try.