Synergy and Discord in a Day’s Time

There are times you walk around this city and everything just falls in line.

The synergy of steps and time line up in perfect harmony.

You don’t bump into people.

You see friends you want to see.

You don’t see people you’d rather not see.

And no unforeseen problems arise.

One’s timing on a day like that is just impeccable, almost without trying.

I’ve had days like that in the old Boston years ago when things moved slower. Likewise, I’ve had just such days in the new Boston where things move so much faster and I struggle to keep up, but here and there I catch a few days on the upswing.

I had one of those days on Sunday.

I began to notice as I walked to the Back Bay in the morning that I was hitting every walk signal at the crosswalk. I blew through three key intersections and never slowed down my gait.

As I weaved in and out of the masses, everyone broke in the opposite direction like a well-practiced run up the middle in a football game. It felt good. I invested sometime in the Bruins game, painstakingly hoping the B’s would pull it out.

It didn’t look like they would, but they forced overtime, and in the extra period snatched a win.

Coincidentally, I didn’t watch the Patriots game on Sunday as I had work to do, so I missed out on the biggest bummer of the football season so far.

I count that as a win for my day.

Later I went to the market, and as I walked through the door the cashier was fumbling some avocadoes.

One fell off the counter.

There I was, and in one fell swoop snatched it out of its mid-air descent and tossed it right back at her.

She caught it.

To cap things off, as I stood in line for a sang-wich, I struck up a conversation with the other fella there next to me.

Same last name.

That doesn’t happen without something workin’ for ya.

But things have a way of evening out in the big city.

The next day was all wrong, disjointed and out of sync.

Right off the bat on Monday, two flat tires on the vehicle. Slashed, no doubt.

I got news that a friend was back in the hospital with pneumonia, and then my furnace started acting up.

No quarter.

Things hit a head in the wrong direction late that night when I went for a news-time snack.

I opened the fridge, and a glass bowl of beans that had been precariously perched on the egg shelf came crashing to the floor in the darkness of the kitchen at 11 p.m.

My reaction in stopping it resulted in a can of Readi-Whip (with lost cap, of course) getting lodged against a gallon of cider left over from Thanksgiving. It discharged its contents with gusto straight out of the fridge as I scrambled to stop it and not step on the glass shards at my feet.

Naturally the cider came crashing out too, landing on the floor and slowly beginning to seep out of its milk-jug top.

I decided the best approach for cleaning up that catastrophe was to start with a spoon, and so in the dark of the kitchen I grabbed a large spoon and went back to the scene of the crime…at which point I slipped on the bean juice and went down.

That’s when the light went on.

My wife observed me laid out on my side like Hugh Heffner in my bathrobe and jockey shorts, grasping a spoon that had dipped into a heaping helping of baked beans, glass chunks and whipped cream.

I had also grabbed the jug of cider in the midst of my fall, so as it appeared I was in the midst of some shameful, double-fisted late night gluttony.

It was perfect discord.

“Good Lord, don’t you think you’re too old for that?” she said. “Just come to bed.”

“Yes dear” was all I could muster back.

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