apples and beers and coffees

and so it goes, this day without any peers, nor precedents. one day is totally unlike another. m is at home with me this morning , which is an unexpected little joy and diversion as she is usuall at work, far off in the land of telephone calls and i am sitting here trying to accomplish that which is made all the harder by the sound of my own thoughts buzzing around like a shit house fly in the lampshade of my head. but today, i have a diversion and a good one at that. m is here, because the telephone guy is hooking up the cable line for the line that, like a magic djinni, will pop in here and allow her to perform the work from home with only the cats and occasionally, when schedule allows, me as a distraction. bus driving is falling into a pleasant rut, a line run to nyc every day, smurf asking me to go to hoboken after a hearty, hello, young man! how are you?! i never tire of being called young man, which i consider to be a funny, but ironic misnomer. i am a young man, comparatively, but am i? its all in the mind and your age, as groucho marx once said, a man is only as old as the woman he feels. m comes in and i am a younger man. i remember the day that i realised that i was as old as my old man (another good, but not so apt phrasing when it comes to my dad, for he never seemed old...) when he bore me and brought me into this world. i was 27 and my dad was to be 54. i was his age when he had me and we seemed worlds apart and yet not so very far as our geneology and pedigrees would allow. i WAS him and he was me on that day and in so many ways our not at all parallel paths finally intersected in a nicely straight facts sort of way that emphasised the places that we had come from. it had been growing into me and did over those last five years how very much i look like him, think like him, laugh like him, drink the same beer and that the apple really hasn't fallen far from the tree. when i was in grade school, i read this poster that was hanging on the wall of our classroom, a quote by mark twain, 'when i was a boy of fourteen, my father was so ignorant I could hardly stand to have the old man around. but when i got to be twenty-one, i was astonished at how much the old man had learned in seven years.' i did not fully understand that until much later, but is it any wonder that my dad loved twain too?