Friday morning I took a friend for a medical procedure outside the city. It was dark and cold when I woke up at 5:00 and showered, and put on the clothes I laid out the night before. It was dark 20 minutes later when I locked my house and travelling to hers, lined up the truck with the early birds at traffic lights.
In darkness we drove to Steinbach’s hospital where I dropped her off. It was the still-cold morning after the season’s first hard frost. Cold fall mornings remind me of France, where I stayed a month the first time I left home. Dark mornings remind me of my dad who sometimes brought me along on trips when he was a trucker. (I remember one time when the headlights of his immense cab shone into the car opposite as he turned left at an intersection. The wide turn needed for the long trailer my dad was pulling startled the man whose eyes grew wide and he reflexively pushed back in his driver’s seat.)
I notice I'm getting older, a cliché statement that nonetheless belies the comfort of growing self-knowledge. In my twenties, this kind of small event was all exclamation-pointed single words: possibilities! exploration! In my thirties, it's full sentences with commas and periods: "Let's see what I could reasonably do in Steinbach between 7 and 10 on a Friday." In my twenties, expectations could be wildly unrealistic and took the form of over-scheduling or imagining I could easily wake-up with different preferences than the ones I usually had. In my late thirties, I'm a person who doesn't mind assembling a day of good habits in a different order. My twenties would have thought "Good habits? Why! Steinbach is a whole new place! Let’s eat a cinnamon bun for breakfast?" Now, avidity seems tiresome.
Therefore, I took my good habits to Steinbach. I walked 45 minutes, just like I would have done at home (minus the dog). I found a local spot and ordered toast and coffee and ate the toast with peanut butter, just like I would have done at home.
And you know what? The delight of this was so off-the-charts as to have prompted me to try to explain it here. I walked, like I like to walk at home and the surprise of the change of scenery, this one little variable, had twice the effect on my happiness as having aimed for something more extraordinary. And that toast and coffee? Its simplicity afforded me double the satisfaction for having checked off a healthy breakfast than the passing satisfaction of having picked something deliciously sweeter. It buoyed the morning's peregrinations, like a calm reassurance.
The frost-tinged grass sparkled with a million diamond rainbows under the freshly rising sun. The small forest on either side of the paved pathway was one tableau after another of fall still-lifes.
Breakfast provided a change of scene and a window on a different view, brown wood chairs that have backs that curve around into armrests, kitchen noises and chatter you can eavesdrop on. An older local man complimented my parallel park that he'd observed from the window. I browsed the small grocery store and bakery and picked cranberry sauce for Thanksgiving and canned tomatoes for that night's soup.
All of this could have been a series of pictures, titled, “my morning in Steinbach”, but I don't know how I could have fit on my phone that funny fifteen minutes when I parked in the sun behind the local thrift store and bided the time to its opening by reading the first 21 pages of the French novel my friend loaned me, wherein the protagonist is left her Grandmother's mysterious dresser containing ten painted drawers, all stuffed with locked-up lifetime souvenirs. Nothing can quite prime you for hoping for a lucky find at a second-hand store, but when I looked up from my book, a line had formed and was continuing to form of locals; a man with no hair but a long gray beard and his wife in a motorized wheel-chair, and two women with their toddler, and an old lady with a cloth bag, all having woken up that morning, and put on their pants and holding a similar hope.
But the only thing I trusted my phone to capture, (for the diamonds on the grass or the fall tableaux in the crisp air would have killed its frail battery-life) was the name and look of a pastry I'd never heard of before.
Happiness is ordinary.