Mind blowing truths

To date I have done a good job leaning into this vacation thing. I haven't been looking at the markets at all during the day. For the most part I am not reading work email. I am not hassling Mary about how slowly she gets ready to leave wherever we are staying.

For her part, Mary has been saying nothing about my having bacon or sausage every morning. Or, for that matter, when I have had both. 

For example, that glorious morning a few days back in Northport when I -- having preceded her out of bed (as is normal) -- had made my way out to Wentworth's on Rte 1 to peruse their breakfast fare, which I had noticed the day before when picking up orange juice. The stove at our AirBnb turned out not to work so we were on our own for breakfast, you see. So I get up there and look in the warming ovens to see what sorts of goodies they had and there were little bacon, egg and cheeses on english muffins, a good start. But out of the corner of my eye I saw a familiar disc shape, only topped with yellow flaked with pink rather red, white and various other colors. Could it be? My mind whirred as it processed what was before it. Yes! It was indeed..... breakfast pizza! A momentous find, topped with not bacon or sausage but both bacon and sausage. I hesitated only momentarily before grabbing a piece and also a sandwich for Mary because I knew this would be a lot for her.

So I got back to her place and cut her off a piece of my pizza to have with her sandwich. She looked it over carefully and asked about the dark brown spots: "is this mushroom?" Because, you see, she was a bit overwhelmed. No, I explained, it was sausage, because the pizza was topped with both bacon and sausage. She nodded slowly, taking it in.

It reminded me of a time in the fall of '88. I was at Bowdoin being the lead of Kathy Lahti's 75h anniversary production of Vladimir Mayakovsky: A Tragedy. I was in the basement of the building where the Russian Department had its office, and a student was sitting alone watching Apocalypse Now. He sat there, slack-jawed, trying to process what he was seeing on screen. "Look" he said to me, "they are both drinking and smoking pot at the same time." This was a lot for him to take in, so I calmly said that I thought he was right.