Oxcart Tavern

I had another little weird skin thing removed from my arm. I delivered supplies to the local shelter. I spent another day in the muck helping my friends dig out, and also recovering (but sadly, not rescuing) my own precious items that drowned in their basement in the flood. I got home, carried my muddy silty icky stuff into the house, I got my own muddy silty icky self into the shower. I was about to sit down and read something, feeling a little bad that I had no candy and would not be a candy-distributing house, when I got the call that friends were meeting for a burger and a beer at the Oxcart Tavern, where I've been meaning to go but hadn't yet had a chance.

So I got dressed and went out through the roving bands of skeletons and train engineers and Dorothy. (There were a lot of Dorothy costumes.) I saw more downed trees I hadn't seen yet—one right through a car—and I walked past the block where Jessie and Jacob got killed, and I tried to balance out the truths of their deaths with kids out trick-or-treating, and also all the other destruction from this hurricane, not to mention from global warming in general, and was thinking about all this as I came to the corner where my friends were gathering, and saw even more friends gathering as well. The wait was very long (over an hour I think) to get a table, and I felt no impatience. We finally sat, and we ordered drinks and appetizers and meals, and we talked and drank laughed and tried on each others' glasses and had just a strangely normal time of it. Truly delightful.

By the time our food arrived, I had to pack it up and take it for dinner the next night. Again, I did not feel impatient about that. I just took it home and put it in the fridge, and got myself to bed, because I had to get up very early the next day to fill my car with friends and co-workers and drive into work in Manhattan.  This might be glaringly obvious, but it's so important to keep things in perspective in these times. Like, maybe you've noticed that this post is a day late. Well, I was out of internet from Monday til this morning. And again, I was not impatient about that. It barely even registers on the list of ways people are affected this time. I hope we can all continue to keep these things in perspective. And as it happens, keeping things in perspective is one way to come closer to feeling joy.