The I walked down down Columbus Avenue the other day and passed a young woman talking on the phone just as she was saying loud and clear there is a reason

for everything and it sticks with me, rationalism, proclaimed publicly.

I wish I'd stopped and asked her for some context.

She seemed to be one of those bold women you could engage in a colloquy, unlike

other women who shrink at you even saying good morning as you hold the elevator door for them.

New York women tend to be bold. Minnesota women faint of heart and the man would do well to avoid eye contact with them

although in situations of mutual suffering for example the long line at airport security at 6 a.m.

Some sweet conversation with strangers does occur.

I lead a small life, I think small thoughts, I read a long essay by a former colleague explaining how comedy works and I am awestruck.

I study the workings of a coffee maker.

I take my meds from a handy container with two little

compartments for each day, one for morning, one for evening. Someone thought of this. An older person on a regimen of pills probably, maybe a

postal clerk like my dad who sorted mail into racks of little boxes. And what if he had invented the

meadow rack? We'd maybe have moved from North Minneapolis to a horse farm called

Meadocroft and I'd have competed in equestrian events instead of reading novels by flashlight. I would have

gained great confidence to go into venture capitalism and become a king of crypto and wound up doing time for fraud.

I said and eat my breakfast waffles, the kind that come frozen in a box and you toast them

and a toaster a great invention not as great as the drug Levatoracotam which has guarded me against brain seizures that might have

left me unable to figure out how to put the waffles into the toaster slots but nonetheless an advance for those of us who are

counting our blessings. Other writers deal with the national debt, the threat of autocracy, man's inhumanity to man,

and I eat my waffle, and remember what we did before this modern wonder came along.

In my parents house waffles took time so they were saved for Saturday morning. You had to locate the

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