When I wake, I want to sleep again. A name ticks across the front of my mind. Jenny Agutter. Jenny Agutter. Agutter. Agutter. My hip starts to ache so I turn over. I fight to keep my eyes shut. When I finally open them, I stretch like a cat, back bent, arms outstretched. Coffee. Waffle. Couch. There’s a flimsy blanket that I drape over my legs. Again, I close my eyes.
“How is your morning so far,” asks the driver when I am on my way to work. I notice his skin. It is dark against the zip-up soccer sweatshirt he is wearing. Bright green with gold letters sewn down the arm. Brasil. His voice, his accent is beautiful. I tell him I do nothing with my mornings. I mention the Chinese and their calisthenics, the Japanese and their natural inclination for good habit formation.
“I just don’t have any discipline,” I say. He smiles, laughs.
“I tell you a story,” he says. “My wife, well, she passed three years ago...she get up every day and four kids...,” he turns his head slightly, “No stomach,” and, with a flat hand, he makes a motion over his body.
“Four kids and she stretching and doing her exercising...every day. And I ask, ‘why do you do this?’ She say, I grow up in the projects. I look across the street and I see those Chinese women getting up eeev-ery morning and they stretching and doing their exercises. I guessed they were doing something right’.” He laughed.
“She did it every day.” He laughed again. I wanted to ask how his wife died. He mentioned what he’d read that day. How the Mars rover has a 22 minute delay in communication, that it had to land, sight unseen. I relayed the announcement of the detection of gravitational waves thanks to the merging of two black holes.
When I get to the store, I grab a cup of coffee, unlock the door, place the vintage Brown Jordan chairs out front. It takes twelve trips. I settle into one of the Wegner wishbone chairs at the Eames table. By the time Nam arrives, my heart feels like it’s struggling to beat. She walks in like she owns the place, dropping her small, black purse on the walnut rocking chair, walking towards the bouquet of flowers at the front.
“It was my birthday,” I tell her.
“Ooohh. These are beautiful. Very beautiful. Very special.”
“I know,” I say. I got lost in them when they arrived. I’d never seen flowers like that. I loved the green, bulbous things that looked like hairy balls.
“I don’t do anything with my morning. I have no discipline,” I tell her.
“Oh. No good.” She shakes her head. Her hair looks freshly cut and curled. “You must get up, greet the day.” She turns her head back, raises her arms.
“You go for walk, greet the sun. Come home. Make one egg and avocado. Coffee home. Not out. This too expensive,” she says as she points to my cup of coffee. “Your eyes sparkle. You make yourself beautiful. You make good energy and then you follow it.” She looks up, raises her arms above her head, making a fluttering motion with her hands. She continues. “I walk in the mountains. You know this? I live on Tica. I walk. It is a good walk.”
She picks up a pen and turns the yellow pad towards her.
“It is like this.” She draws one arc, then another and another so it forms an S. “You get sun, shadow, sun,” she says. “It is good.”
“You walk? You walk with me?” she asks. When she smiles, she looks so Chinese, I think.
“You must form good habits,” she says.
Later, when I am talking to my mother on the phone, I ask her why the Japanese have such a natural discipline.
“Oh...it’s inculcated since they are babies...” She pauses. “Sorry, hon.”
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