On the Sixth Day of 2025. . .

. . .I was on that meditation cushion at 7:45, not out of some overzealous enthusiasm for an early start, but because I had a Telehealth appointment at 8:30. My doctor has covid, so the in-person appointment was moved to the computer. He seemed healthy, his usual self, in the zoom meeting, but the protocol says he has to stay out of the office until Thursday. Okay, no problem. I was happy not to have to drive 20 minutes down the road. It saved me some more time, and it spared me having to stand on the doctor’s office scale, which always shows me about ten pounds heavier than I actually am, and I missed the double blood pressure readings, one from the nurse and another by the doctor. I’m good. I can take my blood pressure at home, which I tried to do before the appointment, but the batteries were dead, and then I switched out the batteries, and the machine was glitchy, so I found myself suddenly agitated, and I took my blood pressure again, and it was high. My doctor has said before, never take your blood pressure when you are agitated or angry. And today, he said, don’t take it spontaneously–you know, you look over, see the machine, and think, hey, let’s take my blood pressure now. Nope, the best time of all would have been directly after meditation, but alas, that ship has sailed. Now I gotta keep a record for a week, twice a day, and report my findings. Determine whether or not I need a new cocktail of pills.

I’m writing in this moment these words you see on the screen. Hopefully I can read some more in Moon Unit’s memoir later on, but today is a special day and all bets are off for a successful and consistent morning routine, because my son flies into Portland this morning for a brief visit before he has to go back down to Riverside, California to continue the season as a snare drummer for Pulse Percussion. We are experiencing the empty nest, as our son, instead of enrolling in his freshman year of college, is spending his first post high school year drumming with the best indoor percussion outfit in the nation, maybe in the world. We are very excited for him, but miss him being around. His mom misses their almost daily outings. I miss talking with him about music and legos. I miss, even though I’m rarely a part of it, listening to my son and his mother talk shop about drum line rehearsals and marching technicalities. I am just so grateful that my boy has become such a highly skilled, competent, and decent human being. I am also grateful he’s our only kid. I marvel at people who have more than one child. More than two seems unfathomable to me. I know that, because we have only one, we have invested all that we can into supporting his endeavors, and he’s had these experiences that neither of his parents could have ever dreamed of having. If we had had another kid, or two, it seems hard to imagine that we would be even remotely able to support all three of these humans in the same way that we have supported our single drummer boy. I don’t know how people do it, raising so many humans. We have just the one, and he’s a good one. I’m so grateful we did not push our luck. We waited about as long as one could possibly wait to start a family, so late, in fact, that trying for another would have indeed been pushing our luck, at least biologically speaking, and to have started earlier, I can tell you, because hindsight, as they say, is 20/20, would have been a disaster. In a few moments René and I will pile into the truck to go pick him up from the airport. I’m a happy dad.

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After nearly missing his connecting flight and upon returning to Portland, our boy is hungry, so we take him for a breakfast burrito to-go from his favorite neighborhood taqueria. Unable as we were to be together for the holidays, we give him his stocking stuffers from Christmas. His aunt has gifted him a personalized ornament and some generous sum of money, I give him some hat swag from the Project MA band, and his mom gives him $10 or $15 dollars worth of lottery tickets, an extremely rare gambling occurrence in our household. We’ve been together, in the car and at the dining room table, for all of about 45 minutes, he’s scratching away at his cards, and it appears that our son has won the lottery. I write this next short installment as my wife and son, in disbelief, sure that they have misunderstood the rules of the game, drive out to confirm whether or not my son is now relatively wealthy. It only takes a short jaunt to the point of purchase to find out he’s won a whopping $5 prize.

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In the rest of the afternoon, as my son takes off in the mini-cooper to go drum with a fellow drummer, the dogs get a walk, I get a nap, I prepare for the first haircut of 2025, and I look forward to an evening of musical merry making with my friend Curtis and company. So far, there’s been no reading of an actual book, and there’s been little time or effort spent reflecting on this most infamous of anniversaries. Maybe after music, this evening, I can read and reflect before tucking myself in.