My life, ain’t the high life, but it’s my life. . .

I’d like to say that after slugging it out for eight hours in court, following a full day of prep and a gruesome work-week, I came home, threw on some yoga pants, and did thirty serene minutes of floor work to regain my center.

I’d be lying, though.

I don’t own yoga pants.

When I finally got to my house, I stripped off my size 2 Ann Taylor black suit that felt more like a straightjacket by that time, and pulled on my Grandma Corley’s pink and flowered reversible housecoat and the fuzzy slippers that my son got me for Christmas.  With the dog eyeing me from her bed, I ate one of my favorite post trial meals, boiled new potatoes, followed by two hummus-laden rice cakes and a sliced banana with a tablespoon of sea salt caramel ice cream.

I wolfed all that down while binge-watching Chopped Junior re-runs and re-living every question asked by either lawyer between 9:00 a.m. and 4:20 p.m. when the commissioner indicated that it looked as though we would need one more day — “maybe two more, given how this is going” — and practically commanded us to clear our schedules and come back Friday.

“If you have a conflict, tell me where; I’ll call the judge.”

I have to hand it to him, he’s been on the bench less than a month; this is his first trial as a commissioner; and he deftly handled some pretty tense moments in a sad custody trial among grandparents, a father who did nothing much during the first six years of his son’s life, and a mother with a pocketful of woes and a sad look on her face sitting in the corner of the courtroom trying to look harmless.

With the pink side of the housecoat outwards,  I can see the label with my grandmother’s name.  I remember my grandmother wearing this as she sat in her easy chair at St. Ann’s Nursing home, in the year or so before her death.  With her regal head of grey hair; her precise, clipped speech; and her small frame held perfectly still; my Grandma Corley held court until her last hours.  My son liked me to wear the flower side out because I looked more like a Mom in flowers.  I like the other way, with the snaps done and the cream-colored bric-a-brac adorning the pockets.

I finished my meal with ten ounces of carrot juice, set the alarm, and trudged up the stairs.  It’s not much of a life, this life which I have carved here in the quiet of Brookside,  but it’s my life, and I’ve seen  lamentably worse existences, so I will keep my peace.

It’s the fourteenth day of the twenty-seventh month of My Year Without Complaining.  I’m going to vote tomorrow, and I will cast my vote for the candidate whom my son has convinced me is the only morally defensible choice.  I don’t know how the election will turn out but if the country goes to hell in a handbasket, crouching behind a stony wall of bigotry and xenophobia, the blame will not fall on my shoulders.

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