Angle of Repose - Wallace Stegner [100]
Habit is my true, my wedded wife. Each morning, after I have stretched out the worst of the aches and taken the first aspirins, I hoist myself up by the bedpost and ease into the chair, carefully, fearful of the knock or jar that may start me out in pain. I roll to the lift and sink downstairs. On the radio news, while the percolator bubbles toward its red-light stop, I hear about the child killed by wild dogs in San Jose, the hundred pounds of marijuana seized in North Beach, the school board meeting broken up by blacks in Daly City, the wife shot by her husband after a quarrel in an Oakland bar, the latest university riot, the Vietnam score. I follow by traffic-alert helicopter the state of the traffic on the Waldo Grade, the Bay Bridge, the Bayshore, the Alemany Interchange. From the weather-alert man I learn that the day (again) will be fair, with patches of morning fog near the coast, winds from the northwest 5 to 15 miles per hour, temperatures 65 to 70 in San Francisco, 80 to 85 in Santa Rosa, 85 to 90 in San Jose. That means 90 to 95 up here. I see that as I eat it is 67 in the dark, shabby old kitchen, and I hitch over my shoulders the sweater that Ada keeps hung on the back of my chair.
Breakfast is invariable-Special K cereal and milk, a Danish roll that is less trouble than toast, a mug of coffee, and last of all, since I can’t take acids on an empty stomach, a glass of orange juice.
At seven in the morning it is quiet in the house, quiet in the yard, quiet across the pine hills. The freeway is a murmur hardly louder than the chiming hum that millions of pine needles make in a little wind. I roll to the door and out onto the porch that Grandmother referred to as the piazza. Ed has brought the rose garden in the courtyard back, though it isn’t what it was in my grandfather’s time. It, with the mown lawn and the pines beyond, stares back at me like an old photograph caught between the ticks of time. It all looks as it looked in my boyhood, when I was back from school for the summer. My eyes have not changed, the St. Paul’s boy is still there. I feel sorry for him, imprisoned in nearly sixty years of living, chained to a chair, caged in a maimed and petrified body. For an instant the familiar grounds glare and tremble, the prisoner rages at his bars. It would be easy to call it quits.
Occasionally I have these moments, not often. There is nothing to do but sit still until they pass. Tantrums and passions I don’t need, endurance is what I need. I have found that it is even possible to take a certain pleasure out of submission to necessity. That have I borne, this can I bear also.
Behind the pines the sun is a shifting dazzle. It breaks through and glitters along the wet grass. Golden-crowned sparrows are hopping and pecking among the roses, a robin cocks his head to the underground noise of a worm out on the lawn, a pine top shakes to the impetuous landing of a jay. Off on the freeway I hear a diesel coming, shifting down as the hill steepens. Each gear is a lower tone, heavier and more laboring. Doppler Effect? Not quite. But I like the sound of these things better when they are shifting upward through their web of gears, not shifting down. Shifting down, they remind me too much of myself.
In the fresh air I light my first cigar of the day, and break the match before I drop it. My chair is a nest of cloth and paper at least as flammable as the California roadside. Then I wheel in, leaving the door open for Ada, and hitch onto the lift and float up into the airier, brighter upper hall. As I detach myself and turn, I can see the study door and the windows in line with it, the pines stirring beyond the windows, the desk waiting with its piles of books and folders of papers and photographs–home of a kind, life of a kind, purpose of a kind.
Do werewolves feel this sense of safety as they creep back just at dawn into some borrowed body?
My mornings are peacefully my own, except for a little conversation-break with Ada when she comes up to make my bed and do up my dishes and get my lunch. If the Giants are on the road, I eat on the porch, listening to the game on the radio. After lunch I lie down for a half hour, more for the change of position than because I need a nap. At any time between one and one thirty