Enumerating a few items of recent occurrence that highlight just how the days go by and the pendulum swings from bad to good, terrible, not-so-terrible, goshawful, miserable, heartening then disheartening... Shall I go on?
Bitter is spending five more workdays at something you'd rather not be doing for eight hours a day. Sweet is the paycheck that lets you replace the baloney skins on your car with tires that actually have tread so you're not killed in a fiery end over end crash. If you gotta drive to work every day, you might as well be able to head out at the last possible second and not worry that your car will leave the road rounding the 40 mph turn at 55, right?
Bitter is dropping your car off three hours ago and not finding the tires on the car when you come back to the garage. Sweet is finding new Star Trek miniature ships at Toys'R'Us while you were killing time waiting for the tires to be put on your car. And suh-weet is flying the teeny USS Enterprise into Burger King for a plain Whopper and raspberry iced tea.
Bitter is forgetting whatever happened to your favorite long-tailed college jersey, not that it would actually fit you anymore, there oughta be pictures of it here somewhere. Sweet is finding a nugget of monkey gold in a very unexpected place and spending a few moments in pleasant reverie of the seemingly endless days of childhood scouring the back roads for veins of the stuff. Man, my brother, my cousins and I used to spend days, I mean, literally, days in the summertime walking along the side of the road back in Smith Hollow and the roads of the river hills at Pequea, bent like little old men, watching for a glint of sun on those worthless metallic chips. Every so often somebody would find a real monster chunk- big like a thumbnail! -and we'd all dance around likelittle madmen, yapping like Indians, holding it to the sky as if we'd found a real gold bonanza.
We kids used to ride up the road from my cousins' place- their folks rented a big old farm property with a barn and four or five outbuildings inc. a pig sty and chicken coop. I can't tell you how many times the chicken coop became the jail or the homestead on the range for cowboy play. The pig pen was great because you could climb from one stall to the next, round about the little enclosure and over the gates, swell for tag or hide and seek. But nothing compared to the barn with it's hayloft and horse stalls. In one corner of the hayloft was a little trap door of sorts you could slide down into the bottom section. Ladders up the the roof beams and then jump into the hay, sometimes scattering rats or mice. It was dusty and musty and the sunlight filtered through the slats in the walls like it sometimes breaks through clouds and gives you such an impression of majesty and it's just breathtaking when you stop to think about it. -in the back of my uncle's pickup, today you'd get a ticket for even thinking about doing it. But we'd all climb aboard and stand up to the back of the cab and either pretend to fly over the roof or spit into the wind to see who'd get hit and who'd duck fast enough to avoid the backwash. And we'd sing songs we all knew- Johnny Horton's The Battle Of New Orleans was a big favorite, we were pretty rustic lads, after all -and get excited when there was shooting somewhere over the hill, wondering who was shoot-gunnin' at what... or who. No, it wasn't that much like Deliverance!
