Probably the last trip up Cougar Mountain for the year. Rained from start to finish, mud in the car now, the smell of wet dog. The trail a mash-up of leaves all brown and yellow, the maples are the last ones to fall.

I didn’t work Black Friday, didn’t shop. Went to the grocery store for a coffee, sat looking outside. The gray the color of cheerless snow when it’s got nothing to reflect off of, has been hanging around too long. Took a Vicodin Loren gave me and went back to the store Saturday, wandered the electronics, stood there like bait for the salesclerks looking at the smartTV’s, now $200. But no one came, so I wandered off to the books and clothes they had out on the tables. And when I got home I called down for Dawn (how did she feel about an early Christmas present?)—and she tried it on and liked it, and Lily smiled, we hugged—and then I went down in the den with a beer to read and nap but did neither, and upstairs the kids sang and made noise, and by 4 it was time to go out again for dinner—this time Dawn got a normal table (not one of the ones on a platform in the window where you have to take your shoes off), and afterwards they had to go to the Ulta Beauty shop for mirrors and hair product, so I went to the home goods store for a new tablecloth—and when we came home we all split up with our things and privately reconciled them, then met back in the living room to start a movie.

But it was so good on my back on the sofa with the cat and the last of the wine I didn’t want to get up, though Charlotte was thrusting her head and arms in each of our personal spaces including the cat’s, and only laughed at me when I said we’re trying to relax, just continued shifting her body from side to side, staring…challenging.

I went to bed without saying goodnight which I often did: it seemed there’d been some resurgence in their energy levels, though it was around 10. I got up to close the bedroom doors (the hallway light was still on) and tried either the Classical program or the Big Band one they have on Saturdays but the reception was bad and the CD in the disc player wouldn’t engage, it only squealed, and I slipped off to a faraway place, and when I awoke in the morning I felt some sense of loss I couldn’t name, the same that comes around from time to time but doesn’t announce itself though it knows where to find me, it knows where I stay.

Categories: Memoir, musings, prose

Tags: Black Friday, existentialism, mid-life crisis, pacific northwest, parenting, stream-of-consciousness, William Pearse writer