Beauty is such a relative thing ...

I’m a solitary creature and I jealously guard my free time. I prefer to spend it alone but can, on occasion, be coerced into spending it socializing with others … but not often … and not today … so again today I reveled in a lunch hour spent in the peace and quiet of my own good company. It’s a “good” lunch that gets thrust at me from a drive-thru window, but once in a while it’s worth dislodging my fanny from the driver’s seat to get out and get that “great” lunch, that little something that will just hit the spot. Today that little something was Subway’s 6” tuna and a lemonade. To steal a line from Campbell’s, “mmmm, mmmm, good”. What is about those shreds of fish (because who knows if there’s any real tuna in there at all) smashed into a paste with mayonnaise and bits of pickle that is so deliciously satisfying? My friends: me, myself and I, parked in our favorite clandestine hiding spot in a doctor’s office parking lot adjacent to an apartment complex. It’s so close to my work that if I let go a big tuna burp from it the people at work would smell it, lol. There’s a handful of wonderfully generous shade trees there … real trees, not Arizona’s typical Dr. Seuss trees and I parked under them with my tuna treat and got lost for an hour in a really good book. Somewhere in a nearby apartment someone was cooking something deliciously pungent, the sounds of a fussy toddler and the soothing cluck-cluck of its mom blew softly down from an upper floor and a grey tabby cruised by on the cinder block wall in front of me. Its fearless demeanor reminded me of my Motown and so earned him the last inch or so of my tuna sandwich and, in the delivery, netted me a little dose of sunshine.

I think it’s when you’re alone that the distinct beauty in ordinary things can be most profoundly felt.

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