The lovely ordinary

Tonight I made Boozy Baked French Toast, which is not as perilous as it sounds, because the alcohol will bake off in the morning when it is put into the oven.  It has in it Bailey’s Irish Cream and Frangelico, as well as cinnamon.  It is a cool evening for August 1. It has been this way all summer. The nights are as crisp as fall, although the days sometimes warm into the 80s.  Just now there are a few scattered clouds around the setting sun; their edges turning golden.  I think about how this night will never come again; no night will ever be exactly as this. I was reading an entry earlier in The Journals of Thomas Merton, Volume Three. The entry was dated October, 30, 1952 and he described it thus: “Yesterday we were raking leaves in the front avenue and burning them—nice quiet work under the sunlit trees. Cars came slowly through the smoke.” It gave to me such a sense of that long ago day, of the October coolness, the burning leaves,  the cars proceeding carefully through the hazy fragrant avenue. Such a simple description, so evocative. It brought back to me the feel of a thousand October nights, and a sense of those long ago people of Merton’s October, most of them gone now, I would think.  I recall walking out of my high school into an October day that I immediately named “a blue and gold day” for those were its colors. I still remember it, the sun streaming down on 24^th street and on the people and the buses and the cars and the leaves. We are distracted from the loveliness of ordinariness. We have been primed to seek “larger than life” moments—but what is larger than life than this? The sun is setting; I have made a breakfast of bread and milk for the morning, my dog is lying by the front door, Geoff is reading on the steps above me, for I am sitting on the stairway in order to be near the west window.  It is quiet. The sky is rose.  And it is always all that we have…this moment, and it is enough.

Tagged as: Boozy Baked French Toast, Thomas Merton