Put Together Guy with Grandmom (Ignore the Beer)
When I wake up on this particular Saturday morning, I realize with dawning awareness that I don’t feel terrible.
The winter can be a brutal time of year in Prague. It’s been ten below (Celsius) for the last week. In the last two weeks there’s been an alternating cycle of snow, rain, sleet, hail, and slush, this all leads to a road/tundra that adds time to any walk or commute.
And this is at the tail end of three months of unrelenting dark and short days that advocate a daily quota of anxiety. There are times in the long nights of December and the bleak, joyless days of January when an otherwise content, responsible adult can feel twinges of despair and pity.
Despite it all, I don’t feel bad. The days aren’t turning into night at 4 p.m. anymore, now it’s a more respectable 5ish. Also, things are looking up.
Now that the semester is over, it’s the testing period, which means a month of administration and very little teaching. More importantly, I am now looking back at a productive (though exhausting) semester that is both over, and allow me to enjoy a deserved period of relative relaxation.
This reward for hard work is something I have come to cherish as I’ve grown older. For yeas at university I did very little schoolwork, preferring instead to spend my nights out partying rather than in studying. So when Friday rolled around and my classmates were enjoying a well-earned night of R&R, I was (not really) enjoying just another night out.
I feel today like, as Burke puts it, a ‘put together guy.’ I suppose this means that in most areas of my life I am responsible and together. Though I am a man in his forties who lives alone, my flat is clean (yep, even the bathroom and shower). I enjoy creative cooking, healthy eating, and I keep myself fit with a good exercise regimen. I am a professional with professional friends, write and publish things. Hell, I even defrost my freezer and clean my oven.
So as I wander into my kitchen and start coffee, I realize with a horror-stricken gasp that I have no eggs. I nearly weep. While I normally eat a grapefruit and oatmeal for breakfast, this is Saturday, the day I splurge and have a cheese omelette, sausage, and rolls. And I scan through my fridge to see that I have bought everything for my Saturday breakfast but eggs. There is cheese, sausage, butter, and rolls. No eggs.
It is clear: I have to go to the grocery store. I put on my shoes and hat, and I sigh.
I live in a section of Prague called Podolí, which is green, quiet, on the river, near Vyšehrad (the original castle of Prague), and just a 30-minute walk to the city center. My section of town has a swimming pool, a few nice pubs, and very little tourist traffic.
That said, I live at the top of one hill and at the base of another. If I ever have children this is going to make for melodramatic complaint gold. There’s nothing on the elevation of my building besides a wooded area, a bunch of garbage cans, and a hidden dwelling of feral cats dedicated to street fighting and singing lonely feline ballads in the middle of the night.
To get to a grocery store is a 30-minute walk (round trip), a thing I never really minded. But still, when it’s 8 a.m. and you just need a couple of eggs, a grocery store just downstairs would be sweet. Thirty minutes of walking is not what I want to do when I’m hungry, it’s 10 below zero, and Podolí is an ice tundra. I force myself to look forward to the joy and comfort I will feel when I get back home and can just eat, drink, and lie prone while watching a dumb sitcom. And then I leave.
I make lemonade by considering how a brisk morning walk will work up my appetite and rack up the steps on my Fitbit. It is not lost on me that a positive attitude is more evidence of my put togetherness.
I am staring at the stacks of egg cartons when the grocery store employee rides by on her cleaning Zamboni. When the floor is thoroughly clean, I reach out to check some eggs, lifting the flap up to expose them to scrutiny. It’s then, of course, that I upend the carton and decorate the floor that the Zamboni woman cleaned roughly ten seconds ago with twelve egg yolks and their shattered shells.
What does a put together guy do when he’s just broken twelve eggs on the clean floor of a grocery store?
He runs away and hides.
And that’s just what I do, but first I need eggs. I immediately grab another carton and make a B line for the check out. Mercifully, nobody is in line and the cashier is leaning on an elbow praying to a god she doesn’t believe in that the rest of her potential customers will spontaneously combust so she can go home.
There’s an old woman moseying towards the register but I outflank her in the toilet paper aisle and make it there first. I ignore the fact that if the old woman had gotten in front of me, I might have body checked her into the wine rack. The cashier blinks, yawns, and stands erect. I impatiently hold my money out wondering when the quiet room will be pierced by the terrorized shrieking of the Zamboni woman. There’s a glitch with the register and I let slip a ‘do prdele!’ Translation: ah shit!
The cashier glares at me in a what’s your problem, bub? kind of way. The way you might glare shamefully at a grown man who curses because his grocery store transaction took twenty seconds and not ten seconds. But I don’t have the time to worry about it. I pay with a hundred Koruna bill, quell the urge to tell the woman just to keep the change, and sprint through the front door Heisman-carrying a carton of eggs and stuffing my change into my pocket.
I begin breathing again as I reach my street. My heart palpitations slow and I recover in time to run up the five flights to my flat. I get inside and peer out the windows. The cat gives me the Feline Egyptian Asshole greeting. A police car drives by and I rehearse my confession in Czech. Finally, as the alley cats begin a brawl, it becomes clear I’ve gotten away with my infraction.
My only hope for salvation is to find a lesson in it all, which I do while eating an omelet and binge watching Frasier.
No matter how put together you feel, there’s always room to grow. And always pick up eggs to check them.
