The One Huffing Mute

 

The call ended at 6:00AM.  The sun was already up.  And then you start slicing up the time you have before you.  If you want meditate for thirty-minutes, you’d still have time to dart out for an early morning bike ride and be back fifty minutes later, with just enough time to grab a cup of coffee and drive the little one off to school.  Usually a quick view at the computer screen ruins such a plan.  One email leads to another four and then you may as well look at the front page of the New York Times.  It is a new day, after all.  And the time is then gone, like the reheated coffee you just finished.  This morning, I stuck to the plan. 

 

The bike ride is so still, at that hour of the morning.  Rather than simply enjoy the serenity, I pause at the hour of seven and pull my Pixel 5 from my pocket and press the link that’s there waiting for the company-wide for one of my clients.  A call where it’s important to be seen and not heard, I’ve justified the morning’s ride with the thought that I can listen as I go.  Hung there in the waiting room I ride through the morning quiet of New Paltz.  Beyond a few cars on Main St., there is no one to be seen. 

 

The phone is in my left hand as I bike.  I don’t want to passively leave it in my breast pocket as I might wind up in a room with fifty people and not be on mute.  “I believe John is the one huffing.  Mute him.”  At North Front St. I’m still ‘waiting for the host.’  Nothing has changed as I ride around the roots that have pushed up and disfigured the trail at Broadhead Avenue.  Ten minutes into when it was supposed to have started by Mulberry Street, I begin to suspect I’ve got the time wrong.  Still, I bike along dutifully with the phone in my hand passed Huguenot Street, all the way out to the Wallkill River where I’ve determined to write the host to clarify, that I’d been waiting at the door for the last fifteen minutes. 

And with that, I put the phone where it belongs, in my pocket and consider the swift current of the river, days after the rain and the stillness of the morning.  Two Canadian geese are moving with the current, one hundred yards downstream.  My Seek app can’t confirm what they are but then I notice that there are another couple down below; “Canadian geese.”  Upstream there is a mallard moving against the current.  It’s too far for me to properly identify and so I just watch it move for a while.  And then I pedal back home and drive my little one off to school. 

 

 

 

Wednesday, 05/12/21