Having finished mowing the lawn, I walked into the kitchen with the hopes of constructing a towering sandwich reminiscent of those in the Sunday paper cartoon strip. Using a few loaves of bread to establish a proper base, I began to claw my way through the pantry. I stacked whatever I could. Deli meat, garbanzo beans, Boston red lettuce, baby swiss, a whole roasted chicken. I stopped only intermittently to gulp down glasses of sun tea I had been brewing since morning.
My wife began to take notice around the time the sandwich reached waist-high. She told me I was being crazy & irrational. I built the sandwich higher. I reminded her, wasn’t she supposed to see her sister this afternoon. She put on her large weekend hat and sunglasses and kissed me on the cheek and left. I was getting the step ladder out from the closet to continue construction when I noticed the usual group of neighborhood kids oohing and ahhing at the sight of the sandwich through my kitchen window. I shooed them away & shut the blinds. This wasn’t about them.
I built up and up and up. I ended up in the crawl space attic above the kitchen, a place I hadn’t been since moving into the house many years ago. I looked through all the old photo albums we had used the space to store. There were so many photos of my wife & I’s children, all of whom had long since moved away and become successful in one way or another. I needed to give them a call, I decided. I needed to take some time and pay them a visit. It’s just that I’ve been so busy and preoccupied lately, I told myself. I hoisted myself back down into the kitchen and bought a ticket that very day.