First day of the year

He slept late, having stayed up late watching old black-and-white Commando Cody shorts on TV - bad guys in big suits, on orders from an evil genius on the moon, stealing cars and having outrageous fistfights and shootouts with good guys who fly through the air wearing a jet suit. He took a shower and got dressed, got a cup of coffee and went outside to test the weather. It was warm but windy, so he put on an old sweater and walked around the yard checking on the new shed roof, the unsplit woodpile, the dormant garden with catnip, onions, and kale still green and growing, maple and pear trees that badly need pruning.

Cooling off, he returned to his warm coffee on the patio, found a jump rope, and did a few minutes of jumping, first on both legs, then alternating two right and two left, four right and four left, eight right and eight left, and so on until he was tired. Then he walked around to rest and did it again. When that got old, he went inside and sat down with a new book of short stories from the library. He read a story about two strangers who meet at a party and can't figure out where they've met before, then keep running into each other with no plan or follow-up, and finally acknowledge their attraction years later when it's too late to do anything about it.

It's too warm for a fire, so he toasts some bread and makes more coffee. It's early, so he turns on the crock pot to heat up the soup he made yesterday. The soup was surprisingly good with cracked wheat, the whole pickled peppers really working in the kidney bean broth. Then he got busy outside, splitting a small stack of one-inch boards into a boxful of kindling that will last a few weeks, methodically slicing off thin strips from the roughly foot-long scraps of lumber with an ax. Most of the scraps are wet, but ironically the pieces on the bottom of the pile have been sheltered from the rain, so they get split last and end upon top of the kindling box, dry enough to start tomorrow's fire. He finds a place for the box behind a wicker chair near the stove in the den.

Back in the kitchen he pulls out the broiler drawer to try to locate the problem with the oven that hasn't been baking properly. The pilot area looks normal, lighting up electrically when the START switch on the keypad is pushed. The gas inlets behind the stove and in the cellar look normal, and gas is getting to the burners on top. He checks the owner's manual and goes through the trouble-shooting list twice, finding nothing, and concludes that it's either an electrical glitch in the oven igniter or a blocked gas line to the oven. In either case, a technician will have to check it out.

While he relaxes into another short story about a filmmaker who dreams of images of doors from a film he's become obsessed with, his wife asks what he wants for supper and reheats leftovers from New Year's Eve - sweet potatoes with pecans, roast pork with sauerkraut, red potatoes with mushrooms, French bread with olive oil and garlic - delicious with a glass of Pinot Noir. They talk about the party with neighborhood friends and the game that's not really a game, where each person answers a series of questions about the coming year: who to see, where to go, what to do, and one unrealistic wish.

He walks the dog, and it's still cool and wet outside. He watches a halfway decent sitcom, part of a football game, and part of a PBS jazz special with a pretty good young Canadian singer. He went outside and did a short workout in the yard; while he was practicing, his daughter came home. He went in, made some tea, and went to bed, wondering how much truth there is to the myth that the first day of the year shows what kind of year it's going to be.