Sunday, January 3, 2010

Burnt Toast

Okay.  You get up in the morning and you decide to have toast, or a bagel, or something you shove in a toaster. ( If you're like me, you've had, oh, six or so toasters in the 25 years you've been married, none of which lasted more than a couple of years, which is food for another post thought... ) So, you pop your bread in, push the handle down, get out your butter and a knife and a plate...and before you know it, you're smelling that coffee smell...and you grab your toast out...and it's burnt in several places.  Now, it's not completely charcoal, so you can't feel good about throwing the whole thing out.  You take your knife and the kitchen towel, because, of course, burnt toast is HOT...and you start to scrape.

Little bits of the burnt stuff drift down into the sink as you stand there scraping.  You scrape and scrape, trying not to rip the bread, trying to get it down to a warm brown rather than a bitter black...and as you scrape you realize that this can be a metaphor for life.

Life frequently hands me burnt toast.  Pain, tired days, cranky children, more month than money - I know I'm not alone in any of this.  So I do a lot of scraping.  I suppose it's another form of that "attitude of gratitude" I spoke about before.  I scrape away the burnt stuff to find the good stuff underneath.  Behind the pain and tiredness is the knowing that I don't have to go work somewhere despite it - I can stay home and do my stuff, sitting on a pillow and taking ibuprofen.  Behind the cranky children are those nice kids - the ones I do actually see once in awhile! - the ones who bring me a Tab when I don't want to get up and who go to the store when I hurt too much to drive.  Behind the money issues is the fact that we in America have a more prosperous life than nearly anyone else on the planet - even living on one income!

I guess the moral is that I should be grateful that I have toast.  And I am.

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