Creamed Ham Over Biscuits

I don’t know if I’m the guy with the coffee cup or the woman in the back freaking out.

I am running so late this morning and everything is in chaos. The kitten is playing with a mouse–a good thing because we have so many mice and the big cats just sit and stare at them–the little dog is growling about something, children are dragging themselves into the daylight, and I’m trying to make a goldenly delicious cream sauce with ham….

what you do is bake a whole ham, eat half of the ham, shove the rest in the back of the fridge, remember it at the critical moment, thinly slice a white onion and a red one, cry a lot into a kitchen towel, wildly make a bechamel with the leftover curry gravy from Sunday, add all the finely minced ham and the now buttery and translucent onion, add a lot of milk and some cream and some water to keep thinning it, start to make biscuits and realize that you have no more milk, mentally rearrange your morning so you can run to the store because you’re also out of geriatric cat food, answer fifteen thousand questions from children wandering through the kitchen, and then finally taste the creamy ham sauce and die of amazement about how delicious it really is…

…and figure out how to be middle-aged. That’s what I am, I think, right in the middle of the age. If I live to be 80 or 90, I’m smack in the center of everything. Children who need to move on with their lives but aren’t quite there yet. Parents who are trying to move from one country to another. A garden that will soon need to be put to bed for the winter. Piles of work at church. A stack of writing projects that deserve actual attention. A mound of laundry to fold on the dining room table. And a lot of insomnia. Like all people, I have always persisted in believing that if I could just make myself a “Schedule,” that is, if I could so order my days in a reasonable and logical way, I would be able to do a lot of work and be a happy person–I would also become holy. But the fact of being in the center of a lot of competing #thoughtsandprayers for a lot of people means that it doesn’t matter what kind of schedule I have. Even if I make a lot of decisions about what I will do at what moment it won’t matter because I won’t be able to carry out those decisions. Not really. Something will come along to throw me off course or worse, I will come to the moment and decide I don’t really want to do the thing right then.

Nevertheless, like all foolish people, I persist, and so now I’m going to try a triage kind of plan. If this happens then I will do that. If this other thing happens then I do something else. So it will go like this:

If I sleep really well I will work out and pray and write and do school and read all my email and clean my house. But, if I only sleep moderately well I will pray and write and do school. But, if I don’t sleep at all I will just only do school.

Oop! and now I need to run to the store before Bible Study. None of this even matters because who even cares, I’ve already made lunch. What a huge lot of winning! Have a nice day!