“My fingers smell like citrus. How strange,” he said while sliding the cranberry curtain a smidge to his right so he could get a good look at the family across the street tossing toys into the backseat of their four-door coupe.
“They must be going to her mom’s house,” he surmised while taking an unhurried step down the sun soaked hallway of his second story apartment, then elaborating, “for dinner.”
“And I shall make asparagus with baked parmesan and …” he hesitated while gazing down at a dusty crate of records from the ‘70s.
“Perhaps I’ll listen to Alice Coltrane,” he declared while delicately bending a knee to flip through the album covers before glancing upward at a wall map of the United States of America, ripe with purple pushpins that celebrated all the places he visited throughout the decades.
“NYC was splendid. I should jump on the Amtrak. It’s just a two and a half hour ride and a judicious pour of dark roast. And I’ve been dying to finish ‘I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings.’ It’s a crying shame my hip is so prickly. I need to get on that yoga mat.”
He returned his gaze to the vinyl as a wailing fire truck rumbled down the avenue.
“Om to my kundalini rising, here she is,” he whispered excitedly, pushing himself up from the wooden floor into a semi-perpendicular pose with the album “Journey in Satchidananda” tucked beneath his arm.
“It’s a full moon tonight,” he murmured while spying a folded piece of paper buried deep inside the left-hand pocket of his saffron robe. “What do we have here?”
He repeated the mantra in his head: Breathing in, two, three, breathing out, five, six. “It’s decided, I will invite the downstairs neighbor for brunch! Then I can ask them if my nag champa chaps their tranquility.”
Filled with unreliable confidence, he prudently walked to the end of the hallway, stopping at the mouth of the living room to unfold the diminutive note he found in the confines of his hooded cloak. It read, “The lemon is in the kitchen. Sprinkle it on your asparagus.”
After a mindful exhale, he gingerly lowered himself into a lotus position on the yoga mat in front of the turntable. He slid the record from the faded sleeve and reverently played the B-side first.
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