It’s the Friday morning before Memorial Day Weekend. A light rain is falling. Bombadill hopes it will alleviate the pollen-driven allergies that have been plaguing him the past few weeks. He walks to the train thinking of his latest up coming trial. Bombadill wishes he didn’t schedule the trial a few days after the long weekend but he had no choice: His client is being held in jail so the trial had to scheduled as soon as possible. He thinks about Davis, his old-school mentor, who told him more than once: Never forget your job is to get people out of jail.
The platform is sparsely populated with fellow commuters and he attributes that to it being the eve of a long weekend. Bombadill is partly correct. It is also the 9 AM train. He is taking the late train because he slept poorly the night before.
In a watery-eye, clogged-nose frame of mind, he becomes aware of the passing of time. He looks at his watch. For that moment, in the rain, on the train platform, standing next to a young woman with a rubber duck themed umbrella, he is acutely aware he lives in the moment. He looks at his smart phone and the date says May 26th. May is such a beautiful month. He wishes he could hold onto May. For that matter, he wishes he could hold onto 2017; a year that seemed so strange and novel and now is approaching the half way mark.
He resists calling his current state of in-the-moment mindfulness. He hates pop-science catch phrases like that. What he realizes is that he is actually getting better at living. No longer preoccupied with regrets, nor concerns for the future, he is proficient now at living each day, simply for each day.
His cat and dog are proud of him!
copyright 2017 Christopher Donahue