"Passing on Your Left"

Today I searched for a post from five years ago because I thought it might trigger an idea for an essay. It didn’t, or hasn’t yet, but I ended up reading a number of entries from the summer of 2007—I haven’t gone back to read old posts in the longest time—and I was pleasantly surprised to see how witty and fun they were. Not that I didn’t think they would be; I just had lost touch with that whole habit. 

I had quite forgotten what it was like to ramble on about this and that in my life, and how comfortable I seemed doing it—all the weaving back and forth in time and from post to post and link to link. I think I trusted myself more in those days to let my mind go where it wanted to. That might be a healthy place for me to get to again. 

So I didn’t get inspiration for an essay (the story is five years old, after all), but I did get inspired to write a new post, which you (someone? anyone?) are reading now. The last time I blogged was in January, and I thought this time was really going to take. Sigh. 

Maybe I was meant to be led back here today by thinking about that lunch with an old high-school classmate in 2007. 

Today might be the quintessentially beautiful Washington spring day. Clear blue sky, ’70s. I spent time in this park again with a vegan cupcake (the best vegan cupcake in Washington) and cup of coffee after eating lunch at my desk. 

I’ll bike home on the folding bike I bought for my 50th birthday last September. I really should have blogged about that when it happened. It’s one of the greatest additions to my life, and it’s exactly the kind of thing I would have blogged about five years ago. Perhaps I will at some point. 

I came across this delightful blog (or really blogs) today and want to visit it more. Part of it is something called the Betty Crocker Project, an admitted rip-off of (or riff on?) Julie Powell’s Julie and Julia thing (I know that was the book and movie name; can’t recall her original blog title at the moment), but this couple is creating vegan versions of every recipe in the Betty Crocker Cookbook. They have their own cookbook coming out next year; I read about the blog in the publisher’s catalog. 

I just thought of a bunch of things to blog about. What does it mean when you have to make a mental note to put something into words at a later date? One thing it means: The bike lane awaits.