Day Three...

(I should really move faster with this before I forget what happened.)

Before we went to sleep on Friday night I let the Jasons know I would be cooking breakfast for them the next morning.

There's something about breakfast with friends. Working at Timberline for six years, and many other jobs that required my presence between 7 and 8 a.m., has made me a morning person. By 10:00 p.m. I get worried that I won't get to sleep soon and my mornings won't be a nice as I would like. When I have breakfast with friends I'm sharing my favorite part of the day with them.

Somewhere and somewhen Jason and I had this conversation about those Love Languages that Gary Chapman, or some other Chapman, wrote. It's the way you show love to people. They are: Acts of Service, Quality Time, Gift Giving, something else, and something else. I secretly speculated that mine might be acts of service, because I love cooking for people, but I realized it is more what I thought it was, Quality Time. The cooking is just an excuse to get people close to me.

I set my internal clock to wake up early on Saturday to go to the store to get groceries, since the only thing Fortenberry had in his entire house was ketchup and coffee. I had been eyeing this grocery store since we first rolled into town, because I love the old locally owned grocery stores. Don't get me wrong, I love my giant HEB with enough food to literally feed a small country. But there is something about walking into a store with wood or unfinished concrete floors and old, antique "grocery store stuff." Prices are stamped on the products with a sticker gun. A conveyor belt to take the food from your cart to the cashier is a work of science fiction.

The best part about this grocery store was the butcher. You could not purchase prepackaged bacon, you had to buy it fresh. The meat market area was from another time. The only electric meat cutting apparatus anywhere in sight was the slicers used for lunch meat. In back was the butcher, a seventy some odd year old woman, cutting slices of pork chop with a hand knife, then switching to a bone saw when she got to the bones. It was amazing. Even less hi-tech than the Food Fare in Chandler. More like Y's Hometown Foods in Brownsboro. You know the one.

I purchased my items, drove back, and cooked breakfast. We ate and we were in no hurry. We talked about Fortenberry's rough Sunday coming and his upcoming move to Ft. Worth. There was a genuine sense on all sides (from what I could tell) that it had been a good couple of days. Worthwile. Even, perhaps, healing.

We hugged and drove away from Merryville.

I noticed that the knot in my shoulder I mentioned a few days ago wasn't as tight as it was when we started.