Still Life With Red Envelope

Had a weird moment just now.  repo.jpg

I’m looking out at the critters on the deck – numerous  doves, starlings, blue jays, cardinals, pine siskins, goldfinches, black capped chickadees, tufted titmouses, even the occasional woodpecker (plus the inevitable gray and red squirrels) – and thinking about how tough their lives must ordinarily be.

And I’m comparing them to me.

For instance, lucky human that I am, here I am inside a temperature-controlled, rain- and snow-proof house. The thermometer outside my office window reads 22 degrees, but the one inside reads 75 (I keep my work area a lot hotter than the rest of the house, because I sit for long periods).

I’m wearing soft, clean, comfortable, fairly new clothes, including nicely form-fitting shoes. I’m freshly showered. I can turn a faucet and have fresh water gush out, at two different useful temperatures. I had gingerbread eggnog French toast this morning, with maple syrup and cinnamon, and with orange juice and coffee served alongside. In fact, I’m so well-fed I’m overweight.

I’m sitting in an office full of computer equipment, including scanners, printers, graphics tablet, hard drives, speakers, and a cable modem hookup to the rest of the world — not to mention several thousand dollars of software in the computer itself.

I did my laundry a few days ago, in the in-house washer and dryer. I sat in front of a crackling fireplace last night and watched TV. I have a nice bed downstairs with an electric blanket, so I sleep in toasty comfort. I have a couple of hundred books on my shelves, including a half dozen library books, to read myself to sleep.

I have a truck outside that will take me anywhere I want to go. Less than two miles away, there are no less than two huge supermarkets, plus a McDonald’s, a family restaurant, a CVS drug store, a couple of gas stations, several pizza and sandwich places, a Chinese takeout, a clothing store, a discount clothing store, a barber shop, and TWO Donkey Nuts (so shoot me — it’s what I call Dunkin Donuts) within a half-block of each other.

I live in a rich country. I speak English, and I’m white, and male. I have a pretty good education packed into my head, and what is probably an unusually large package of salable skills.

And … I’m broke. I’m sitting here with less than 20 bucks in my pocket, and nothing in the bank. There’s a letter on my desk from my mortgage company, telling me to talk to their law firm from now on, and another from my auto insurance company … in an ominous red envelope.

So the weird moment is one of comparing myself to those poor critters out there on their own in the winter, while I get to be a rich, powerful, fat, safe human. The catch being that, without money, right now I’m not able to DO all the things a rich, powerful, fat, safe human might choose to do … and the birds and beasts outdoors actually have more freedom, within their wild domains, than I do right now in my human one.