I was doing Pilates this morning. I’m feeling like the Tin Woodman with all this cold weather, in need of a can of oil. Anyhoo, as I was contorting on the floor of my den (I guess it’s a den – the-only-room-the-bookcase-fits-in is too obscure, and if I talk about moving the bookcase I’ll have to talk about Lloyd, and then I’ll get all snippy…) and in the decorative pillar near the door was what looked like a mouse hole.
I will remind you I live in a church. Church mouse? Hello? So I’m doing Pilates and all I can think of is this adorable, little mouse who lives in a church and I have all these ideas about writing a children’s book about a mouse who peeks at people who are drunk and sober in different apartments and then I think to myself, “It is incredible what happens when you have a different perspective on things.” Who lays on the floor and gets the mouse-eye view, right?
After my Pilates video I felt stretched – less creaky. I checked my emails and I had one from a friend who had just been to New York. She recounted the last time she was in the city: falling down in a restaurant, sick-drunk and miserable… She said, “New York has changed now that I’m sober.”
It’s a matter of perspective. The mouse hole was always there. And even though my friend’s experience was a little more lavish than sprawling on the rug in a “swan variation,” New York has always been there as well. It’s our point of view that has changed. It’s sobriety that changed us. My friend Nick used to always tell me to look up. But I say look up, look down, lay on the floor and inspect the baseboards, look at New York City!
