Summer Solstice

Recent days have been long for me - going no place and nowhere, retreating to bed, and following prescriptive orders. I've been homebound, sick, lethargic, languishing. Obsessive, too, like focusing on a grocery list that included mayonnaise and Bon Ami (my favorite cleaning powder for kitchen and bath, it means, good friend) and even more concretely, Duke's mayonnaise, light. My sick days began toward the end of May. Today is the day after this year's June 20 summer solstice, and I ponder. As the solstice approached, I started to feel better, wanted to go shopping for the Duke's light mayonnaise and Bon Ami. For my first trip out, I allowed myself an hour and a half to go grocery shopping at my nearby Giant and found everything else on my list except these two items of my obsession. I had no immediate need for them. A good bit of mayo was still in the Duke's container in the fridge, and I had an almost full can of Bon Ami. What makes for such an obsession?

Is it the sun, the moon, stars, planets, season change, cosmic markers? Or while my body fights microbes and viruses, is my rational thinking obscured? Does constriction of activity along with the passageways of breath lead to constriction of my thinking to two items on a grocery list?

Over the next pre-solstice days, I made a second grocery trip to another Giant store, a larger one, and, again, no Duke's mayo light and no Bon Ami. 

"I'll go to Target." I know they carry Duke's. So on Sunday, the day before the solstice, I stood before a shelf of cleaning supplies. Incredulous. No Bon Ami.

"Get a hold of yourself. Take the damn Comet," (the celestial name for another brand of cleanser). 

I did. Then to the condiment aisle and lo and behold, Duke's light mayonnaise, fully stocked. You would think I would have grabbed one, maybe even two to add to my oversized shopping cart with the lone Comet. But, no, I obsessed further (maybe it was a meditation) comparing the amounts of trans fats and cholesterol in Duke's light, regular, olive oil. Not much difference I found, all three had too much for my cholesterol count. Like the Comet, I damned it, and selected another brand with zero cholesterol. 

So what does all this have to do with anything? Is it the languishing, the narrowing focus of life, the containment, the mind trying to find some order out of the biotic wars inside? What causes such a narrow, unimportant focus? Would a psychiatrist have some profound insight - or a neurologist? Why do I choose to write about this?  I don't know. It just seemed like something I had to do.

Don't even ask me about Trader Joe's fragrance free dishwasher powder. That's another story, maybe a sequel.