Edinburgh Days, or Doing What I Want to Do

Curio Shop

Curio Shop At breakfast every morning I swallow four tablets: a small gel resembling a golden blimp fat with fish oil; a vitamin the color of red sandstone , the ingredients a gravel pit of mysterious, invigorating minerals, the print on the bottle too small for my eyes to sift into words; and, to keep my blood flowing no matter how long I sit cramped at a desk, an “adult low strength” aspirin, pink and about half the size of a currant. The fourth tablet I take is a capsule, blue at one end and white at the other. This turns me into a spillway and keeps liquids from backing up, preventing my blood pressure from bobbling and rising like a rowboat that has slipped its moorings. I keep a week’s supply of pills in a translucent plastic container six inches long. The container is divided into seven compartments, one little box for every day of the week, each box the size of the end of my thumb, measuring from the tip to the knuckle. Stamped on top of the compartments in gold are seven letters corresponding to the days of the week. Thus M appears above Monday’s dose and W appears over Wednesday’s. Lids to the compartments are the size of my thumbnail, and to get at the pills, I have to pry a lid back to the cuticle. Every Sunday morning, just after I have bolted the day’s dose and after I’ve finished my cereal, I fill the container. Actually I look forward to filling the container, and I rush through breakfast. I like opening the little bottles and dumping tablets into my hand. I play a game, seeing if I can shake out seven without looking. When I shake exactly seven tablets into my hand, I usually nod 26 Edinburgh Days and say “yes” as if I had won a literary prize. I also enjoy putting the tablets into the compartments appropriate to each day of the week. I move my hand slowly over the container, its lids gapping, and drop the tablets carefully, as if I am planting seeds in a furrow. Once I have put all twenty-eight pills in the container, I lean back and study the boxes. The pills fill the boxes, and here and there a tablet sticks up over the lid of a compartment, like, I enjoy thinking, a child peering over a fence— maybe, I imagine, a raggedy Huck Finn character watching bulldozers push aside hills of dirt and rock, digging a foundation hole. Filling the container is one of the delights of my week. From small matters I derive great pleasure. Appreciating the small does not, as might first be thought, indicate diminished sensibility and capacity. Imagination often flourishes amid the small and the confined more easily than in the open. In malls I become claustrophobic, the harsh light dissecting and not illuminating, turning people into specimens paddling about inside beakers. In a little store, walls do not pinch like ribs broken by and to contemporary living. Instead they bow out, allowing one to breathe and dream. The container reminds me of a row of shops, say, those near the university , a district frequented by students and office workers, these last headed home at dusk, harried by little responsibilities and pausing for a moment to pick up an item forgotten during a shopping trip to a mall. Amid the shops is a Chinese restaurant, named Lucky Star or, improbably , Miami Take-Out. Stacked outside a greengrocer’s are flimsy wooden crates, sunny with clementines and marmalade oranges, grapes, tomatoes and apples, and then leeks, looking like green and white truncheons. Beside the boxes stand buckets bursting with tulips, the flowers not open and the buds finials of red, yellow, and purple. Standing in the doorway of a cobbler’s shop, I imagine smelling the grainy fragrance of leather. What I hear is the grinding of keys. Signs in the window of a health food store mention bioforce, body butter, and Keto-Slim high-protein shakes. A regimen of Chinese herbs will remedy all ailments and failings, a sign declares, from rheumatism to psoriasis and acne, from anxiety and impotence to bloating, water retention, and smoking. A butcher hawks duck eggs, potted meat, steak and kidney pie, and “haggis made on premises” as well as haunches of flesh, some silvery , others scarlet. Raisin buns, croissants, scones, and loaves of bread, a few crusty with...