Vox Meditantis

What was your favorite subject in school?

Friday, 7th November 2025

The harbour kept a schoolroom’s hush this evening – the kind where the chalk dust just hangs and every desk feels like an invitation for attention to sit down and be fed.

That old timetable surfaced unbidden: bells, margins, and the small sacrament of a page turning, the way a sentence can behave like a corridor – straight, then suddenly opening into a brighter room.

English was never simply books; it was permission to notice how people move inside language, where they place their pauses, what they hide behind conjunctions, and which verbs they trust when the light is thin.

Mrs Hayes – whose voice could sort a room without raising itself – taught me that a paragraph is a neighbourhood: beginnings mind the bin day, middles mind the children, endings walk the dog and lock up after everyone’s gone home.

Tonight, mindful of yesterday’s promise to make a place for attention, I set a quiet table for it – no fanfare, just lamp light and the tide working at its slow arithmetic outside the window.

My father would have approved of the plainness – tea, the day’s paper folded into quarters, and a book chosen for sentences that know how to stand up without showing off.

What school taught me, at best, was steadiness: show up, read closely, wait your turn, and allow understanding to arrive at its own pace – skills that have survived better than my algebra.

By late evening the flat had that Friday exhale the harbour does when the last commuters have given the pavements back to the wind, and the floorboards remember how to be a house again rather than a junction.

I went into the guest room with no particular bravery – just the sort that pretends to be tidying – and opened one of the boxes that has been waiting for years longer than I admit in company.

On top lay a recipe card in my mother’s hand, “Ginger Biscuits,” the ink a little faded where butter must have kissed it more than once; a small, domestic meteorite fallen from a different weather system.

I didn’t catalogue or conquer; I only read it through, line by economical line, marvelling at her terseness – no preamble, no story – just action words, as if the doing were the only biography that mattered.

The truth is that literature taught me this muscle long before medicine ever paid rent for it: to hear a life in the rhythm between instructions, to measure character by how a person treats the small transitions – simmer, stir, rest.

I slid the card into the kitchen bowl where the shallots usually nap, not as a shrine, just a placeholder – a gentle claim that another day will come for flour on the counter and a timer that minds its manners.

Outside, a late ferry’s horn stitched the river to the street, the kind of sound that reminds a place what it’s for, which in New Corinth is still arrival, departure, and the ordinary courage of returning.

Jenny would laugh at my grand word for it and call this “housekeeping,” which is fair; librarians know that most care is filed under verbs nobody boasts about.

Earlier, between patients, I caught myself reading a stubborn sentence the way I read a face that isn’t ready to be understood yet – letting it stand, not forcing the meaning to cooperate before it ripens.

That, too, is a lesson borrowed from school and kept in practice: comprehension as hospitality, not conquest – the kind that sets out a chair and waits for the guest to arrive on their own two feet.

There were no heroics today, only the mild bravery of not turning back from a box and letting a memory take up one square foot of counter space without rehearsing its entire history for the room.

It feels like a small alignment – page to page, hand to hand, attention to its chair – sufficient for a Friday that asked nothing dramatic and, in return, gave a card that smells faintly of cloves.

Tomorrow, perhaps, I’ll buy ground ginger from Elena’s and pretend it’s only for the biscuits, though I know it’s also for the sentence I’ve been trying to write since third year, the one that ends with an ordinary life lived on purpose.

Catherine

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Bob Lynn | © 2025 Vox Meditantis. All rights reserved.