Recipe for perfection

What are the ingredients of a perfect day? Yesterday felt pretty perfect but when I try to measure out the reasons, they don't add up to much: a pinch of good reading, a dab of interesting writing, a modicum of mundane cooking, and a midafternoon walk to the mailbox. Yesterday's perfection may be a function not of what I did but of what I didn't do: attend meetings, listen to students' excuses, wrestle with cranky electronic equipment, rush anywhere. The absence of annoyances is certainly one essential ingredient of perfection.

When I try to remember more perfect days and identify their common elements, I come up short. I can remember some nearly perfect days: our tenth anniversary, for instance, was well on its way to perfection until late in the evening when my husband came down with a bad case of chills and fever that wracked his body for the next six weeks. Not a perfect day. The day of my PhD graduation was running perfectly until the moment when someone who shall remain nameless locked his keys and my coat inside our car. No car, no coat, and temperature below zero with a biting wind: never have I been more grateful for full regalia.

The day I recall that comes closest to perfection occurred in Key West three Christmases ago. It really shouldn't have been perfect at all, because the week before our long road trip, we all came down with the flu one after another. I was the last to be stricken and so was totally unable to pack or prepare in the days before the trip, days which were also memorable for the sudden unexpected lack of running water in our house, a lack caused by an arson down the block at the oldest house in town, a house that had been slept in by generals and presidents but in recent years had been divided into low-rent housing units where, one evening in the week before Christmas, an angry woman kicked her boyfriend out of their apartment, upon which he, also angry, walked over to the corner store and purchased a cigarette lighter and announced to anyone in earshot (this is true) that he needed the lighter so he could burn down his girlfriend's apartment. The house burned and the residents escaped safely, but the firefighters drew so much water that a water main burst, leaving the entire town dry, including those of us who were trying to do laundry and pack for a long road trip while suffering from the flu.

After three days without water (and with the flu) we were happy to get away to sunny south Florida. The trip itself was a blur but I clearly recall Christmas Eve, my daughter's birthday, which we celebrated by eating take-out Chinese food on the beach while watching the sunset. I think I was a little bit sunburned by then but I no longer had the flu and as for water, it was everywhere as far as the eye could see. The sushi may have been a little dry but the day itself was perfect. Still, I wouldn't want to try to repeat the experience. For starters, I wouldn't know where to find an arsonist.