I’d seen them come out on trays. The waiters were carrying them through the country club, lifting them up over the wedding crowd. Open at the top and curved in the middle, they were the brightest in the room – decorations brighter than the occasional spring dress.

I waited for the mimosas to come my direction, but the servers coming from the kitchen were all right-handed. When they hit the first bodies crowded in the foyer, they veered right and around a round wooden table with a sign-in registery and enormous flower displays.

I stepped into line at the bar and watched more shapely orange glasses carried away. Straight champagne was being poured and a few couples talked in a doorway talked over it. They were smiling at it each other, but what they held between them wasn’t exciting. I waited for my mamosas. The girls around were pristine and pretty, or aged and slightly sullen, baring different degrees of cleavage. The men were balding an akward or young and awkward, confident in their women but over-confident, not aware how weak the connection can be.

Another waiter came out from the kitchen and veered right. I hadn’t moved any closer to the bartender.

For a divorced man at a wedding in the presence of love, the feeling comes over filtered and strained. I wasn’t cynical or distrusting, but I wondered why what seems so real evaded me, after all. The love was evident and also gauged, not how I used to perceive it – more balanced and layered with doubt.

The line gradually dwindled. The backs turned and walked away with orange shapes in their hands. I’ve played with Vodka/cranberry and had my share of blonde beers, but I wanted the light combination of citrus and bubbly. I finally laid my arms up on the bar and watched the vested bartender make my sweet drinks.

I carried the mimosas from the bar to a table with friends and handed them out to anyone with an empty hand or set them in the table center. The country club windows and the white-board blinds were open to the golf course and budding trees.

The tables in the reception room were beginning to fill with people, but most were still standing and talking in the room the wedding party fled. I walked through it one last time. The love was gone. I went back to the bar and got more mimosas before the glasses from the first round were picked up from the help.

I drank them through lunch and until all the chairs were pushed out and people were dancing. I joined a congregation in the hall when the pretty brunette with blonde streaks said, “You should come drinking with us.”

But I was drinking. “Why would you want to leave these beautiful mimosas?”

“I love mimosas.”

“Yes, me too.”

I’d just learned the word the day before. Three-quarters champagne topped off by orange juice is how the bartenders were making them. They were pouring for tips and making decent money.

” … but you should seriously go out with us.”

Why would anyone leave? “Where are you going?”

“Maloneys.”

Someone was always wanting to bring the party to an end. I wasn’t ready to plan the next move. “I don’t know where that is.”

“You could follow someone.”

Another waiter passed and this time I saw him veer left in the thinning crowd. “I suppose I could … okay, yeah. I’ll go.”

Mimosas wouldn’t be the popular drinks at the bar. They’d get lost in the neon and the bar lined with fancy bottles and fancier colors. I couldn’t stay at wedding forever. The ceremony was over. The vows had been exchanged, including mine. I’d just met the love of my life and I could make it last until 4.

When the final crackles and hisses ceased, he would replenish the coffee and filter in the coffee maker and fill its clear-glass pot with water so it would be ready for early morning coffee. The coffee pot gave off its own hisses from the water spilled in the pouring. When the crackling stopped and both pots were quiet, he opened the refrigerator door and took an egg carton and set in on the countertop. He removed three eggs from the center, first, so that the container would be balanced, then attempted to lay the eggs softly in the water without dampening his my fingers. The water wasn’t warm enough to burn, but he went about it all gingerly, until he felt the light vibration in setting the egg against the non-stick metal.

This process was more about the senses for him than it was familiarity or rigidness to a scheme. He followed the same process when he younger, while he made breakfast for his kids and coffee for his wife. He hadn’t changed in all the years, more than 40 had passed since he was first married and 32 since he’d been divorced. The routine made him feel young again, like me be able to reclaim his mistakes. Not his youth, just his errors. His youth was too good to ever come back.

And as I write this, I realize it must be nonsense to most of you. People sit down and write, don’t they? They have ideas they put to paper, don’t they, knowing every nuance and curve in the lettering before they start to tell a story? It’s not that way at all and while you might not realize it, I just broke a cardinal rule I set for myself, which is to not begin sentences with “it”. You won’t see it much in my work, but when you do, it’s a failure. It means I’ve given up on a sentence. If you could see me working – thumbing the words into life on a tiny little calculator – you would take me much less seriously. I would. You should. I’m switching to a keyboard.

When I sit down to write, I know that some days are good for writing and that others would be better spent carrying out a life to gather material, but most are somewhere in the middle. Speed seems to be coming to me now. I can write better, faster. When the words are nearly dry, they at least tend to be accurate in what I’m describing. I am starting to see patterns in my writing behaviors and the subjects I choose to tackle.

I saw a photo of Tom Wolfe once in his white suit and matching hat, and began to associate all things summer with him. Granted, that impression came from the clothing he wore and not his words, but I’ve always wondered weather I would be a summer writer or winter writer, fall or spring. Steinbeck, Kerouac were spring. Vonnegut was summer. Capote was fall. And winter the rest. This might relate more to when I first read their works.

So, what am I? Definitely summer. Definitely warmer weather, possibly September, if it could be pinpointed by month, when the summer is beginning to fade and the nights turn cold, a foreshadow of winter. The words come easier and I getting closer to choosing the subject I am going to spend significant time on – something non-fiction, story-driven. I need to submerge myself in the subject and see what turns up. My intention is to tell someone else’s story, to empathize with their experience, and to learn about myself as anyone would in the process.

I am hoping to acquire a big sound, a monstrous voice that can’t be ignored. And it all starts quietly with a cat on my lap, looking out on the window well and a sliver of sky that turns to a sheet of black in early March at 8 p.m.

Around the throne were books stacked no higher than the chair arm, and the collection included the Book of Life. In it were the names of the ones who would be ascending to heaven and some that already done so. The other books were the ones in which voices could be heard outside the book covers glorifying his name and leading others to this moment, a day for judgment to be cast. There was a great crowd gathered before him and all together they took a knee. The ones who were righteous and pure stood again and then were drawn into the Lord, disappearing in light and shooting in his center. The others stayed on their knees and one by one, tumbled forward into a thin strip of fire that had erupted beneath them. This was hell opening and it would be the last time in eternity that God would be concerned with Satan and his acts. When there was no one left, the vision closed, tighter and tighter on God’s face, and then it finally disappeared, and there was nothing but dark clouds collecting everywhere but before the muted, blood-red sun.

The horsemen came out, then, and rode through the darkened landscape and the trees shriveled and turned bare as they rode. The grass turned gray and the rivers and creeks suddenly swelled and then dried into the ground. People left behind tried to run but turn to ash as the horses’ legs strided past them, and the world fell silent for a few minutes until it, too, was just a vision that faded from existence.