Happiness is Breakfast at La Note

First of all, thank you all so much for your love and sympathy about yesterday's post.  I heard from Marie again this morning and, although she is incredibly sad, it made me feel better to get a long email from her and hear how she is coping with the loss of her brother.  All your thoughts and prayers mean so much to me, and I will pass them along to Adam's family.

But I'd had enough of being sad.  I'm not very good at being sad . . . so I tend to take the bull by the dang horns and make myself be happy!  Which is what I did this morning.  My classes start later on Tuesdays, so this morning I met my dear friend Helen at my favorite breakfast place in Berkeley, La Note.  Some good strong coffee and the nutella French toast that I have always coveted (but never had the nerve to order) did my soul well.

pre-work breakfast at La Note

Helen with lemon ginger pancakes at our window table

sometimes happiness comes in the form of nutella French toast

And now I'm home working on my lesson plans, and revisiting this poem by e.e. cummings before I head into work today, because sometimes you gotta go back to basics:

i thank You God for most this amazing
day:for the leaping greenly spirits of trees
and a blue true dream of sky;and for everything
which is natural which is infinite which is yes

(i who have died am alive again today,
and this is the sun's birthday;this is the birth
day of life and love and wings:and of the gay
great happening illimitably earth)

how should tasting touching hearing seeing
breathing any-lifted from the no
of all nothing-human merely being
doubt unimaginable You?

(now the ears of my ears awake and
now the eyes of my eyes are opened)