The Good Work

The Good Work Jill McDonough (bio) Keywords coffee, middle age, happiness, adults, daily Before we brush our teeth and get dressed, beforeI take two kinds of blood pressure pills and threefiber gummies, put coffee in one kind of go-cup,kale smoothie in another, get into the car, I say I wantto have one more cup of coffee in bed and read youthis Ellen Bass poem, but it's short and then we'll go.I am always drinking 1% in my coffee and tryingto tell Josey we have plenty of time. Josey wakes upsaying We're running out of time! Which makesno sense. You can't be running out when it just started!But this time it is true and I am slowing us down with coffee,with Ellen Bass, and then we have sex, and then we'relaughing, still in bed, still not dressed, and then she getsout the tweezers to help me with a hair I can't see, in the earlygood light, our shared readers, this happiness whichis middle age, late middle age, even. 47 and 53, whichI swear no one ever told me I would get. Not middle age,but its happinesses, grown-ups always looking somiserable, bitching and moaning about marriage,the mortgage, how tired they are, youth's wastedon the young, and best years of your life. Except Ellen Bass!Ellen Bass knew way before me. Or maybe the oldstried to tell me and I couldn't hear them above all the boringand old? When I was a kid the coffee-breath grownups,their doubleknit suits, joked about middle age, black balloonsin front of somebody's house, a banner saying Lordy,Lordy, Sharon's Forty! Or Over the Hill with a cartoongravestone reading RIP. The last letter I got from my PCPsays my HDL's better, or something, so keep up the goodwork. The work of living, some daily acts of faith that ifwe move the sludge inside around, eat what they say,we won't die as soon as we would washing Cheetos downwith gin, some Oreos. So I get on the treadmill,watch Succession, watch HBOGo. [End Page 64] Jill McDonough Three-time Pushcart Prize winner jill mcdonough is the recipient of Cullman Center, Fine Arts Work Center, NEA, and Stegner fellowships. She teaches in UMass-Boston's MFA program.