A Minute to Smile Read Free Page B

concentration that marked the art of tai chi. Not often—it was nearly impossible for a Western man to completely master the art of silence. But the mellow sense of peace occurred often enough that he continued to seek it. In the past few years, even the pursuit of it had often saved his sanity.
    Flutters of calm touched him today and after several hours, he strolled home in the bright heat of early summer, feeling pleasantly energized.
    On his porch, however, were the gory remains of a robin. The head, wings and tail were scattered beneath a chair, surrounded with a few loose gray feathers.
    “Damned cat,” Alexander swore, and found a shovel to remove the carcass. Piwacket, the murderer, slept serenely below a rosebush in the backyard. The mangy tom opened one eye as Alexander began to dig a shallow hole.
    “The only thing that comforts me, Piwacket,” he said to the animal, “is that soon you’ll be much too fat to climb a tree.” He frowned, eyeing the rippling, dusty belly that billowed before the cat like a sail. “It amazes me that you can move fast enough to catch even a robin.”
    Piwacket yawned and flopped back down into the warm dirt. Despite himself, Alexander grinned—few creatures were as unrepentantly degenerate as his cat.
    He spent the afternoon gardening, taking pleasure in the feel of the warm sun on his bare head and arms, in the rich smell of the earth and the damp feel of it on his hands. He weeded between sprouting marigolds and his late wife’s energetic lilies, and transplanted the tiny purple and blue violas that would create such lovely contrast to his collection of roses as the season progressed.
    By dinnertime, he was satisfyingly sweaty and dirty, his arms and hands nicked from thorns and rocks. He showered, broiled a steak and sat down with a bottle of ale and the newspaper.
    All according to schedule.
    When he settled in the library for a nightcap of cognac and a little reading, that, too, was well within his routine. A breeze danced in through the French doors that led to his garden, carrying with it the relaxing scent of earth and wet grass.
    He picked up a paperback suspense novel from the lamp table and read, sipping cognac in the quiet evening. Piwacket padded in on enormous paws and flopped his ragged, unkempt body at Alexander’s feet. He meowed, but Alexander ignored him.
    Annoyed, Piwacket jumped up to Alexander’s desk, batting halfheartedly at pens and paperclips to watch them drop to the floor. Turning a page in his book with studious quiet, Alexander nonetheless smiled.
    Next the scruffy animal leaped with surprising grace for his outrageous size to the lamp table. For a moment, he sat there, tail flicking, then reached out a paw and stuck it into the cognac, toppling the glass in the process. Alexander caught it before much was spilled, then shooed the tom off the table. “I thought we settled this,” Alexander said with annoyance, dropping a paper napkin on the mess. “It’s bad enough you don’t purr, that you kill birds and leave me their heads, that you snore and knock things over, but you’re also an alcoholic!”
    Piwacket blinked, licking his whiskers. His yellow gaze was focused intently upon the cognac-soaked napkin. Alexander almost threw it into the dustbin near the desk, then thought better of it. He’d be picking up little scraps of paper in the morning, and Piwacket would have a bellyache from devouring the napkin.
    “Come on,” he told the animal his wife had rescued—against Piwacket’s protests—from an alley behind a Denver hospital. “I’ll get you some food.” Not that Pi would eat it. A single bag of commercial food lasted several months and in spite of that, the animal was grossly overweight. He fed himself on birds and snakes and squirrels when he was lucky enough, but would be content with spiders, beetles and garbage pickings if times were lean.
    But the evening sprinkle of food in Piwacket’s plastic dish was also part of