Hard Twenty, if you are new to this blog, is a format where I get twenty minutes to write and then, without editing, post to my site.

So, here then is the start of these twenty minutes. 

It’s surprising to me that as I begin here, I have a sense of anxiety, mostly, I think, because I have no idea what I am going to talk about. 

I know, this feels a bit too behind the curtain, at least it does to me, for the writing itself to be about the complications of doing the writing, and of course talking about talking about writing.

Yada yada yada.

Normally I organize my day with writing first, trying to capture the flush of energy and creativity I always feel when I wake up. It might be the coffee. It might be the twenty-eight years I spent as a teacher, when morning was when the engine started, ready to chug through the day, and then at the end of the day the engine sputtered and I crashed, so to speak.

This morning, though, as I have done for the past thirty-one years at least once a week, I went out to breakfast with friends. In all of those thirty-one years these have been my teaching friends, which is a silly distinction at this point. They are simply my friends.

This morning I had two eggs over medium with tater tots and rye toast. If we add up roughly all of these years, I’ve had this breakfast, roughly, twelve hundred times. 

Even saying that it sounds silly. My math was this: forty weeks for a school year and thirty-ish years, so forty times thirty, that’s twelve hundred. 

And it is probably more, as I often go to two breakfasts a week. 

I’ve had this same breakfast though, with slight modifications, about ninety percent of those times. One of the slight modifications has been getting tater tots instead of home fries. 

Home fries, in case it isn’t the same everywhere, are sliced potatoes fried on the grill. When they are done right, with a crisp brown outside and a soft warm inside, they are amazing. 

Usually, though, they are not done that way. 

My go-to diner of choice, George’s Diner in Willow Street, started serving tater tots a couple of years ago now. I began to ask about them several months before then, but I don’t think it was my asking that tipped the scales. Other diners were offering them, where I had realized how much I preferred them to the chance the home fries on the grill would be done the way I like them.

This morning, as the four of us sat at our booth, one of the tater tots ended up on the ground. We noticed it near the end of the meal, our feet having crushed it into the carpet, tiny pieces of shredded potato all over the place. 

I apologized to the waitress, who told us not to worry about it.

We finished our meal and then as we stood up to go, my friend Joellen noticed the crushed tater tot again and said, “That’s a mess. But our waitress said not to worry about it.”

To which I replied, “Yep, it’s just small potatoes.”

And we laughed at the joke. 

The thing is, I have no idea where that came from. I have not heard the term “small potatoes” used in years, not as in the idiom that means not something to worry about.

But there it was, without any processing time in my head, the perfect reply to this odd-ball situation. 

I don’t think I’m unusual in this, saying clever things on the spot. But this one, I didn’t even realize what I’d said until I heard myself say it. 

Spending time writing like this, and often, I’ve tried to follow my thought process, trying to see where the next words and ideas come from. 

It isn’t quite whim–the words are there and they have connections. But I have no idea how the mind works here. The same as I have no idea how I can catch a ball that someone throws to me. 

On some level, it’s just reflex, our minds processing information faster than our conscious logic, the thought processes we can roughly follow in our heads.

Ok, that’s twenty. Perhaps nothing of import here. 

Mostly small potatoes.