ALTITUDES CAN ADJUST SOME ATTITUDES, PERHAPS

From the time I take my mail from the mailbox, cross the street, cross the yard, come back into the house, something has almost always fallen out of the bundle of mail.

Sometimes it is a post card enfolded in the rest of the mail which my grasp hasn't been tight enough to keep anchored. It might be a slick-sided little piece of advertisement that just loves to slide toward freedom if given a chance. Most often it is a subscription renewal card that falls from a magazine.

I'm thinking of going after my mail with a basket. It will keep me from bending over to pick up an escaped leaflet or two, maybe right in the middle of the street when there's an oncoming car. If I let it just stay where it dropped I might get fined for littering or eventually have the vicinity looking tacky and unkempt. The street sweeper seldom gets out this way.

This grumbling will cease somewhat if you keep reading. But not yet.

Even when I open the newspaper, out comes a singular advertisement or, on a "good" day, a whole avalanche of such materials. Stoop, bend. Stoop, bend.

Last week such a piece of advertisement fluttered to the floor when I turned the page in a magazine. I bent over to pick it up and saw what I thought said, "Attitude Adjustment." That's just what I need about this fluttering mail I said to myself.

I took time to lean back in my chair and adjust attitude. Such thoughts as these were forced into my mind: If, on one occasion, I hadn't bent over to pick up that pizza ad I wouldn't have seen that single little violet blooming. I picked the premature little blossom, brought it into the house, put it into a tiny vase and enjoyed it for several days, a harbinger of spring.

When there are lots of violets you don't notice their faces in much detail, but when there's just one, you notice the fuzzy white throat, out of which comes the pistil and stamens, the tiny marks on the petals coming up out of the throat, the slight dip in the upper two petals, the rounded curve of the lower three. Always and always five petals, just like the always and always six-sided snowflakes.

A second thought was this: If I hadn't stooped over to pick up the reminder-of-subscription-ending card from the carpet, I wouldn't have found that big-eyed, favorite needle I had lost. I might have stepped on it barefoot, or worse still, someone else might have stepped on it, become wounded, outrageously wounded according to some lawyer. I'd have been taken to court. There would have gone my savings, my car, my right arm!

Besides, all this bending and straightening up again would have strengthened my gastrocnemius, tibialis anterior, semitendinosus, biceps femoris, vastus lateralis, gluteus maximus and oblique muscles! How lucky can I be, even with a sore back and a charley horse.

By-and-by I looked more closely at the fluttered piece of advertising that had sent me on the attitude adjustment exercise and I saw that it hadn't said attitude adjustment at all but altitude adjustment. My attitude adjustment took a sudden free fall.

Here I'd gone to all the trouble to look up the names of those muscles so I could talk intelligently with my doctor, telling him which ones I thought had snapped or were going to and right soon too.

Altitude Adjustment. It was all about how to arrange your furniture so you wouldn't have all the tall pieces on one side of your room and the short pieces opposite, how to make you room look taller with striped wallpaper, how, if you have triple, same-sized windows, to remove the middle one and make it go up to near the ceiling.

And upstairs! My, what you could do upstairs by adding great dormer windows to a steeply slanting roof, putting in an elevated skylight where you could see all the way up to Pegasus, Andromeda and Cepheus if they were anywhere near overhead.

If anything, I've been thinking about dropping the altitude of my ceilings about a foot to offset Clinton's BTU proposition on the horizon. What is that? Butane Tax Unification? Beautiful Turnabout Universe? Beastly Taxation Ungent? I really know, but what's a column for but to throw some words around, trying to raise the altitude of some attitudes, er, whatever.

REJOICE!