A disorienting time, but also a season of renewal, maybe even transformation.
Yesterday afternoon Peg came home from work and I was on break from defending a truly miserable deposition, with the father of the witness, my witness, periodically darting onto the screen to yell at the lawyer on the other side, who in turn was engaging in the time-honored lawyer practice of asking the same question over and over, arguing with the witness, and eye-rolling at some of the less credible pieces of sworn testimony. It was a shit show, all around.
"Screw this. Screw the money. Screw the law. I'm going to quit and go work at a f*****g bait shop," I blurted as she poked around in the kitchen.
"Can I bring you a drink?"
"No. Too early. I just have to get through this."
And I did, retaining a stoic countenance throughout even as my subconscious was obviously roiling in the stew of career decisions I found myself questioning for the thousandth time.
Later we ate ribs that Anne Marie and Tommy sent home with us a couple nights ago, and watched the second episode of the dialogue between Bill Moyers and Joseph Campbell on the power of myth. The conversation was wide ranging, funny at times, and fascinating. Campbell obviously felt his scholarship might lead to a societal awakening of our consciousness to the vast, benign mystery of creation as an experience of the divine, with us not exercising dominion over it but seeing ourselves within it, and the creator within us. I look around at our country in 2021, and sense that his optimism was misplaced. Or maybe we just haven't gotten there yet.
Campbell posited that a society without its myths tends to disintegrate because it loses its grasp on larger truths, and that those truths are universal no matter what religious or spiritual tradition serves as the vessel. And at an individual level, the quest for those truths holds the key to a meaningful life.
By bedtime I was now feeling the need to get away from the law for a while, somehow, and questioning the religious journey that led me from a still, small voice beckoning me back through the church doors all those years ago, through ordination, and then the realization that I did not belong in a space where I had to choose a covenant (in the truest sense, a contract between the lord of the manor and his underlings, with grace flowing in one direction and obligation in the other) that required accepting a set of truths over my own experienced revelation through life. I tried, really I did.
Was all that a waste?
Then came the predawn dreams. I was in a drab hotel room, maybe a Howard Johnson's from my childhood in the 70s, alone, waiting to go somewhere. The door burst open, and in walked my three sons. Smiles, laughter, the sort of reunion Baptist preachers tell the crowd at the funeral they can expect on the Other Side. Sean hugged my neck, and he was the impish little guy with the pointy chin. We all were crying, the four of us, but we were so happy.
I realized I was late for something, late for a flight overseas, but I had lost my passport. I panicked--the flight left in two hours. How could I find my passport and make it to the airport in that time? I could see the plane outside the window, waiting.
"Mom has your passport in her purse. I'll get it for you," Jim said, calm and clear now.
A familiar figure walked by the door, Jim stepped out and walked alongside it. He returned a couple minutes later with my passport. But did I still have time to make it to the gate?
I'll never know, because suddenly it was 1994 or 1995, the sun streaming through the windows of a classroom back at law school. The Lemonheads were playing in the background, "Confetti", a song on an album that was the soundtrack of that whole season of my life back at UGA.
He kinda shoulda sorta woulda loved her if he could've. The story's getting closer to the end. He kinda shoulda sorta woulda loved her if he could've. He'd rather be alone than pretend.
I probably should have listened a little more closely, and pondered why those words resonated at the time.
But here I was in my dream, as a young female professor approached the lecturn and told us there were too many in the class, and half would need to go down the hall and take something else. I looked around and my old friends were all around me, Don and Woody and Samantha and Keri, the last now long dead, all stuffing binders into their backpacks and walking away as I decided to stay in a room full of unfamiliar faces.
Then I was in my high school locker room. We had made the playoffs, and were suiting up for the game. I was as old as I am as I sit here, the rest of them still seventeen and chatting excitedly as we slipped on shoulder pads. But where was my helmet? I had set it on top of a locker, but now it was gone. What would I tell my coaches? How could I take the field without a helmet?
And then the alarm went off. I rolled over and there was P, with her uncanny ability to look lovely at 5:45 a.m., wearing God's makeup around her eyes, stretching a dainty foot with scarlet toenails toward the opposite wall as she gradually returned from her own dreams. My reality felt a far more secure place than the worlds I'd inhabited just a little while before.
Then this morning's trip through the New York Times led me to a book review that so spoke to me that I ordered the book on Kindle. The title is Robert E. Lee and Me: A Southerner's Reckoning with the Lost Cause. Its author is a history professor at West Point, a retired general and fellow Georgia boy who grew up just down the road from Athens in Monroe. I immediately felt a kinship growing out of what sounds like a shared struggle, as we confront the false myths on which we were raised and the loss of identity that comes with this moment. I'll let you know how that turns out.
Religion, cultural identity, vocational choices, family. It's all sloshing around between my ears right now, all in flux, while sitting in a place I could not find on a map three years ago, but which seems to fit this part of the journey. No wonder the crowded, vivid dream-space.
Or maybe I am dragging all this confused tangle into the light because I finally have the security to do so, in this new life with P and the happiness and stability she brings. Did I say "new"? At three years or so into this ride together, and eight since we first met, I'm not sure that is still accurate. New or not, it remains fresh, however.
Feeling unenthused about the seven (!) conference calls my paralegal has set for me today. If the rain gods oblige, I am hoping Tommy and I can crown the day with nine holes of golf while Peg, Anne Marie and the girls enjoy the country club pool. We'll see how it goes.
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