“There are times for sleep, for inactivity, dreaming, indiscipline, even lethargy. You’ll know when you deserve these times. They come after you’ve been broken.”
― Mark Helprin, A Soldier of the Great War
The journey to Corning lasted, in the end, just under twenty-four hours. A corpulent, chatty Uber drive delivered me in front of Tara on a sweltering Tuesday noon, just as his doppelganger drove me to the airport going on three weeks ago. A difficult sojourn away from P draws to a close, at least for now.
There was a time when I could endure these travel marathons with relative ease, but now I am a few days shy of sixty, and am not bouncing back this morning. After Peg left for work, I laid down on the couch to read the paper and then fell dead asleep for over an hour. I rallied enough to spend a few minutes prepping for the first of my five conference calls today, then figured I had just enough time to slip down to the gym if I was efficient about it. This was when I discovered Peg had driven away with the car keys. People thank God or St. Anthony when they find their lost keys; I should probably thank some divinity for saving me from my perpetual business by hiding mine. This is a day to go slow and recharge a little.
Peg had planned to surprise me when I returned yesterday with two large, high resolution photographs of Hurricane Michael's eye as it approached Bay County.
The notion was, and I guess is, that they'd be encased in fancy frames and hung in my home office at the Cliff. The image, I have to say, hit me like an emotional sandbag in the gut. Those of us who lived all that simply refer to life and things "before the storm" or "after the storm", a line of demarcation in our lives as stark as "BC' and "AD" were for centuries before the liberals abolished them. The Bay County that existed on the morning of October 10, 2018 was swept away, and although the place has been rebuilt, in some ways better than before, nothing ever felt the same again.
Peg's goal with these photos and other mementoes she's purchasing for the condo is, as I understand it, to surround us with reminders of some of the key milestones in our life together. Hurricane Michael certainly falls into that category.
The photo that will always tell the story of the aftermath of that day, at least to me, is this one taken on my street within a couple days afterward.
I still mist up just looking at it. My ratty little cottage would have been just behind the photographer and to his left, if I'm right about the location. The house is gone now, replaced by an ugly, utilitarian home with living space over a two-car garage that comprises the entire first floor. I don't like walking past the spot, as we sometimes do on our walks together from 407, only a few blocks away.
Time to get some billable hours on the books after losing the better part of yesterday and the day before thanks to Delta. Maybe I'll find the time to nap a little, and try to catch up after that endurance exercise.
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