“Home is the place where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in.”
Just the cats and me this morning,
waiting for the snow that's supposed to get here in a couple hours and hang around through lunchtime.
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Those hashmarks are from Slane trying to climb onto the keyboard. My buddy.
The blue push pin up on that map is us. The powder blue to the west, for my southern friends, is snow. Lots of snow. There have been days when the approaching snowstorms here behave like the thunderstorms we sometimes see approach Panama City from the west in the summer, then melt away somewhere around Lake Powell. That happens here too, but this stuff today goes on for miles so I'm thinking it really is going to come down in a bit. Whether it sticks with temperatures in the low 30s is another matter.
And I have to go drive around in it, which may be a challenge. Right after lunch our friend Hal is going to cut out a suspicious growth on the side of my head. It's probably nothing, but aesthetics matter so the thing's got to go. I remember when I was a young fighter pilot and many of the "old" civilian instructors, about my age now, had accumulated these lesions on their bald noggins after a lifetime of flying around at 35,000 feet. The ones who finally gave up and let them grow wild ended up looking like Otis Spunkmeyer chocolate chip cookies with tufts of hair fringing their temples. Peg doesn't deserve to wake up to that, so the growth will end today in a bucket heading to the pathology lab.
I'm also eyeballing this weather with concern because we're flying out of here in a couple days so I can work in Florida and get ready to try another case on the 13th. Who in the hell schedules an eight-day jury trial only ten business days before Christmas? A trial judge who wants the case to settle, that's who.
If it settles, I reckon I'll come back up here until it's time to go to Christmas in Texas. Peg will be working, having learned yesterday that Guthrie's ORs are surprisingly busy given the state of emergency in New York right now. That Covid emergency is being driven in large part by the huge unvaccinated population in the upstate, meaning here. The hills are alive with the sound of MAGA, and they're dropping like flies while crushing our hospitals by arriving in the ER and demanding treatment for the potentially fatal symptoms of the hoax. As I was driving past Houghton Park and the Corning, Inc. campus this morning, I found myself wondering how long this now publicly-traded company will stay in these hills full of yahoos. I'm told Plano has better shopping.
Anyway, the plan now is to fly south on Thursday, pack Peg onto a commercial flight back here on Sunday (what does that cost? Don't ask), then stay there until the case settles or is tried. If the latter, we'll probably buy P another ticket on Delta to meet me in Texas on the 23rd, and I'll just fly the Columbia to meet her there for the Dickey/Loughridge family Christmas. After that we'll fly to the farm unless she needs to work that week, in which case we'll fly to Corning for a week and then to Wyldswood to "relax" for a few weeks. That is, if the snow and ice on our NY departure days don't keep us here for an indeterminate time.
And when we get to Florida, the drama of where to sleep continues. The cabinets for the condo were supposed to arrive no later than today. The last I heard yesterday they hadn't, and so P and I will almost certainly be sleeping in a mostly unfinished and unfurnished condo. I may need to schlep the Dunlap & Shipman slow leaking air mattress over there unless Peg manages to get a mattress delivered on the same day we arrive. If you see a Mercedes roadster with a queen-sized Serta strapped to the roof driving down Harrison Avenue on Thursday, you'll know the Mike & Peg Show is back in town.
It all makes me very tired, and makes practicing law a challenge because of all the distractions. And it is not great for the two of us--I spent last night, which could have been a wonderful evening, one of my last for a while with P by all appearances, brooding over the prospect of another extended separation.
But we have tried to cheer ourselves up with the prospect of a mini-vacation in January, Omicron permitting. Like most other folks, we haven't had an actual vacation in a couple years now, and we were racking what was left of our brains trying to come up with a warm weather itinerary someplace interesting and within the U.S. Finally we struck on the idea of flying the Columbia around the shoreline of Florida, dropping into places with cool Flagler-era hotels where we could stay a night or so then make a short hop to the next destination.
Here's the tentative plan:
Day One: The Vinoy in St. Pete (land at the cool St. Pete waterfront airport, and play a round of golf while we're there);
Day Two: The Don Cesar in St. Pete Beach;
Day Three: The Casa Marina in Key West (two nights so P can hang out with friends);
Day Five: The Boca Raton Resort (play another bad round of golf);
Day Six: The Gasparilla Inn in Boca Grande (get up early the next morning and catch a tarpon);
Day Seven: The Casa Monica in St. Augustine (maybe have supper with the kids if they're in town).
Then back to Perry.
Not cheap, but no worse than taking a cruise or going to the Caribbean for a week.
And if the pandemic shuts things down again (doubtful in Florida unless the funeral pyres become taller than the palm trees), we're spending the money on a hot tub at Wyldswood. Feeling a little decadent these days.
The last time I wandered off into fantasy vacations was almost exactly thirty-one years ago now, and it's easy enough to see why these flights of fancy have returned. I was in Dhahran, had been for going on four months by that time, with no idea when or if we'd ever be going home. During the hours spent sitting alert the guys would leave on the ready room table brochures from exotic vacations we dreamt of taking once the war was over. Safaris in Africa, all-inclusive resort islands in the Indian Ocean, luxury elk hunts in the Rockies. If we survived this thing we were going to throw financial caution to the wind and have a little fun.
"To travel hopefully is a better thing than to arrive," Robert Louis Stevenson once said. That was true during those desert nights in Saudi Arabia, where the dream of some adventure far away from dreary camp life sustained us even if few ever actually climbed those mountains or swam in those emerald blue seas. I guess it's the same here, waiting for the snow and peering just over the horizon at a December spent mostly busy and alone, but dreaming of sharing some of Florida's greatest treasures on the trip of a lifetime with Peg.
We'll get through this. If the gloom returns later maybe I'll go online and flip through the photos of some of those hotel lobbies. They're something else.
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