Renovation

“Waste no more time arguing what a good man should be. Be one.”

-Marcus Aurelius

I woke up this morning feeling a little like Ebenezer Scrooge on Christmas morning. The past couple weeks have been tough, very tough, but there seems today to be in the air a spirit of redemption, of starting over and doing better, being better.

I'm not sure how I got to this point, but I did and it's not a pretty sight, not at all. Too many happy hours. Too little exercise. Swallowed by work. Spiritually running on empty. Not enough minding my knitting with P, taking care of the most important part of my life. And strangely, I've reached an age where I find myself making excuses I never made before, mostly about being too old and having tried and failed to survey my life and make some necessary repairs in the past. Why bother trying when you know you'll fail?

My coffee mug's words call me up short: "What Would You Attempt to Do If You Knew You Could Not Fail?" I've had that mug a long time, and made some big leaps of faith on days that began with a cup of joe and those words. Would I be married to P, and sitting here at Tara in a town I couldn't find on a map five years ago, if I listened to my internal naysayer? I cringe at the thought of what the easier, softer way might've looked like.

So let's get started. Today I'll exercise at lunch, and have joined the Y again although it costs money. Have a few less Jamesons, ace. That should cover the membership fee.

On that point, this whole daily routine of happy hour has to go. I mean, we can still be happy, can still sit together at the end of a long day and enjoy each other's company and stories. We just need to develop a habit that does not entail a couple doubles every night. Habit? It sort of reminds me of one of my favorite album titles of all time, from the Doobie Brothers: "What Were Once Vices Are Now Habits." Ain't it so.

So I'm going to take the sage advice of Dean Wormer to Flounder in Animal House, "Fat, drunk, and stupid is no way to go through life, son."

I've got to work on myself a little if I'm going to keep P around. That means trying to better understand and correct behaviors that damage this lovely life we've created. I'm reading a book right now that P suggested weeks ago about the neuroscience of childhood trauma and PTSD, figuring that understanding the problem is the first step in addressing it. Of course, self-help psychological work is notoriously ineffective--it's damned hard to objectively assess what's going on in one's own noggin--so maybe I'll talk to someone. Maybe we'll talk to someone.

Further on that point, I serendipitously ran across an essay yesterday by David Brooks in the NYT, mourning the passing of Presbyterian Minister and writer Tim Keller. He mentioned how helpful he found the book Keller and his wife wrote called The Meaning of Marriage: Facing the Complexities of Commitment with the Wisdom of God. So I ordered it and am a few pages in now, already tuned into Keller's theme that marriage means serving the other and sacrificing for the relationship, which is a sacrament from God.

So, there's the religion thing again. I need to talk with P about this, but I feel like we lost something when we wandered out the big red doors of the Episcopal Church, me blaming the institution for things I actually owned. I think we should go back, even if the local rector can't preach his way out of a paper bag. The rhythms and the rituals and the beauty of the Episcopal rite are liminal to me, and I sense for her as well. I need structure, have not thrived living by my own credo or lack thereof. And if I'm reading books by pastors about how to be a better husband, I probably need a little time with the Big Guy, not just on Sunday but every day. I was a better person when that was a mainstay of my life--the person P fell in love with all those years ago.

The most trivial-sounding thing on my "this must be fixed" list is golf. But trust me, it's not trivial at all. Peg always enjoys being out there, except when I fly into rages over errant or duffed shots that seem to lie waiting in my bag to strike even on the best of days. Part of that is a character flaw, and like I said we'll lean into that problem and start taking it seriously (he said as if there's only one "problem"!).

But I also need some outside help with the fundamentals of the game itself, to address the whole exercise more systematically, to develop a checklist that gives me a sense of efficacy when faced with my own bad play. I think part of the rage on the course flows from feeling helpless when things go wrong, and turning red eared with shame first at the poor play in front of P, and then at my childish behavior. Let's work on both. I'll call this morning to schedule a lesson, and make that a habit while I'm up here over the next few weeks. It costs money, sure, but I'll just need to have one less brown water or high-dollar cab. Hell, it would almost pay for the lesson to eschew the cocktail I usually slosh around while I'm playing, and it's demonstrably true that the aforementioned toddy is a major contributor to my golf impotency.

So there it is, the start of a scope of work on a major renovation project for this wobbly old man. Will I have the discipline to do it? I think in the past I always figured there was so much road stretched out before me that I could get away with backsliding and not running my checklist each day. Now most of that road is behind me, and I don't have the luxury of giving myself a pass. My life and my marriage both depend on it.