"There is only one way left to escape the alienation of present day society: to retreat ahead of it."
Up at 5:40 this morning, watching the sun rise over the pasture.
I drove over here late yesterday because I needed a break from Panama City, and to distance myself from the anger P and I both felt when yesterday's mediation became, at the last minute, 100% Zoom. Recall I flew commercial down here on Sunday, jet-lagged and completely exhausted from the non-vacation to Europe, expressly to accommodate the demand of one of the parties to the mediation that we appear in-person. Then that individual decided he was too busy to get there. Seven hundred dollars in airfare for nothing, and two weeks away from P when I could have been working remotely and resting up.
Yes, we were a little ticked off about all that.
So I drove through the woods back here last night because I feel spiritually a little closer to Peg in this place, the scene of the happiest six months of our lives. Now it's lonely and a little shaggy as the grass takes off on these warmer days, but I can still catch a glimpse or a scent of her here, and the feelings of that scary, hopeful summer all flow back to me.
Last night I arrived out-of-sorts, and Peg suggested I carve out a little mental health time this morning to go hit golf balls before conference calls and a mediation that have already begun to swallow this day. Hence, I awoke before six, worked for an hour in the sunroom, reviewing over a hundred unready emails from the week of our vacation, then traveled with hope over to the Perry Country Club for a quick nine holes before my first call.
But as I pulled through the gate there, I saw sprinklers running and a couple groundskeepers gazing at me as if to question why I thought a golf course would be open at 7:30 on a clear, cool spring morning. Silly me. The door to the clubhouse was locked. I sulked home and cooked some breakfast.
In thirteen minutes I pop up on a Zoom screen for yet another mediation, this time representing a party in a lawsuit over whether a widow who got in a fight with her husband that ended in her sister blowing off the back of his head with a shotgun should get the $280,000 in life insurance proceeds as the beneficiary of her malfeasance. I guess you can tell which side I'm on in this case. Trying to figure out how much to say in the opening session, how much to divulge that we know, to what extent I should convey the rage felt by his family over the circumstances of his demise. I want her to feel the heat, but I also want the case to settle if reasonably possible. We'll see what happens.
In the meantime, I find myself thinking of my own image on the Zoom screen yesterday, mediating a complicated business dispute involving an IT company. The face looking back at me had the pockmarked dehydration, grey-blue sacks under the eyes, and sallow complexion of someone I barely recognized as myself. Did you ever notice how presidents age twenty years during their four years in office? Dig out a photo of me from the week before the storm, and hold it up to that old man on the screen yesterday. These years of stress and speed and unceasing change have taken their toll.
But now it's time to venture back into the arena. If this thing ends in time I'll ride back to PC to attend the Inn of Court end-of-year banquet, then tomorrow go over the inventory of our ridiculously expensive condo furnishings so we can pay the decorator. Then I'll wander back here Friday night, and try to find a little peace even as I keep working like a fiend to meet the deadlines stretching from here to the date of my coronary. And so it goes.
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