I am on a lonely road and I am traveling, looking for the key to set me free.
"I don't want to think about it." Peg cuts short my observation that I am on the cusp of a long stretch away from home. We are holding hands, walking down the hill to Market Street for a light bite because I've worked until seven again, and neither of us feels like cooking. We find our way to Hand & Foot, pretty much our favorite restaurant in Corning now that it's returned from the dead after being shuttered for a year during Covid. We drink Portuguese wine, pick at their sensational pickle tray, and talk about our lives. I avoid mention of the road trip looming just over the horizon. The music is too loud, exacerbated by bad acoustics in that brick-lined space, but the playlist is right up our alley: John Prine, Bob Dylan, the Byrds. Sated but not stuffed, we make our way in the fading evening light between the busy storefronts and back up through Canfield Park to our beautiful, drooping old house. Peg looks lovely.
But this morning I rolled over, grabbed my phone, and scrolled through my schedule for the next several days, like a prisoner hoping to receive a pardon on the morning of his execution. There will be no such reprieve today. In roughly twenty-four hours I will be a mile above central Pennsylvania, on my way to a gas stop in Spartanburg and, from there, a two-hour hop to Panama City. Office conferences begin there after lunch, and Saturday morning I must attend the meeting of a condominium association comprised of a couple hundred units, explaining to anyone who cares to attend our strategy for pursuing a contractor who bungled Hurricane Michael repairs. I will head to Wyldswood on Saturday afternoon, and maybe spend Palm Sunday puttering around on the boat if the weather cooperates. Depositions begin first thing on Tuesday in Tallahassee, and extend until about midday on Friday when I'll fly home just long enough to pick up P and fly to Boston for Easter.
Peg loves Easter. It's her favorite holiday in fact, or else I probably wouldn't put ten hours roundtrip on the Columbia to come home, only to leave here the following Monday for another several days of depositions and an in-person mediation (the lawyers insisted for some reason) on Friday in Panama City.
I actually have a couple days off after that, those being the weekend, before I have to be back in Tallahassee and Panama City for still more depositions and an attorneys' fee hearing. I'm trying to resolve the motion being heard that day, but opposing counsel has never been reasonable up to this point, and I see no reason to expect a rational resolution this time around. If it does settle, I may let my partner cover the depositions and just go back to Corning on the 22nd. Otherwise, I fly back here right after that hearing on the 27th, drop off the Columbia for its annual in Binghamton on the 28th, drive from there to Boston, and leave the next day for vacation.
And when I get back from that adventure, May is starting to populate with reasons I must be in Florida.
Furniture is supposed to be delivered to the condo tomorrow, but nothing about that ill-starred project has gone according to plan, so I am bracing myself for the likely scenario of camping in lawnchairs for the balance of this month. It is such a depressing setting that I end up either working until all hours of the night or hanging around the bar at the yacht club sipping Jameson's and hearing about Jano the bartender's endless workers' comp saga for the umpteenth time.
I wouldn't choose to live this way, to live apart from P most of the time as we enter this last phase of life when we're still in reasonable health, but I guess I have. She works here. I work there. They've not yet mastered the provision of anesthesia by Zoom, and her gig is a solid five days a week, 6:30 to 3. My gig still allows some measure of remote attendance, but that is getting spotty as we all pretend that Covid has ended, and there are blocks of time when I have to sport the bowtie in person. Not to mention that I am developing an issue with a staffer who seems to have decided that my remote work provides a space for her to screw off and make mistake after mistake from lack of oversight. So I guess I'll fly home, spend nights alone in a condo furnished with a lawnchair, and stand over her workstation glaring at her for never proofreading anything. That is, if she's not homebound again because her head or her tummy hurts.
"You buy the ticket, you take the ride." I've used that quote from Hunter S. Thompson so many times, from mediations to oral argument in the court of appeal, that it is a well-worn old bromide by this time. The observation seems to accurately describe life right now--our household is committed to paying what amounted to several years worth of ransom imposed three-and-a-half years ago, and the only way to meet that obligation is for Peg to leave every morning in darkness for work, and me to bill and collect, bill and collect, until that obligation ends years from now and I'm way past the point where most of my professional colleagues have hung it up. And we complicated that already onerous trudge by falling in love with this place and putting down roots, hoping against hope that we'd find a way to make it work, to reconcile "the struggle for the legal tender," as Jackson Browne put it, with rather recklessly following the call of our hearts.
Most folks fail in the attempt, lead lives where in the end they just settle, and wait for the last illness to usher them toward the exit of a meaningless life.
But, as I've reminded P before, we're not most folks. We'll figure it out.
A lugubrious gloom hangs over the Southern Tier this morning as a light rain falls outside my office window.
The moss taking over the neighbor's roof seems happy with the damp warmth. We have new tenants over there, and we stood in our dark kitchen at nine last night watching the three of them pass around a bong and blow the smoke out their open window. I stood judging them while holding a double Jameson's on the rocks, too in my own head over my burdens these days to appreciate the irony.
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