Taking a short break from deposition prep after an hour or so with another three to go. Still wearing the same khakis and white buttoned-down oxford as yesterday, only now with spots in the crotch and on my breast pocket from where last night's pan seared grouper spilled all over me. I've become a slob in my old age, only changing clothes when I notice a change in aroma, an old-man smell that oozes out of the fabric. At that point, I dump the outfit into the hamper, and then after the hamper fills dump the whole kit into the washer, regardless of color or fiber, to be washed together at always the same temperature. Success is getting the old man smell out of the laundry. I don't always succeed.
I ran across an amusing essay in this morning's UK Guardian about stepping into old age, written by a guy about the same age as me.
Much of this resonates. I'm not aloof, you understand--I'm just a little deaf these days.
His comment about eroding ambition and energy struck home for me. The last several months have been a steady stream of six day work weeks, with each workday lasting sometimes eleven or twelve hours. Throw in lots of travel, and pretty soon there's no time for anything else.
But I don't want to do this anymore, don't want to work all the time and feel life ebbing away. P and I were talking the other day about the empirical evidence staring us in the face when we encountered some photos of us together before the storm and the pandemic. P's done better than I, but those visages looking back at us from mid-2018 could easily have been from a decade or more ago. We're both tired, and have packed a mountain of change into a very short time. It shows.
I don't feel like working this hard anymore, feel time flowing rapidly toward a moment when I just can't.
This morning over coffee on the condo patio, watching an osprey hunt in the bay as a fishing boat came off the Gulf into a lagoon so the crew could rest before going back out tonight, Peg mentioned a social media post she'd seen suggesting the Apalachicola Bay oysters are coming back. Although once the source of some of the world's most plentiful and delicious oysters, Apalach lost all of that over a decade ago when the Deepwater Horizon oil spill led to the ill-advised decision to harvest everything in the bay ahead of the oil slick that never arrived. Between that and Atlanta sucking the river dry and causing the salinity of the bay to creep upwards, it seemed the legendary Apalachicola Bay oysters were a thing of the past.
But apparently not. There are oysters to sell again, and the supply is gradually coming back. That good news is tempered, however, by the observation by the old timers that they can't find any of the younger crowd who wants to work the oyster beds. The labor is difficult, hot, and sometimes dangerous, and no one wants to do it.
Meanwhile the Air Force can't find enough twenty-somethings to fill its cockpits, which strikes this old fighter pilot as remarkable. I'd heard that at the Air Force Academy, once a production line for future aviators, most of the cadets opt not to embark on a career in aviation, hoping to serve a shorter stint in something that will pave the way for an easy corporate job later.
And closer to home, of course there is a marked scarcity of qualified baby lawyers who want to take an associate job in a law firm like ours, laboring for years in the hope of making partner, turning their youth into a sea of six-minute increments. So old guys like me who are ready to slow down don't have the option because there's no one to step into our place.
It occurred to me, on the drive into the office early this morning for a conference call that never happened because the client no-showed (trust me, they'll get a bill), that our mental and emotional state is as much a part of a collective consciousness as our individual predicament. We're like a boat drifting on a river filled with other boats, sometimes lashed to one another for a long stretch, sometimes just bumping into each other before drifting off in opposite directions. Whatever's going on there in the boat is only a piece of the story, because wherever that collective armada is going creates the context and influences what's going on inside. We can work all day on scrubbing decks and making plans to re-varnish the teak, but in the end we feel what's going on around us, feel what's going on in all those other boats.
Which is a long, imprecise way of suggesting that this sense lately that I'm ready to slow down, take charge of my life, set boundaries, and work less, may all be as much a reflection of our moment in time together as my own senescence and sense of impending old age. We've all been through a lot, seen change and disruption in the space of a few short years that might've taken generations in another era. It's not just me--we're all tired.
But this worn out old fighter pilot turned professor turned priest turned lawyer needs to pull it together one more time and get ready to wade into the arena for another acrimonious deposition covering an extremely complicated and arcane subject. After all, there's no one else to do it. Maybe someday.
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