How the Hell Did I Get Here?

“Promise me you won’t be mad,” my wife of ten years sheepishly demanded of me one late autumn day in 2010.  How does one respond to such a request?  Go 100% honest and you’re likely to get into some trouble yourself, cave in completely and you might be setting up an unreasonable precedent.   I chose the middle road.

  

“Okay?” I tentatively said as I wait for some terrible shoe to drop into my life. 

“I put a bid on the camper we were looking at on Ebay, and I think I may win the bid.”  Though the CFO of our household, Shari’s conservative and creative management of our meager holdings were not prone to large purchases of which the other member of the board, namely me, was not aware.   This was a surprising and impulsive move.

“I thought we were going to talk more about this before we did anything?” I pleaded, “I mean we just glanced at the photos.”  Actually, I had only just glanced, Shari had been pouring over the photos of the 1957 Sportcraft canned ham camper trailer for two days -- weighing opportunity, logistics, price, and risk.  At the end of an extremely frustrating week at work, she punched in her bid, and hit “send.”

“It’s only $900, and if it’s a total lemon, it’s not like we’re out a small fortune or anything.  We can afford to risk this… Are you mad?” 

“No…” taking the computer in hand and walking to the bedroom to bring up the Ebay site.  “I’m not mad, what the hell, you gotta take some chances in life.”

Though our mid-life crisis didn’t exactly start with that small bidding war on Ebay, it did make the discussions we’d been having more real, and more consequential.  Before this, we’d just been talking, just dreaming, just making some tentative moves in a new direction.  But this, this made it real, we were going to end up with an aged, oxidized and pretty smelly box of aluminum on wheels sitting in our driveway in a very short time.  It would sit there, an unfinished promise of another way of life until we stopped talking about it and started.  If you know my wife, it wouldn’t sit there untouched for long. 

Over the last two years, I’ve had several opportunities to ask myself, “How the hell did I get here?” It’s not that I’m completely shocked by my current locations; it’s more that I believed in earlier days that life expectations and life realities would know more congruence. 

I say “I” but I really mean “we;” because it is we who are on this adventure together.  We’ve been here since deciding that staying together was more important than anything else we wanted to do since grad school.  But without going that far back I wanted to reflect on a few of the key steps of our journey toward taking this journey that brings us here. 

About 6ish years ago, never mind the specifics, Shari started asking the question, “What’s next for us?”  This is exactly the kind of question men want to hear, especially while watching their favorite movie, or trying to fall asleep.  So, I responded, “Next is…pizza!”  Am I alone in thinking that this line of questioning is a lot like the “define the relationship” talks so enjoyed by men everywhere?  I knew what she was thinking when she asked it, of course, but I just didn’t want to engage with the consequences of what the question meant. 

You see I’m the sort of “glass is half full” guy raised on “A Prairie Home Companion” faithful in the knowledge that any situation could be a whole lot worse, and that wherever I am is “pretty darn okay.”  Not to say that I am a complete stranger to restlessness, boredom or feeling cornered.  But I’m nearly positive that the grass only looks greener on the other side of the fence and I should be grateful for the grass here.   She, on the other hand, is always pushing the envelope of what it means to really live life. So, when my wife asks, “what’s next?” I find it difficult to imagine that she wants to completely pick up our life and supplant it unchanged in some other soil.  What she suggests rather is a more radical departure from our current path, from a life we wanted to a life we imagine and struggle to co-create. 

We met in our late 20’s where our trajectories intersected and eventually merged.  We were both craving a professional mission inspired by our graduate school visions of “transformative education.”  We found amazing opportunities at Appalachian for innovation, creativity and made some lasting change during our time there.  Students and faculty regularly told us that we had the coolest jobs on campus.  We grew both personally and professionally while learning new skills and strategies that prepared us for each new step.  We aggressively saved for our own place and eventually found a cool house with room for a garden and room to grow our family should the desire arise.  We were living the quintessential thirty something, dual professional dream.  We had engaging careers which paid better than enough.  Our colleagues seemed to respect us.  Our good friends kept inviting us over to dinner and parties and kept our social life thriving.  The Boone area offered outstanding outdoor recreation opportunities; some just outside of our front door.  Arts, live music, good beer were all within close reach and the list goes on and on of the good things in our lives.  Anyone on the outside might have thought, “Good for you, you’ve got it all!”  And indeed we did. 

I know you’re all waiting for the rather large “BUT” about to drop.  I must admit it’s tempting from a narrative perspective.  I will however, defer to my good friend Gareth Wheeler (an Aussie transplanted in New Zealand) who postulated that in U.S. culture, “everything before the but is bullshit.”  For us at this juncture of having a good enough life and wondering about the big “next” there is no “but”, just “and.”  The life we lead in Boone and all the things we had going for us was not bullshit.  Neither was it sustainable, and I don’t mean from a carbon neutral perspective; I simply mean, we couldn’t keep it up.  It’s like we were trying to create a stable environment for children only without the children.   Is this all life is supposed to be?  Is professional complacency in a good enough place with great people around you worth it?  And if no kids, what then?  What else is out there, “what’s next?” We needed a change…a big change.   I couldn’t avoid the question she asked, because in my heart, I asked it as well.    

We choose to go to the moon in this decade…

Like the folks at NASA, we had a deadline for launch and by hook or by crook we were going to make it to September 3^rd, 2012. Getting the trailer and beginning to work on it was the easy part.  How we even came up with all the things we needed to do within the next year and a half I’ll never know.  How much money would we need to carry us through more or less eighteen months of living on the road?  What assets do we have currently that can become savings?  What do we need/want to take with us?  What do we need to do in order to rent the house?  How can we keep ourselves on a schedule to make it all happen?  

Slaves to the Master

My partner in crime and life is perhaps one of the most organized people I’ve met.  These are powers she has, but is loathe to use.  She would rather be carefree and relaxed, but when there’s something to be done she gets down to it in a systematic, warrior-like fashion.  Like Peter Parker, she learned early that with great power comes responsibility.  Responsibility was the very thing we were trying to shed, but in the meantime we had to pile it on, and pile it on we did.  Shari woke early with ideas running around in her head and couldn’t sleep past 4 am until the Master List, which was essentially a color-coded rubric with priorities, dates, deadlines and extensions, a “List of Lists,” was fully fleshed out.  I’m pretty certain that, given the opportunity, Shari could organize our way out of our current Congressional gridlock – if only they would buy in.  

Upon the fridge our Master sat and looked down upon our meager efforts to complete it, while its underlings (the sub-lists) scattered about like so many bureaucratic fish flitting about here and there in some perpetual state of incompleteness.  A check by an item meant, in progress, a strike though it, complete! The satisfaction of crossing any item out was surpassed only by the complete trashing of a small list, and with newly found hubris, walking up to the Master and reducing that overwhelming 8 and ½ by 11 by one small fraction.  The items on the Master list might be seemingly innocuous, something you might do some free weekend afternoon while listening to Ira Glass, for example “Organize stuff in basement.”  What this really meant for us was taking everything in our basement, separating it into 4 piles; 1. to sell, 2. to donate, 3. to bring with us, and 4. to dump.  Then build, drywall and paint a new wall in that basement dividing the garage from the laundry area thus creating an area to hold the 5^th category of our stuff -- to save for whatever comes after the Peace Corps (hopefully).  In all honesty, neither of us can actually remember now what is in that 5^th category, secured behind the locked door of our basement.

As we worked our way through the Master List, colors ran, arrows were drawn, 11^th hour amendments slipped in, and the horizontal lines which simultaneously indicated dogged determination, relief, and exhaustion grew.  The slaves were fighting for their freedom and were winning.  The once haughty and domineering list began to take on heavy fire as the categories fell down one by one until in a final celebratory fire on the eve of our departure consumed it entirely.  We did this to ourselves I have to remember! 

Five more minutes?

When she married me, Shari knew that I have difficulty with transitions of all kinds.  Getting from the warm bed to the shower, leaving the office to head home, tearing myself away from the latest sci-fi/ fantasy novel to go to sleep – doesn’t matter what it is, if it requires me to stop one thing and move on to another, it’s like pulling teeth to make the transition.  Each morning, I am always asking for “5 more minutes?” This might have been cute during our initial years of living together, but after nearly 15 years of living with this issue, Shari finally figured out how to outsmart me.  I’d stir at 7am on a Saturday morning (keep in mind she’d been up since at least 5am) with a cup of steaming, hot coffee under the covers near my nose.  When I awoke to the arousing smell of fresh coffee, she would inform me that some wonderful homemade breakfast was ready and on the table.  Had my modern wife turned into June Cleaver?  No, she simply wanted me to get my sleepy ass out of bed and get moving, the Master wasn’t going anywhere.  Despite the fact that every fiber in my being wanted to stay in bed, I simply couldn’t be mad at her, damn it!  Weekend and after weekend, her tactic worked, even though I knew it was coming.  She’d be up at 5am checking lists, taking pictures of the things we needed to sell on Craigslist, cleaning out closets, projecting the savings in our money market account, etc…AND she had made breakfast.  All the while, I was dreaming about swashbuckling pirates on the S.S. Hamlet fighting off intruders dressed in skimpy costumes…and snoring with a cat on my head. 

Relatively Normal?

During our countdown, I truly felt like I was taking a break from the real work of getting to our zero hour while I was at work, sitting down, in front of the computer.  Even though we had a busy semester and summer with programs galore, new staff, 2 interns, and helping our programs transition to our replacements, it felt easy when compared to the oppressive regime of our own creation.  We had created a monster in our Master, but sometimes you’ve gotta dig deep to make something worthwhile happen.  And the Master was helping us keep it together.  Lord help us if we ever have to dig that deep again.  Fortunately, we have a way of losing the finer details of suffering to the distance of time.  And time for us has become somewhat different since leaving, perhaps relative?  The summer was a blur which ended in our departure and what seemed normal to us only months ago, is now foreign.  All we went through has brought us to this place and this new pace of life.  It is more than a trip, more than an adventure; it is a new life for us – one that will be hard to transition.   Can I have 5 more minutes please?