January 2, 2008: it was a cold, yet
calm and absolutely beautiful morning in Walpole, MA. The sun reflected
brightly off the layers
of snow that the several December
storms had deposited,
enough to give hope that perhaps the impending squall, predicted to
come that same afternoon, might not materialize at
all.
My morning was to be
spent securing
the cargo I was taking from my empty (and soon-to-be "no
longer my own") home onto the twelve-foot trailer for the
nine hundred and twenty mile tow down to Myrtle
Beach, SC. Rather than stop at and
pay for a hotel to sleep in during the overnight trek, I had somehow
rather easily recruited my main man The Ken
as co-driver for a one-shot deal, roughly sixteen hours of
driving and perhaps twenty hours on the road all told.
As I had miraculously succeeded
in unloading my third-hand refrigerator only two days earlier,
and had subsequently packed away everything I was keeping from the
kitchen, I had no facility for
preparing any meal nor even the de
rigeur cup of tea. If ever a day called for
breakfast this was it, so I headed the three miles down the hill to the
local Dunkin' Donuts for an infrequently purchased, but reasonably
known quantity:
sausage, egg undt chiz
on a bagel (poppy seed), and the aforementioned tea (with milk, but no
sugar, so I can add it with the packets and not get a sugar
headache when they ladle in six or so spoonfuls on their own).
All
to go, natch. It was
still rather early, so there were but few cars on the road and no one
in the place. I was back out and on my way in moments; things were
looking as good as I suppose they could, given the circumstances.
Now, people, here you should insert,
to whatever extent you see fit, the
ugly, jarring sound of screeching tires, for I must ax you: could
there be anything worse
than arriving back home -- "home", that is,
for literally just a few more hours -- wishing only to eat that egg
sandwich...while looking out your kitchen window...perhaps focusing on
the now snow-covered
front yard where your own marriage ceremony was performed on a hot
August day sixty-four
months ago, thinking back about the years gone by and the memories for
those few
moments...or perhaps watching the deer that slept overnight in
the backyard chowing
down on those pain-in-the-neck bushes, the ones that always
killed any hopes of efficient leaf-blowing...before needing to snap out
of it and finalize all the cargo
loading...only to find that they didn't
put any milk in the tea?
Seriously.
Alas, the storm did finally hit later
in the afternoon, with less snow falling than called for. It was still
enough to create a near-catastrophe which could have completely screwed
me over, and which required an emergency appearance of The Tokish One (tm) to
help deal with and dismiss. And naturally it
was still enough to convince the various highway
departments to coat the roads with salt, most of which ended up being
worn by the items in the trailer and thence carried down South.
In short, the day capped a tumultuous
eighteen
months or so which featured the collapse of a handful
of minor, trivial
things such as, um, right: career, homeownership and marriage.
I certainly valued the
first of these elements for its having provided the means to acquire
the second, which itself was more than agreeable and worthy of being
proud. Still, it was the loss not of these but of the last, the
marriage, that
is by far the most regrettable. I suspect that my ex-wife would somehow
believe I am not very sad over the unraveling of our hoped-for life
together. On this, I cannot assure you strongly enough, she would be
wrong.
So, after spending some twenty-one
years living in
and around the Boston area (or twenty-five if you want to count the
four years in college), I no longer had any compelling reason to stay
there. Economics and convenience suggested a temporary stay down in
South Carolina, to regroup and begin
considering an approach to the "back nine", as my man JJ was fond
of
saying. Seven months later and the jury's still out on those
results, but it doesn't matter 'cuz it's time to move on.
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