I've fallen away from blogging, distracted by necessity. There's so much going on that it's too much to tell, some of it hard to fully describe, some other unwise to do so. The Husband... has been working again, since mid-winter. He has a consulting agreement and it's taken a little while but things have started to happen, the kind of things that lead to long-term security for all of us. I can't help but think that this has something to do with The Oldest returning home from five and a half years of living in North Carolina, getting educated in his chosen field. Could it really be pure coincidence that the years of The Husband...'s cessation of productivity were exactly the years that The Oldest wasn't here pushing him? The Oldest might have still been in high school, but he was intensely involved at the strategic level in our family business during the early years of the patent saga. He stayed informed while away at school and was always copied on everything of importance to the effort: patent applications, amendments, rejections, and petitions; business presentations, proposals, contracts and agreements. Still, he wasn't here to, er, motivate his father with his almost uniquely determined and tenacious will, or support him with a full spectrum of assistance, a job I exhausted myself with for many years, a job to which he brings passion and youth and his considerable energy. This recent flurry of work has been a team effort, requiring my participation. It's an odd labor, not obvious to the outside observer, a tremendous transfer of energy from the family, unhealthily, to make one plus one plus one equal five, to increase the standard of living for all of us, into which I have been dragged kicking and screaming for (please, God) one last round, the necessity that has distracted me.
Work, job and baseball, all making for a life that's quite full. We lost the championship in a great game with a better opponent. I was disappointed but it would have taken one of those "any given day" scenarios for us to snatch a victory from them just that once. We were 0-0 through 4 innings but we made a costly mental mistake (it wasn't even a real error) and gave up 2 runs in the 5th. They scored another in the 5th. It was as it should be. We were a good team. They were better. They deserved this, just like we deserved it last year when we met in the finals. It is over and we're on to summer ball and a much higher level of competition. First game is today, this early evening. I'm not as worried about the heat as I am the bad air. We've had one practice, last Thursday, the 21st, the longest day of our year. We started at 7:30 and practiced for close to two hours. We turned on the lights towards the end to optimize the experience but could have easily gone on without lights. It wasn't fully dark when I closed the park, turned the lights off and drove through the closed canopy of trees that line the park's entrance by the fire station.
Much seems right with my little world. Last week's business, which included The Husband...'s traveling to New York, was demanding and difficult but it appears that, finally, it might all have been worth it. Old relationships generated new opportunities and something seemingly little, almost a toss-aside idea, suddenly became gigantic possibility. Within it all, there was a separate opportunity for the son, and hands were shaken on a deal and a job, a tidy circle of new associates bringing new technology to old associates looking for new solutions to replace old technology. Simple and tidy, but for the calculator-melting math and a few pesky questions relative to marketers being whores. Putting aside any misgivings, I'm holding my breath as we await contracts. This could work.
Meanwhile, I'm trying to catch up, getting around to all those blogs I've so missed reading, and, last night I read The Capt.'s fascinating post on dreams. Thinking about it, I'm guessing I have less recall of my dreams of late because of lack of quality sleep. I stay up late and get up early and sleep amidst activity and noise, sharing quarters with nocturnal homemates. After reading The Capt.'s post last night, I slept late into this quiet Sunday morning and had the oddest dream. It was complex and disjointed and much of it has not come back to me but it began with spreadsheets of big yellow iron in the background as I was tracking equipment for the KnockingShitDownCompany but I was ordering flowers and there were folks there from The Husband...'s early agency days (the wife of one of his bosses). In one room Samuel Barber's Adagio for Strings was playing mournfully (is there any sadder music?), but as I walked into another room it was drowned out by a loud jingle (that I'd never heard before) for McDonalds. Then I found myself with The Husband... walking into a crowed room filled with his friends from high school except it was supposed to be for Loyola alumni (which he is not) but behind the room there was a tall wall of ice under which there were hyenas, where I learned of a tradition (think kissing the Blarney Stone), which said that those who could scale the wall and hold on at the top for some undisclosed amount of time and laugh would be granted real laughter, joy. Three of us tried, all women, but I don't remember who the other two were, just that I was in the middle and that when I reached the top of the ice wall, I realized just how hard it was to hold on amidst the slippery cold, but remembered why I'd climbed and started laughing.
So, I am happy, perhaps a little overwhelmed, but happy. We celebrated the week's good fortune Friday night with drinks and dinner out, The Husband..., The Oldest and I, amidst some of The Oldest's life-long friends, with Middle Son and The Youngest on the phone (over and over again). My errands are run for the coming week and with an eye towards preparing for a trip to New Orleans next weekend, a more leisurely visit than I've had in the past, as this time I'm not so poor and have the whole week of the 4th of July off from the KSDCo. I'll go Saturday or Sunday and he has a bit of time off from his job. I'm not sure where I'm staying yet, but I plan for it to be someplace quiet where I can catch up on my sleep, and dream.
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