Just Sayin'

I wondered if Kim was catching me stealing glances down the row of manicured back lawns that stretched down the block. “Kim is a friend,” I thought to myself. She gets it.

Her kids—as well as a couple of others from the neighborhood—were buzzing orbits around her on the sidewalk, on the parkway. They were still releasing energy bound up from a full day in classrooms, now set off by the sun and fresh air on the walk home through the neighborhood. Kim smiled, kindly, in between the snaps to keep the kids corralled back off of the street and their interruptions of our conversation. I checked Megan and Kylee to see if they were looking for the same things and felt a little relief in seeing it held no interest for them.

The sunset maple was gone, I noticed, but the willow was still there. There was a grill on the flagstone patio where before the outdoor furniture rested. It looked bare, with just the grill there. It needed something more, I thought. Hours and days went into hauling off the dirt and setting all that stone level, and it deserved something more than just a solitary grill resting on it.

Kim and I chatted, as best I could, while I tried to keep my attention held on her. I was in the car, Megan and Kylee with me, idling in the middle of the street. We were close enough for easy, conversational voice, but the distance between us seemed both vast and tangible. Today it felt just a bit uncomfortable there, being in the neighborhood.

I remembered how much I hated that willow, even in all its tenacity and grace. I thought it a weed tree. It was her favorite, her choice. I begrudgingly planted it and wished it dead, then later debated for two years over killing it and setting it ablaze. A fitting end for it, I thought.

I felt the curious urge to drive around the corner, see if the garage door was open, but then thought better of it. It would be picking at the wound, obvious and maybe hurtful to the girls. It would be selfish and silly and serve no good purpose. Not now.

How long ago was it? I was already struggling with remembering it in the context of time. Two years? Three years? How long didn’t matter.

One evening in particular burns in my memory even though I can’t put a date to it, or frame it with any other life events. I was sitting at my desk, paying bills and mapping out my finances. The girls were at their mother’s house for the evening. In the figures scrawled across the pages it was all too obvious. The promotion didn’t happen. The raise was way less than expected. The reserves were all gone and the 401k was tapped. I wasn’t asking family—even if they could help—to throw money down a rabbit hole that didn’t show any promise of a bottom. It was game over.

The certainty washed over me, a wave of disbelief, like so many before since she asked for the divorce. I’d come to recognize that each new step in the grinding and slow legal process would shake me from my fragile denial, remind me that it really was happening.

I got up from my desk and went to my room, and curled up on the bed. I looked at the walls around me and wondered how and when I would make them just that to me—walls. I had to forget the suede-textures and fall colors I carefully chose and painstakingly painted. I had to forget the river birch in the front lawn, prairie grasses clumped around it, that sunset maple and the willow (that damnable willow) and the hours invested in planting, pruning, and maintaining. The same for the Japanese maple in front of the windows; it would now become a Father’s Day gift I would not be able to take with me. The garage (man, how I wanted to see what he did—if anything—to that garage), painted, the floor coated with epoxy, the walls lined with cabinets, the workbench handmade, a lifetime of accumulated tools on the walls—all that would have to somehow become meaningless material.

I told myself things. I told myself I tried everything. I told myself it was a product of the divorce. I told myself I was like so many in the area, in the state, in the country. I told myself it was the economics of the times and it was unstoppable, that it was a larger-than-my-life freight train rolling over thousands. I tried to tell myself it didn’t define me, wouldn’t define us. I was grasping for something that would help me shake the feelings of shame and blame and guilt.

But none of it was working.

And I worried. I worried about the whispers, about what the girls might suffer at the hands of their friends if they chose to be either cruel or, at the very least, inconsiderate. I hoped with all hope we could hold out for the end of the school year before we had to move, could slip quietly into an apartment during the summer when everything would be less obvious. We had an exchange student with us at the time, and I didn’t want to face having to uproot her as well. She never wished for anything like this as a part of her American experience.

We did make it through that school year, and I was able to shift mental gears from feeling beaten to feeling empowered. The work and preparation that had to go into finding someplace else to live and making it a home took over, and the disconnect began. Anticipation replaced fear and uncertainty and dread and melancholy, as best it could. The garage sale helped me sell every little unnecessary remnant of what would soon be our former lives.

I took the girls with me looking at apartments, tried to give them some sort of investment in our new home. They seemed eager and excited. I couldn’t tell if they were just trying to help me (What had she told them?) or if they never really had much invested in wherever we lived. I remembered how many times we had moved for my career when we were all still a family and wondered if that afforded them some sort of detachment. I envied them for that, because this house was home to me, more than any others had been.

We haven’t gone back very often since; it’s only Kim with whom we keep in contact, and the invitations to visit have been few and far between. Whenever we have gone back, the girls and I would take different roads into the subdivision—avoiding the street we lived on—so as not to tempt the feelings I felt I could barely keep suppressed beneath the surface.

It wasn’t so much the house as it was the intangibles I missed, struggled to let go. There was a void where before there were feelings of community and belonging. When we first moved I used to call and see if there was a fire pit gathering planned during one of my weekends off, see if we could stop in, but somehow came to think that maybe I was inviting us back into something that made everyone a little uncomfortable. After a while I quit calling to see if they would call to invite us, and wasn’t surprised to never hear from anyone. Disappointed, but not surprised.

Those days, our house still sat empty, and everyone—including me, I think—still identified us with it. We’d built it, after all. But, now it’s sold, and the new owners have likely filled any and every void we may have left for the neighborhood, financially or emotionally. I imagine they’ve joined in those fire pit gatherings we so enjoyed, our absence now barely noticed, if at all.

It’s only days like today—when we are in the old neighborhood—that some of those old feelings resurface. I don’t want them to, but they do anyway. I wish those feelings away as best I can for myself, and hope nothing similar is being processed by the girls. I wish them all the protection their youth and naiveté can afford them.

Later that same day—in another cozy subdivision not far from our apartment—I drove Megan to her singing lesson. She’s been several times now, and I’ve never even gone in to meet her teacher. When I take her, I sit outside in my car on the quiet street that meanders past landscaped lawns, three car garages, and bicycles splayed out under basketball hoops in the drive, all the while feeling out of place, detached. This isn’t me, isn’t us. Not anymore.

© 2010 Cody Kilgore. All Rights Reserved worldwide under the Berne Convention. May not be copied or distributed without prior written permission.

"All That We See or Seem..."

I was digging around in some old boxes the other day, in search of something I just knew I had stashed and kept somewhere for safekeeping because I knew I would surely want to have it as a memento later. I was not having any luck finding this particular item, but I was finding all sorts of other memorabilia that I had long forgotten I'd kept. After a few minutes I gave up on what I thought would be a few minutes of searching, and let it turn into a much longer trip through memories.

Among the things I found which were most interesting was a list of the “100 Things I Want to Do In My Lifetime.” I can’t remember at what age I originally wrote this; it may have even been prompted by a speech I once heard by Lou Holtz, the then-venerated coach of Notre Dame football. But I had not heard that speech until I was in my thirties, and I am pretty sure I remember dreaming up this list in my early twenties sometime.

The list ran the gamut; it hit on everything from visiting that rare travel spot (“Tour an Aztec or Incan ruin,” or “See the pyramids”) to civic or charitable tasks (“Help with A Habitat house,” and “Fulfill a Dear Santa letter”), and even the less ambitious (“Handcraft a piece of furniture,” or “Have a recipe published”). There were the obvious ones that I have had all of my life, like getting a novel published, or doing a photographic safari in Africa, and some that I will now never get to do in my lifetime because they can no longer happen. Not unless Pink Floyd comes back together, or Dean Smith returns to coaching the Tarheels again.

Most of the list is very ambitious, although I did not think so at the time, I'm sure. I am betting that I believed it would all happen one day, with little doubt. I believed I just had to keep pushing toward the opportunities, keep hoping, keep my eyes open, and keep that hunger for seeing and learning new things. I think I've always had a hunger for learning (although my high school teachers, or Principle Klaasen may not have thought so), as well as a thirst for a certain level of adventure.

At one point in my life I let that hunger and thirst get dulled, blaming it on the responsibilities of being a father and a husband, and of providing a living for my family. I took it even further—too far—because it became more of an excuse for not living life to its fullest, and became an excuse for not even living life well. I let it make my life…well, a little mundane.

But I must have had that urge still living in me somewhere, because it tried to manifest itself in other pursuits. Instead of feeling the need to “Dive the Andrea Doria,” or “Drink a beer in Munich,” I set my sights on clawing my way up that next rung on the corporate ladder, buying a bigger and (supposedly) nicer house, or a bigger SUV. I became very good at all that.

Funny, but the one thing that was not on that list was finishing my degree in college, even though it would later become one of the most significant (for myself) accomplishments in my life. It was unfinished business, so I can’t imagine why I would have left it off the list, unless I wrote that list during my somewhat angry “I don’t need a sheepskin to be successful” days. That would date that list to somewhere in my early twenties, when I had run out of money for school, was rising fast in the ranks of the railroad contracting company I worked for, and traveling quite a bit. To know when I wrote it, it also helps to see the nature of what is on the list; there is nothing there that a father could reasonably run off and do with a family in tow.

The completion of my degree would later happen at a crucial time for me. I was forty, and my marriage was in trouble. In fairness, it was likely in trouble—at least in part—for one of the very reasons I was working so hard, to be a good provider. I was a certified workaholic. I thought that hard work would get you everything you needed, or all the rewards you hoped you would one day earn. I was always chasing that proverbial carrot that dangled just out of my grasp, sure that my equally proverbial ship would come in if I could just reach out and grab it. Every day was just one more lunge. But the time and effort I invested in that took away from what I should have been giving more energy and attention toward, and so that ship hit tough waters, and eventually rocks.

In the midst of all that, I began looking around for other ways to satisfy my need for learning and new experiences, and finishing my college degree was just the thing. I had a campus less than five minutes from my office, they offered a number of the classes I needed online, and I was alone in the town since Michelle and the girls had already moved back to Des Moines ahead of me. I thought it was a productive idea that would fill my time, my mind, my curiosity, and keep me out of trouble. And, that it did.

I was soon drifting further and further away from career ambition and enjoying more and more of the other things in life. A different perspective of Corporate America began to take shape in my mind, and I began to see myself as having been a little bit foolish in my addiction to work. I approached my role as a father differently and relished it more. I tried to be a different and better husband, thinking that I could still save our marriage.  It was a little too late for that.

Eyes opened, I moved on, with the desire for learning and experience now returning to replace the need to achieve career success and material possessions. I no longer needed those things, and instead wanted a life enriched in a different way. I wanted my dreams back.

Sometimes I worry if I am too much the relentless dreamer, and that I am sometimes fooling myself with what I think I can achieve, or am addicted to whatever it is that I do not have in my life and feel the need to pursue. It reminds me, when I think about it, of a gambler who is sure that their one big jackpot is surely going to happen for them, if they can just keep playing, just keep in the game. It’s probably a good thing I don’t gamble.

But still, I believe in myself, and I believe in the different types of pursuits that I have in my life now. I believe they are better than I’ve had during the “middle” of my adult life, and more in line with my true self. They may still be only dreams at this point, but I think we all have to harbor some sort of hopes for ourselves that are outside the scope of our everyday lives. Without them, a little of our spark dies, and we let more and more of our spirit and core erode, or just fade away. Can you imagine a life without any dreams, or something similar to a dream?  Something to which we look forward? I can’t. I could only imagine it to be like a slow death.

So I keep alive the thought that I am supposed to—no, destined to—do something more with my life. I’m not sure I could kill it even if I wanted to, anyway. It has always been a part of my life, further back than I can remember making that list of 100 things those many years ago.

When I was looking back over this list, I noticed that—for all the dreaming and wishing I did back then—I had a pretty fair amount of them I could now cross off the list. I know that they were things that were (then, when I made that list) far removed from my life and its possibilities. But, I have forty-two of them completed at this point, which puts me just about on track, given that I am only about to the halfway point of my lifetime right now.

I guess it pays to dream.

© 2010 Cody Kilgore. All Rights Reserved worldwide under the Berne Convention. May not be copied or distributed without prior written permission.