Saturday night's all right....
“And he said to me, “My grace is sufficient for you, for my strength is made perfect in weakness.”
2 Corinthians 12:9
Do you have those thanksgiving horror stories? Did you have a drunken relative causing a scene at the main family gathering? I thought about that on Thanksgiving during the day. They were giving a movie with like the worst Thanksgiving family moments ever.
It was depressing really.
I asked the Wife why she was watching it.
I even suggested that it wasn’t the right thing to watch for the occasion. You know, mindset, frame of mind, that sort of thing. I could feel my mindset shift, becoming more and more susceptible to a gloomy mindset. I saw in that movie the grim visage of Christmas coming. Those things were weighing heavily on me all week coming up to the holiday. As our bank account dwindled and the phone continued to remain silent, no hits on job inquiries, I started to feel the edges of despair creep up on me, like nightfall in winter. I think I was fourteen when I first noticed that it got dark a lot earlier in the winter.
It just hit, BAM, like a snowball in the face.
It was four in the afternoon and we were banging the basketball of the milk crate nailed to the brick wall of the cleaners we used as our basketball court when it dawned on me that it was dark, gloomy, cold.
Winter had snuck up on me.
That’s how I felt as night descended on Thursday.
I didn’t want to go to my Mother in law’s house. It was her turn to host. We did it last year. Did I ever tell you about Virgil our turkey last year? He was awesome. Anyway, I was finding excuses to delay our arrival. I think that the Wife understood, worse still, she was feeling what I was I think.
I went, she went, we all went as a family.
To be more precise, I was there in physical form but I was miles away mentally. I was lost on that edge again, caught looking over the precipice trying to see into that darkness beyond and figure out what Christmas was going to look like.
Will we be moving out of our house?
Would I be working?
So many unknowns and here I am supposedly the answer man. Billy knows, ask Billy.
Well I will tell you a secret that I have been dying to tell for years.
I don’t know anything about anything.
I just don’t know.
I don’t know half of what people expect me to know, and I am even less sure of the things I thought I once knew implicitly.
Confidence?
Whatever grains of confidence I had squirreled away have gone. Crushed under the weight of false expectations and that murky, foggy foundation I set up for myself. I deluded myself into believing that I could skate through the rest of my life leaving nothing in my wake.
What did it matter? I wasn’t happy where I was working, doing the work I was being paid to do, working with the people I was paid to work with (which in my defense, turned out to be wholly accurate since they jumped at the first opportunity they had to dump both me and my salary).
I was empty at work, empty at home too for that matter. Life was turning all different shades of gray.
I was fading into my own background, irrelevant in my own life.
Can you become your own afterthought?
Absolutely, and that is what I was quickly becoming. With all that already going on in my head, you can imagine the wreckage that was left sprawled across the landscape of my mind and soul after getting canned.
Canned. Like a fish.
Call me Charlie Tuna.
I was looking forward to Thanksgiving with all the enthusiasm of a turkey. I didn’t want to be thankful, I wanted to plant that seed of resentment and let it grow; nurture it until its vines choked the rest of my miserable existence away for good.
Weed in the garden? You better believe it.
I shivered through the evening, gliding between family members like a ghost. Not really acknowledging anyone. I managed to find twenty minutes of silence dropped in a chair next to the pool, echoes of laughter mocking me from people who were still alive.
Me? I was the ghost of Christmas future.
I was angry and bitter.
I know what you are thinking and you’re wrong.
I wasn’t really thinking about my former job at all. I have come to terms with the fact that it’s all over. That part of my life was crumpled up and thrown out like a two week old section of the Sunday paper. I felt like all that effort and experience was as useless as last year’s black Friday coupons.
And so out it went.
What I thought about, as I leaned back into the cold vinyl of the pool chair, was my father. I was wondering where he was.
More to the point, why wasn’t he there with me.
My Dad, if you had bothered to ask me years ago when there was life in those deep pools of brown beneath my eyebrows, was my hero. I wanted to be like him, kung Fu master, the hoodlum priest, respected by everyone, friend to everyman, devout follower of Christ.
A hero.
At least to me.
Well damn the devil, I have learned a little in this, the unenviable affliction of mid life crisis. He is just a man. A man with fears and dreams not realized and hope and he is weary.
Gray cracks in the armor, snow on the mountain, shaved and bare as it is.
He doesn’t call. He doesn’t come to me to console, to council, to tell me it gets better, light at the end of the tunnel, the darkest hour is just before dawn.
I would have settled for a stitch in time saves nine.
Insert your own cliché here.
I was mad at him for not being there.
Is that fair?
Do you know why he wasn’t there? Well, at least my opinion of it? I think he feels that I am strong enough to get through this, that somehow I am man enough to fight my way out of the shadows and come through like a champ.
In short, he looks at me the same way I looked at him as a kid, infallible, Herculean, imperturbable, a man’s man.
Guess what? He’s wrong too.
I got over the shadows and gloom and the whole daddy’s not here, waa, waa, waa, poor me long enough to stuff some hot turkey (better you than me pal) and other traditional food stuff into my gullet.
I passed on saying grace when offered the opportunity.
Just let me have my misery with a side of pity party to go with the gravy and stuffing thank you very much.
Friday came like morning always does, too soon and just a little too brightly for my tastes. But it was okay, I had a thing to do, a meeting to make, a prospective client to woo.
I thought it went well.
After I got home my brother in law came over and we basically blew stuff up online. LAN parties, you gotta love ‘em. I was pleasantly distracted until about 1 am with hover tanks, drop ships, titans and mech walkers.
Bang, bang, boom.
Saturday was so much better. I had fun the night before just goofing off and it was a beautiful day. We spent most of the day in the park with family and friends and I even got a call from my buddy Moe (yeah, the Moe listed up top as a contributor on the blog yet never posts… trust me he contributes behind the scenes).
He said he felt like a bad friend because he hadn’t spoken to me all week.
I laughed.
Are you kidding me, a bad friend? I don’t think he realizes how much his call helped. When someone is going through a tough time, we tend to leave them alone, not sure of what to do, or what to say.
I know, that’s usually what I do. I figured if I was in a pinch I would rather be alone and it is for the most part true. But what I need is different from what I want (and that topic is a whole other blog entry). I was glad for his call.
After the party in the park wrapped up we returned home, smiles on our faces, feeling really good.
Then I checked the mail box.
My last paycheck was in there.
I was determined to not let it get to me. So what? I’ll make more money somehow. I will get another job or I will make enough money freelancing to keep us going. It’s going to be okay. God said so.
I could see that shiny, glowing bit of hope above me.
It’s so pretty hanging there above my head like that. Makes me wanna just snatch it up in my hands and…
Then I opened the envelope and looked at the check.
I was expecting a full two week paycheck for whatever reason and there was only one week in there. Instead of enough money to cover the car payment, mortgage and get some food, there was enough for the car and food.
Suddenly that shiny bit of hope turned into a hook and I felt like I was yanked from the water and reeled in.
Ha! Got one! Look at the size of this one! Woo hoo!
Charlie Tuna.
I felt like someone had gutted me.
Pass the butter.
Wifey and I had officially reached our end point. What came next was about an hour of wailing and gnashing of teeth. What do we do? Why is this happening? We know people that are worse that seem to never have this kind of trouble, waa, waa, waa, poor us.
In the end Wifey needed a walk and left, disappearing into the warm night air.
The kids were in and out of my office yammering away, oblivious to the doom in the air.
Don’t you see it kids? It’s game over man, game over.
I was done.
Verklempt squared.
I quietly asked them to go watch a little tv for a bit, I had work to do. Hey, at least I had that $30 logo auction I sold on eBay!
They retreated to the living room, giggling and laughing all the way. I wish I was that young again, that innocent. I think back now and I can see my father sitting in the shadows during those days when we struggled financially and I get it know.
I so definitely get it.
I felt bad as the tears started to scald my face. Yeah, the burned. The greater the grief the more fire in the tears I think.
I tried to get up and walk out, to go sit with the kids and borrow some of their hope in the form of hugs and kisses and I love you daddy, you’re the best daddy in the world.
It’s the best medicine. A cure all.
I never got past the door.
I crumpled near the door, woozy and weak and struggling to contain the sounds of failure as I slumped to the floor sobbing. Who wants their kids to hear them falling apart? Night had finally descended on my life. It was dark and cold and so far from dawn. I felt the heavy wet blanket of despair cover my completely and I was lost in its darkness.
I cried to God. I asked why he hated me, why? Was I evil? I know that I am no saint. I know I have done things in my life that ought not to have been done. I cried out for forgiveness, for what felt like the one millionth time.
At least a million, probably more than that.
“I can’t take it. I can’t take it. Please, please God, please, all I want is a little hope. Hope. Please.”
The words spilled out of me, jumbled, bleeding, washed out of me with the tears.
They pooled at my feet. I wanted to lay down and give up.
Bankruptcy, foreclosure, near divorce, I had survived all of it before but I was at the very end.
“Please Jesus, I need some hope…”
Ah, the delicious weight of the world on you, the sweet, crushing press of all your guilt and shame and wasted opportunities.
“My grace is sufficient for you, for my strength is made perfect in weakness.”
I felt like I needed air suddenly and I took a breath like a man that had his head held under water for too long.
I gulped that breath down, swallowed it along with what was left of my tears.
And it was gone, the weight, the gloom, the doom, the anxiety, gone.
Someone had taken that blanket off of me.
I stood up and wiped my face clean. I could feel my legs under me, I could breathe again.
The problems were still in the room with me but I was no longer afraid of them.
Yeah, weird huh? I had, dare I say it? Hope.
Hope.
I want to say it again.
Hope.
It showed up in a crumpled heap on the floor in the corner of my office on a Saturday night.
It’s still night outside as far as I can tell but I know that dawn approaches.
The glow is in the horizon people.
Dawn comes and I will wait for the new day.
Hope.
