If I were a pirate, I think I'd function best as the guy in the crow's nest. For one, I have a really loud baritone voice. Even the lowest deckhand scrubbing the deepest bilgehead could hear me yelling, "Avast! Spice merchants along the staaarboard boooow!" Second, I enjoy rum, and I think a private spot atop the mainmast would offer me the chance to sit back and get soused in peace.
And third, I'm a planner. I like to see what's coming.
Every year I buy a super-cheap desk calendar and tape the months up on the wall in my kitchen, three at a time. Then I write down all the stuff I have to remember--deadlines, birthdays, business trips, you name it. Yesterday, after I put up April, May, and June, it suddenly dawned on me that I have very little idea of what my life will be like when the second quarter is over.
I tried to think of stuff to put on the calendar, and all I could think of was Robert's Little League schedule and TwoBert's birthday. The rest is wiiide open, mostly because I have no idea where I'll be living next year.
I've been in the city proper since college, and as I've always maintained, New York is great when your kids are wee nippers. It gets challenging, though, when they reach school-age, as TwoBert is about to do, and you read about draconian budget cuts while kindergarten waitlists are burgeoning. (I know! Waitlists? Huh?) You know your kid could be shunted to some farther-off school (in a VAN down by the RIVER!), and you wonder what it will be like to get there and back when there's no one left to run the subways. You know that New York surfed to family-friendliness on a wave of imaginary frothmoney that's just no longer there, and when you think back to city life in the 70s, you kinda don't want raise your kids to be Sweathogs.
And you mention these fears to other parents in the neighborhood, and they look at you like you just blew your nose in your hands.
I guess my point to all this is that just about every facet of my life is about to change drastically over the next few months, and I'm not likely to know much about these changes until after that last Little League game is played. The real story, though, is how uncharacteristically calm I feel about it. The scorched-earth scenarios just aren't finding the purchase that they used to.
Why is this? I don't know. Maybe my soul is getting ready to molt, and I'm looking forward to shedding all these sooty feathers.
Or maybe it's just the allure of life without alternate-side street parking.
