Category Archives: Memories

end of the road

April 11, 2019 8:29 PM , Leave a Comment ,

(Adapted and expanded from a Facebook post from May 2018)

I don’t quite remember when I first began doing these “end of the trip” personal summaries.  Certainly as far back as the turn of the century when I was coming back home from Baltimore though I might have done it prior to that. I just remember that particular time sitting in a mostly empty Baltimore airport terminal scribbling some random thoughts about the trip into a notebook. Since that time I have done summaries for most personal vacations and some work trips.

I’m standing in front of my hotel in east London at 4 AM waiting for my Lyft to arrive. On the last day in the UK I finally get to see just a wisp of one of those famous London fogs that everyone goes on about.  Not impressed. I do however suddenly have a craving for a cigarette.  Maybe it’s the urban setting that’s doing it but the craving passes by fairly quickly.

I decided to give myself a treat after two weeks of ‘roughing it’ and got a room at an upscale hi-rise hotel. A glass and steel spire with nice new streets, expensive roof top restaurants, and all night bars and clubs where the current crop of stylish 20somethings hang out. So this is how the other half lives.

The temptation to stay another two or three nights was strong but all vacations have to come to an end and soon the night wound down fairly quickly as I had a dawn flight out of Heathrow.

The next morning up pulls an E-class Mercedes and the driver comes out wearing a peaked cap. I didn’t ask for a fancy car and I suddenly felt rather scruffy in my travel-worn clothes and my travel backpack.

We whisk down the empty streets of London towards Paddington station. Even on empty streets it would take about an hour to get to Heathrow. The Paddington express would get me there in fifteen minutes.

The driver turns on the radio. A morning DJ is doing what morning DJs all over the US would do. Playing songs, talking to callers, getting people pumped up for the work day to come.

I could live here. I could get used to using the underground and walking everywhere and the smaller houses and running from one small store to another to get things instead of finding everything in one store.

I could probably make a go of it in any of the countries that I visited. You can learn local languages and customs fairly quickly if you want to or are forced to.

At the Airport I swap out the last of my English pounds, Euros, and Korunas for good old American dollars.

I’m thinking about how I’ll get home once I step out from Hobby airport in Houston and what the weather will be like.

My mind is shifting back out of vacation mode. I planned everything beforehand so I had little to think about during the trip. I just went to my next destination and it was there waiting for me.

While people around me went about their jobs and lives I wandered round with nothing to do. Except… joggers. Walking around London and Paris in the middle of the day I would encounter joggers and I would wonder what kind of job that they had that allowed them to take a jog in the middle of the day.

For the last two weeks my room was cleaned, my bed was made, my food was cooked, and my transport was arranged but now I’m going back to the real world.

Bills to pay, appointments to arrange and keep, checklists and schedules to make. Beds to make, meals to cook, places to drive to. A life.

My first real vacation in four years. My first real mental break since my dad died. I have come to terms with the fact that he will no longer play a part in my decision-making process.

For the past five years I’ve planned my life round his needs and now that chapter is closed. I can now put my needs in the forefront. The thought frightens me a bit.

I feel a bit like a soldier that’s just come home from a war with no clue about the future.

I had my daily routines, my schedule, the course of my life all built around him and putting him ahead of everything else so that he’d never want for anything or that his health might suffer. But that’s gone now and I have to do things for my benefit and I find that hard to do.

During the vacation I tried to remember what my ‘life plans’ were before I committed myself to take care of my parents. Those notions of what was “going to happen” seem like they belong to some other person.  My life path has gone onto a totally different course.

Twelve years ago I realized that my dad would need care and what and who I could depend upon to help. Ten years ago I bought a house to take care of both of my parents, a big Four bedroom house with front and a back lawn. Totally impractical for a childless bachelor but something that would give them the space that they had been accustomed to.  Five years ago they came to live with me.

I gave up a normal social life. The invites to events and parties trickled down to a few and then to none. No point inviting me if I always said I couldn’t go. I’ve become contented with a movie or a play on the weekends.  The parents and the job filled most of my waking hours.

The job I didn’t particularly like but it would let me work from home and stay close to them so I had to keep going. This came in particularly useful in the last year of my dad’s life when I had to rush him to the hospital more than once.

But now I’m coming home tabula rasa, with a clean slate. My dad is gone, my job is gone. I lost my job in March.

Maybe my mind couldn’t concentrate on the work anymore, or maybe I didn’t see the point in staying at a job I didn’t like with no compelling reason to stay, or maybe after 15 years of doing inside sales I just burnt out.

Sales was never a good fit for me. I’ve never been a born salesman. Somehow I kept it going because I had to. But I don’t see myself going back. Not to that company at least and probably not to the sales field.

Don’t ask me what’s to come for me. I don’t know. I’ve got savings so I’m okay for a while. I told myself that I was taking this trip to get some inspiration or some new idea of where to go and what to do. I think I knew that wasn’t true.

Truthfully I just needed time away from me.

Maybe now I can force myself to look at my situation and see something that I wasn’t seeing before. Get a clue about what to do.

Landing in Ireland and running to my next destination.

(Errata – June 2019.  One of my British correspondents rightly pointed out that Lyft does not operate in the UK. I went back through my Uber ride records and confirmed that it was Uber.  All I can say is that it was 4 in the morning and I earnestly remember that it was a Lyft but I was mistaken.)

Posted in: life in general, memories, travel, vacations, work

The high cost of success

December 17, 2014 6:23 AM , Leave a Comment ,

[Author’s note.  This is a reprinted blog posting from June 2008]

 

I was bored Friday night and decided to rummage through the closet for things to donate on Saturday to the local charity thrift store.  As I was sorting through old college notebooks and receipts I came upon a cardboard tube with my name on it and inside was my diploma.  I had never gotten it framed partly due to circumstances and partly due to laziness.

It was early December of ’93 and I had just cleared my library record, I had settled all my accounts on campus and I had gotten clearance from the registrar to graduate.  I went home and sneezed as I was cleaning my apartment since my parents were coming for the graduation.  That was the beginning of a three week-long flu bout.

By the next morning I could hardly get up.  Heavily fortified by NyQuil and pig-headed determination I somehow attended the graduation ceremony and stumbled across the stage to receive my diploma and then went home to lie in bed for most of December.

The diploma lay forgotten in some moving box. I was out of college but poor as a church mouse and living on credit cards as I tried to find a job, so framing a diploma was the least of my concerns.

Couple years later, I’ve got a job and I wander into a framing shop and they quote me 60 bucks for framing it.  Being lazy and needing to save money for vital things (aka going out and drinking) I put it off.

So it’s 2008, I take it out of the tube to look over.  There’s a slight crease along the side of the diploma from the graduation when I, half out of it due to the Nyquil and the fever, took the diploma out to look at it and then jammed it back in the tube hard.

On reflection, graduation should have been one of my proudest moments.  Not just for the occasion but due to the fact that I received my diploma from Michel Halbouty and shook his hand.  Who is Michel Halbouty?  He’s the last of the great Texas Oil men.  It would be like an engineer receiving her diploma from Thomas Edison or an art student receiving his degree from Leonardo da Vinci.

In any case, I finally took the diploma to a framing shop and found that success does indeed have its costs, as does laziness and procrastination.  There were frames to pick, backgrounds, different types of glass, and in no time a 60 dollar frame job turned into 390 dollar job and will take 2 weeks to be done.

The diploma will be custom fitted, sealed and protected from the elements in a dark red cherry wood frame with gold edging on a maroon and white (the school colors) background.  Normally I don’t like conspicuous display, I find it vulgar.  However, some things do deserve to be displayed and some things are worth showing off. This now sits in my home office.  The only decoration in the room.

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Posted in: education, life in general, memories, school

summertime blues

September 10, 2014 7:05 AM , Leave a Comment ,

I was coming out of the Alamo Drafthouse one Saturday in mid August.  Some of the movie workers were gathered round in the parking lot talking.  I caught a good deal of the discussion as I wandered past.  Some of them were quitting and headed back to school.  Whether to high school or college I couldn’t make out.

They were glad to be leaving work and to start the new school year but also dreading the monotony of constant schoolwork.

This brought back some memories of working during the summers in college.  Particularly a summer that I worked construction out at NASA.  My then brother-in-law got me a job as a day laborer for the company he was working with.  He was a shift foreman for an electrical contractor and needed some muscle to move parts and supplies for a new office building at the NASA complex in clear lake.

I started out by going to the early 1990s Heights neighborhood, which at the time was much scarier than the now fashionable Heights neighborhood.  I arrived around 6AM and was lost.  I stopped at a convenience store to get directions and a guy in a long green coat sidled up and offered to sell me “new tires” out of the trunk of his car.  I’m surprised he didn’t kosh me over the head with a lead pipe.

Anyways I found the main office which turned out to be a part office and part warehouse where I and 3 others watched a safety video and got a lecture from a middle management type about being very careful since we didn’t have health insurance and that was all there was to it.  I was now a day laborer.

So I spent the Summer driving out before dawn with my brother-in-law and working 14 hour days for 5 days a week and 10 hour Saturdays.  The double pay really added up over the Summer, specially since I was too tired to spend any of it.  On top of everything I signed up for a community college course to finish off an elective course in college.  So between that and work I was pretty much exhausted the entire Summer.

Work itself was tedious.  The electricians were all journeymen and were a motley crew of individualists here for the duration of the contract.  Once it finished they would all go their separate ways and get whatever jobs they could.  Union seniority was really the only distinction.  The shop steward made sure that we didn’t work a second after quitting time and reminded me often and loudly that as a non-union day laborer that I wasn’t covered by the Union in case of accident so I should join up and pay dues.  I explained to him several times that Summer that I wasn’t interested in making construction my life and that I was in fact in school.  Didn’t seem to matter to him.

I expected to be ostracized due to the fact that I was in school but the opposite seemed to take place.  Most of the electricians were interested and asked questions about modern college life.

I can’t say that I made the best laborer.  Most of these guys had been working hard since high school and were fairly muscular and large.  By comparison I was small but apparently they appreciated that I tried to do my job as best as possible.  Apparently day laborer isn’t a very well thought of position.  They apparently are often late to work or don’t show up at all and spend an inordinate amount of time hiding in the supply shed trying to avoid working.  Being naive as I was I didn’t know enough to hide from work and as a result I was being requested by various teams of electricians on different floors for whatever they needed.

Eventually this got me in trouble.  One of the older electricians had a son who was a day laborer.  This laborer was a snappy dresser and was not fond of getting his clothes dirty.  He was as lazy as some of the other laborers.  The older electrician took me aside one day and threatened me.  He said “Do you want to live longer?  Then stop working so hard!”  At least I think it was a threat.  Hard to tell.

The threat didn’t matter to me.  It was mid August and my time was coming to an end.  Community College was long over and I needed to get back to school and get my stuff out of storage and move back to College Station.  I walked up to the foreman’s trailer and gave my week’s notice to the site foreman.  All of the foremen there got really quiet.

“Can’t you wait for one more month, we’re almost done”  I couldn’t and truthfully I didn’t want to either.  Construction was a good experience for me but it wasn’t what I wanted to do for my life.

My last Friday came and I checked out.  The site foreman announced it on the walkie-talkie and all the electricians wished me good luck at school.  It was oddly touching.  As I was leaving one of the junior electricians came up and took me into the supply shed.  He looked left and right and behind him and handed me a scrap of paper.  “Just in case you’re interested”  Then he was off again.

It was a notice to some Christian revival meeting out in some small town I had never heard of.  Unexpected but very kind of him and I could see why he would be nervous.  The company would probably frown on this sort of thing.

I drove home that night and by Monday I was back in College Station setting up my apartment.  I had my working summer and was glad to be out of the hard world of construction work but I was also dreading the monotony of school life once again.

Posted in: Houston, memories, school, work