Working for Another Grateful Monday

This lonely flower lived just long enough to bloom. Dad says we have to be more like plants and animals. They do whatever they can to survive. Maybe that’s why he has lived as long as he has.

This is a time of sadness for me. I have been having film noir dreams again about an alternate reality where I live alone in a dingy one-room shack somewhere on the Texas coast where I grew up. Last night I dreamed I awoke to go to the bathroom, where I knocked over the box fan that cooled the house and circulated heat from a space heater in the winter. Then I explored a countertop piled with debris, junk gathered over a lifetime but with too much sentimental value to throw out. All this with a sense of comfortable resoluteness and acceptance of such a fate.

I think these dreams—I can’t call them nightmares because no matter how horrifying they are, they are not scary until I wake up and think about them—must stem from the trapped feeling that unemployment brings.

I hate not having a job. I hate not being able to provide. And I hate that I had to sell part of a farm that has been in the family for more than a hundred years—even if Dad suggested it and basically told me who he wanted to have it. It is a bittersweet legacy.

But sometimes to prosper in the long term, we have to survive the short term. As Greenspan once said, “In the long run, we’re all dead.” So I am grateful that I have that bittersweet legacy to help me survive the short run. I am grateful that Dad advised me to sell. And as much as it irks me to listen to him tell the same stories over and over, I am glad that he is still around at 85 to do so.