When we tell our life stories, it doesn’t mean that we are
telling stories that are necessarily “exciting” in one way or another. Leaving a
feeling of what life was like is a part of storytelling. This provides others
with a sense of an ordinary day, it gives a glimpse of a moment in time.
I was talking to my brother the other night about how it is
possible to take a month off from a regular schedule and experience a new life
for a little while. It happened for him when he was between jobs. And it
happened for me during a month when I was in Wisconsin. For him, he still did a part time
job while he was looking for work. For me, I was still working full time during
the day at my job in financial services, but from a different location.
I was able to escape my usual routine in the Bay Area and
settle in to the pace of a midwestern summer where everyone is grateful for
those golden days when the sun shines and you can ride your bike at the
lakefront and plant flowers in your front yard. You can even sit out on the
patio for a few minutes before the mosquitos start to gnaw on your arms and
legs.
In California,
we take for granted those golden days. We have so many of them strung together
before us. Even when we have the fog, still, where I live just north of San Francisco, it is
overcast in the early morning. You wake up, you get your coffee and sit for a
bit considering the opportunities that a Saturday presents and by the time you
make up your mind to some direction, the sun has come out and you are ready to
go.
My brother-in-law Dave was visiting some years ago, just after
he and my sister got married and he came out on the patio and said, "you have
a regular botanical garden out here." Then he paused and looked around and
said, "don't you get tired of all this sunshine?"
So while I was in Wisconsin
during the past month, I was able to experience the thunderstorms and the
sudden rain that clears after 20 minutes. I saw the dark clouds over Lake Michigan. I saw the lightening streak across the sky
as I was driving to my cousin's house out in the prairie where there are fields
for miles around and the roads are long and stretch ahead with hardly a car in
sight.
And I had my walks after work.
My brother lives close to an area where there are really big
houses set back on wide lawns. These houses are built of lannon stone, with
shutters, many of them. Some are Tudor style with high peaked roofs. And there
are wide boulevards in this neighborhood. So I walked around there and felt
like I was in an Americana
fairyland.
Here I was at my brother Jim's, relishing his neighborhood and
the orderliness of his lifestyle. He's a sport's guy. I learned about fantasy
golf. He even put up with my reorganizing his kitchen, with a shrug, as if to
say, "OK, that's my sister."
He accepted me into his home. He mowed his lawn after work.
I slipped into the slower pace, the gentler routine. My walks
after work were something I looked forward to. I walked up and down the
boulevards, admiring all the gardens and the blooming peonies, some flopping
over after a rain. I wandered around those neighborhoods for an hour and when I
returned back to Jim's I was ready to make some dinner. And then some nights we
watched Seinfeld. He had all the funny episodes recorded. It was hilarious.
And we got along. He made a space for me in his home.