Apartment Living

Zena and I are doing airbnb this week. Location is good. Maintenance not so much but it is clean. Zena is on guard for people walking up the steps and the footsteps in the apartment above. Good news is she will walk up and down the stairs to the second floor apartment. Big surprise was no coffee maker but a drive through less than a mile away. Wish me luck tomorrow my first big day on the route. Coffee first, drop Zena off for her first day at new school, then to shuttle parking lot to the office. In the afternoon reverse course. Sounds so easy until you stir in traffic. Wish me luck. One week at a time.

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A dilemma

Once again I am caught by my own idle talk. Fifteen months ago I said I needed to go back to work, tongue in cheek, in repsonse to the acknowledgement that what I wanted to do with my free time took $ and for the first time since 1984 I didn't have a job and I had not won the lottery. So I put my name in for a project management job thinking, who would hire me, it was turning 68. And they did, and here I am. It is a time limited gig, ending at at Thanksgiving because of business rules that it is 18 months and you are our or convert to and FTE. I have been looking forward to Thanksgiving. I planned to start looking in mid November for something that would carry me to December 2017. My official retirement target date. When what should appear but a jolly old man and, no, no, no. A project Bruce has been working on lost a PM and is preparing to let the other one go. It is an opportunity for him to bring in his own team. Ray, a great guy I have worked with before is taking PM 1 job and I just interviewed for PM 2. The job is something I like doing and am good at, it pays way better and will be based in Atlanta and next fall in NJ, where hubby is now AND Ashby will be. So what is the dilemma.

My need to please. My current boss appeals to my smartest girl on the block drive. Please don't leave, she is marketing me to everyone on the team who may have an FTE opening in the fall. I am loved. How can I leave. Oh vanity you are my Achilles heel.

The other true worry is Miss Zena. For the first two months I will be in Atlanta a lot. Not full time but 4 days a week for several weeks while I build a team.

I think I answered my own question. I talked to my $ guy who recommended working until Dec 2017 and some downsizing so I can retire the way I want to. This gig is better than the projected so I can start a new furniture fund for the new abode. I am lucky to have options. I am grateful to be asked. So one more interview tomorrow and see if they actually offer me the job.

 

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Wednesday October 5

Wednesday is Jason's birthday.  It is a big milestone - 16.  Except we won't be celebrating it with him and his Mom and brother, he will not be blowing out the candles or ordering his favorite meal, dessert first.  He will be a hole in our hearts that we can never fill.  In My Sister's Keeper, Jodi Picoult writes, In the English Language there are orphans and widows, but there is no word for the parent who loses a child.  Through her character Kate, There should be a statute of limitation on grief.  A rule book that says it is all right to wake up crying, but only for a month. That after forty-two days you will no longer turn with your heart racing, certain you have heard her call your name.  That there will be no fine imposed if you feel the need to clean out her desk; take down her artwork form the refrigerator; turn over a school portrait as you pass - if only because it cuts you fresh again to see it.  That it is okay to measure the time she has been gone, the way we once measured her birthdays.  See, as much as you want to hold on to the bitter sore memory that someone has left this world, you are still in it.  And the very act of living is a tide; at first it seems to make no difference at all, and then one day you look down and see how much pain has eroded.  

I wonder how he keeps tabs on us.  Was he sad that he missed us and sorry for the hurt he brought to his Mom and brother? Was he happy to see us talking to each other? Does he check up on us? Or has he taken on a new role of looking after other children who are hurt and afraid, children who feel that no one hears them.  If there are better angels, wings that brush against the faces of people so they instinctively know something or someone is there, I would gladly mourn him without any comforting breeze if I thought he had moved on as another of the better angels to comfort a child at risk so that one less mother or brother counts the days he has been gone like they used to count his birthdays.

Jason, in your honor I will eat dessert first on your birthday.  I will wish that you would wrap your Mom and brother in the shelter of your wings and when they laugh and feel guilty, remind them that you would have thought it was funny too.