Until he returned early on Friday.
Have you ever had that feeling of total relief? When the long, cross-country trip is over and you walk into the house and drop your bags on the floor and head up to the bedroom and flop down on the bed and close your eyes and you don't even care if your clothes are still on or you haven't shaved or brushed your teeth, you just want to fade into oblivion.
Or the end of the work-week has finally come and the day is over and the kids have all gone to bed and the house is quiet and you don't have anything planned for Saturday and all you want to do is to climb into bed and not get out until after nine in the morning so you close your eyes knowing you won't have to open them again for hours and hours and hours.
That's what it felt like when he (and all the rest of the management team) took off on that airplane and went somewhere else to spend a few days being yelled at by the Customer while we, we lucky few, stayed behind and got real work done, unhindered by the constant plague of whiny requests for statistics and status and meaningless metrics. Relief, total relief. Quiet, peaceful days. Crossing items off our checklists. Talking in normal tones of voice. Focusing. Concentrating. Working through the backlog of emails. Whittling down the stack of documents to review. Ignoring the charts with the pretty lines which were all going in the wrong direction (Progress should go UP! not DOWN!), ignoring the reminder emails of the meetings we didn't want to attend, ignoring the empty offices where we were used to being called in to hear our names being used in vain.
It all came to an end on Friday when they all returned.
"Where are my charts? Where are my metrics? Where is the new schedule? What have you been doing the whole time I've been gone?"
Work, man. Been doing work.
Lean back in my chair, close my eyes, remind myself for the umpteenth time They can't kill you.
Yeah, they can't kill you, but they can crush your soul if you let 'em.
I gotta get a real job.
Got a bit of leftover Ike here, lots of rain coming down, filling the streets, washing away the heat of summer. It's still warm outside, but not as warm as it had been. Not much of a summer, really. Only got up to ninety or so a couple times. Even then, it wasn't humid enough to be a problem. So now we have a nice, warm rain.
It would be nice to stand in the nice, warm rain and let it wash over me like a nice, warm shower. Rinse away all the tiredness, the frustration.
Why does winter look so inviting?
Winter is the time when the snow comes and encases the land in an insulating layer of white, underneath which one can hide away from everything. If the pantry is full and the refrigerator is still humming, we can survive all alone in our little house, reading books and drawing pictures and watching the glow of the fireplace.
Reminds me of those wonderful days spent at Ron and Eileen's house, many, many years ago, sitting in their living room late at night with everyone asleep but me, watching the glow of the woodstove with the wind and the rain and the winter outside, feeling warm and safe and cozy and happy, wishing the night could just go on forever.
Wishful thinking again, returning to the times when there were fewer worries, fewer concerns, fewer responsibilities (fewer does not, of course, imply none). It is in my nature, this wistful wandering among the memories of yore. Someday it might be these days that fill my yearning, back in the days when the kids were young and our lives were so simple and the world was a much nicer place.
It is difficult to live in the present when all the past's troubles have been resolved by the passage of time, and the present's are yet to be faced.
Meanwhile the rain keeps falling and the river of water rolls on down the gutter to the drain. If only it would take my troubles with it...
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