12 December 2019
What I Will Miss
When I think of the next chapter of my life I know that there are things I will miss.
Me, I am a creature of rituals and habits. From making coffee to being at certain places to be assured of having someone to talk to, there are patterns in my current day to day to life. Despite the wide range of damaged, wounded and sometimes depraved human beings I come into contact with, I like to talk to people. Conversations are both my job and part of my personal life that I love. Leaving a job where I have easily conducted 20,000 interviews and, in reality closer to 25,000, I will be walking away from an average of 10 significant conversations with different people every single weekday.
On the morning of January 13, 2020 that guaranteed pool of interaction will be gone. From baristas, to coworkers, to my clients…all that will be gone. Of course I will have to find other things to allow me connection. In that I will probably be yo-yo-ing back and forth between continents and communities I am a bit unsure of how I will structure my interactions. Don’t get me wrong I will not miss the totally bat shit crazy moments, and there are a goodly number of them, but the quiet conversations, the sincere conversations, their absence will leave an empty space in my life.
My carving out a hour to write these little posts will also be different. If I do my keyboard ponding during the day it is usually at the Biggby on Friendship Circle in Lansing. If I am doing it at night I have my table at the East Lansing Public Library I almost always use. All in all I will have the time to expand the locales I want to work from. But the feel of these places has almost become a part of the writing experiences. Changes upon changes….
Time to wrap up, lunch hour is almost over. The last song to finish on the music service here at Biggby was Walking in a Winter Wonderland. The song now beginning is Little Pink Houses. Right now, right here at this time both of these songs have meaning to me. It is cold. Christmas is but two weeks off. Gotta get some stuff done this weekend. Sunday will be tree cutting.
But the lyrics“…ain’t that American, home of the free…” God how they stir my soul. I hope the America John Mellencamp was depicting survives what comes next.
1 comment:
You will love the change that retirement brings. It may take a few years to make the changes part of your life, but change is good. (Where have I heard that before?) And just wait until you find those new conversational changes! Love you, boy.
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