Life Comes at You Fast

If you are going to try to sell me something, make me laugh. The commercials that come on and try to drown me in sound and fury or fear I tune out immediately but the ones that are funny I remember and even lean forward to watch. I love the Geico cave man in his therapist's office. His cell phone rings. "It's my mother. I'll put her on speaker." Or the one where a woman is going for a boat ride in Vienna and handsome Fabio is steering her boat in a flowing, white romance novel shirt: they go under a bridge and in the next moment he is decrepit and old. Life comes at you fast. Last night I had to show my ID. The DMV never takes your picture anymore; they just mail a new sticker. Maybe that's changed. But over the last many years I've had to visit for a change of address or renewal that's what happened. My driver's license picture is from about 1993, about 15 years ago. I hardly recognize myself. I wasn't nearly as handsome then.

But the changes and movements of life come quickly and they are often unexpected, occasionally jolting or wrenching, filled with humanity, good things and bad. My friend Daphne at work is taking some vacation time to visit her daddy, who is very sick, and she gets ready for her trip she's filled with the realization she may be going to say goodbye to him, although in the last few days he seems to be rallying his strength. There's a dear and radiant woman in the commercial department whose husband recently underwent surgery for cancer and the doctors discovered it has spread to his lymph nodes. He'll begin chemotherapy in a few days. Her spirit is strong and courageous, utterly inspiring to witness, but what an unspeakable trial this must be. Can you imagine, going to work and leading a meeting, with all that in your heart? She herself is a cancer survivor, a miracle of God's grace, and an inspiring person. It's amazing what people overcome and endure.

I've mentioned my son Roger here many times, 21 and full of life and promise. Recently his girlfriend of six years, since sophomore year of high school, an eternity in his young life, broke up with him. "I just feel we're going in different directions," she told him. It may lead to some wonderful growth and opportunities for him but right now he is devastated and drinking too much, and my heart hurts for him. We are only born with two fears, the fear of abandonment and the fear of failing, and losing a loved one, in any way, is both. We hurt to our core. We feel the ground under our feet has fallen away.

Yesterday in my little life two big things happened, or at least two things that were important to me. I met with Richard one more time and we agreed to become roommates. I'll be living in the little house in Portland's Gateway district, just a few miles from work and three blocks from the grocery store. There's an off-street well-maintained bike path that winds on for many miles nearby, connecting to trails that go all the way from Marine Drive to Clackamas Town Center to Gresham, and including one that easily takes me most of the way to work without encountering a single car, downhill on the way there. Roger and I used to ride that trail when he was little. It stretched from my house to his and all the way to Blue Lake Park. He rode the yellow bike, the first one I bought him when he was five, and I taught him to ride in the parking lot of the Lutheran Church across the street from my apartment. That was a great apartment. It had a pool and a nicely landscaped courtyard with rose bushes, on a quiet street. Stephanie and her friends would come over to go swimming. Roger and I played broom hockey one day when it snowed.

My new place is the third bedroom in a house, an older home Richard has beautifully restored. He's an interesting, likable guy, a man of faith, a Catholic with a 14-year-old son who stays with him a couple of days a week. Richard rides Harleys with a group of his buddies on weekends. He's 47 and at a crossroads in his life, thinking of how he wants to shape and be shaped by his future. This weekend he's playing drums at an outdoor festival in Vernonia, a charity event run by some bikers friends he knows, a group called Brother Speed. He's seen a lot of life; it shows in his voice and his eyes, but there's a directness and a reflectiveness in him that I trust, particularly when I see the care he has put into his home, a small Craftsman bungalow he has lovingly restored with hardwood floors and three coats of paint on the crown molding. He seems to be a fine man and runs the house with just a few reasonable rules: Pay your rent by the third, and let me know right away if you need to to wait until the fourth or fifth; only one overnight guest a week, keep the noise down after 10 pm,and turn off the lights and the TV and computers when you are done with them. We met last night for a final time to discuss the arrangements and wound up talking for two hours. I'll get back 10 hours of commuting time a week and save $500 a month I was spending on gas. In another six months to a year I'll have accumulated money in the stock account again and I'll be able to get a place of my own. It's an inefficient way to save but I know myself; that's the best I can do right now. Later on I can use the same habit to a better purpose. But I'd better be careful, because life comes at you fast. I'll be 60 in seven years. 60. In the words of the immortal Mickey Mantle, "If I'd known I was going to live this long, I would have taken better care of myself."

The other seemingly big thing that happened, at least in my world, is that yesterday Marie didn't return any of my calls. Over the course of our separation, which began in February after a passionate and often troubled marriage, we have made it a habit to talk every day and I usually call her at lunchtime and after work, at least when T-Mobile doesn't drop the call, and often again in the evening before going to bed. We've dated and worked out together and continued to talk and many Sundays have gone to church together, with the hopes of working out differences and finding better ways to handle them, to experience conflict and resolve problems without letting our stuff spin things out of control. We were hopeful of preserving the love and ending the screaming and craziness. I pay for her cell phone and her gym membership and try to stay connected.

Yesterday I called at lunch and again after work and then again a couple of hours later and she never returned any of my calls. I left three tender, concerned messages. No answer. Nothing. Not an email or a text or a hello or a goodbye. My stomach tightens a little as I write this, the fear of abandonment and the fear of falling, grabbing me at my core. It could be she has been busy, it could be I said something that upset her, maybe she met someone or had a date; I can't possibly know.

I have another gnawing worry, totally unrelated. Any of my close friends or family members might tell you that I am the most absent minded person in the world. Sunday I took the credit cards and AAA card and some other stuff out of my wallet, and I thought I set it in the console of my car, intending to put them away later to a safer place. I was tired of carrying all that stuff around, and the AAA membership had long expired. There were about eight cards in all, things like my Kaiser Permenente membership and stuff like that. Friday at lunchtime I was looking for them and they're not in the console. It was foolish of me to leave them for so long. But now I am wracked with a growing uncertainty--did I misplace them or store them in a different place, or have they all been stolen? I have some money being wired on Monday, to pay for the new place and catch up on some bills. Oh my god, what a disaster it would be if they were stolen, if that money was taken. Right now it's all the money in the world to me, even though it's just a few hundred dollars. I'm going through the car and my room today to see if I can sort it out. If not, I'll have to make all those panicked phone calls and hold through the muzak and navigate the phone tree for my bank and the credit cards, the kind of task I truly dread. Life comes at you fast. And even when you are think you are doing better, when you are striving for sanity and reasonableness and good decisions and control, you're vulnerable, far more vulnerable than you can ever realize. Life can plunge you into sorrow or craziness or disaster or joy in a second. It can take your breath away, fill you with ecstasy or shake you to the core. It can expose you or transform you, in a 1000 ways you couldn't have possibly anticipated. My mother's car was rearended at sixty miles an hour on a Saturday morning in June 2005. She was stopping at a roadside fruitstand to buy strawberries for a shortcake. The little girls had junior rodeo that day and she wanted to make them a treat. The pickup slammed into her Honda and spun her into the path of oncoming traffic and in ten minutes she was gone. It can happen to anyone. Anything can. We are here for only a moment, and our most treasured connections are more tenuous than we can possibly imagine. Our boldest plans are bits of fluff.

May God be with you today. Thank you so much for coming to visit.