Sitting poolside early in the afternoon with a pitcher of Mojito, I forgot it was even Wednesday. This is the sort of thing that happens in Scottsdale. It is a version of the Vegas effect when time slips into that chasm between the chairs and you decide it is not at all worth retrieving. We showed up well before noon. It was 4:30 PM before we even realized what time it actually was. This is the kind of thing that doesn’t happen if you work a 9-5. This is the reason I will never work a 9-5. I lack the stamina for such things. I can (and have) sit and write until the sun falls behind the horizon, but it is something I love. I cannot (yet I have had occasion to) sit in an office for 8 hours and process the detritus of the modern world.
I want to live a life where research means laying under a canopy reading books or locked away in a colorful office where a half dozen flatscreens are casting the latest and greatest in science and fiction and literary wonder. I live a version of that life. Less flatscreens and color, but I am blessed with a ‘day job’ that permits me (rewards me even) to live the life I have desired since I was a little kid lining up baseball cards on the living room floor and wondering what sort of batting average I needed in order to have enough cash to make my dreams come to life.
Batting average never got me there. Yards per catch didn’t even get me close. I found the route to my dreams through a classroom and in the spaces between the lines of a novel where I best imagined what was not said and should be; where I considered what I would say if I could.
I know now that I won’t live forever. That childhood dream slipped behind the horizon. I do know now that I can live. I can live the life I dreamed of and love and languish and have the things that make me happy. All I have to do is reach.