If You Come Back, I Will Buy You a New Hat

So, with my house uninhabitable and my wife and daughter relocated to a safehouse (grandma's house) in a distant city, I am left to my own devices. The first few days were productive, while I was still able to be in the house. I was unpacking boxes, reorganizing closets and burning home movies to DVD like a man possessed. But this morning I woke up to the sound of one of the remediation guys down on the first floor, hollering to see if anyone was in the house. I was. I told him so. He showed me how to turn on the ozone generators and run like mad. So, he left, I packed a suitcase, straightened up a bit, hit the little red buttons and dove for the door, dropping into a brilliant barrell-roll and bursting into the garage. Then to work.

So, now I'll be in a hotel for a few days. I also can't go home to eat. Today all the regular lunch spots in downtown Phoenix were closed. It was an absolute ghosttown. I wandered over to the Wyndham, which was serving lunch... Just to me. Amazingly desolate. Burger nearly killed me.

I workd six or seven hours today, then ducked out and enjoyed the wide-open highway (labor day = no rush hour) drive home. Not at all interested in an evening in a hotel room, I stopped by the movie theater and got a ticket for a 7:30 show. Determined to try some new restaurants in our assigned swath of suburbia, I headed to an Indian restaurant in a strip mall just down the street from us. I had never been there. It is almost across the street from the Cuban place I tried last night.

This brings me to the topic of this entry. If you had asked me, seventeen years ago (whoa - I just blew my mind) when I was seventeen, whether, when I sat down to dinner tonight I would expect myself to know whether the hard, thin appetizer bread was the naan bread or not, and which sauce is which, I would have said "of course". That's the kind of person I thought I was. Engaged. Connected. Mindful. If you would have asked me if I would go months and years in one home and another never really getting the place "done up," not noticing a leak before it damaged drywall, not this, not that, I would not have thought that would be me.

But here I am. I fall about 90% short of my image of myself. The image is changing.

I feel like maybe 17 years ago I sent my mind packing, or my mind decided to jump ship. i

We had such a good thing, I thought. I'm nothing without it.