Days 37-40: Roanoke Rapids, North Carolina, to Merchantville, New Jersey, to McLean, Virginia

Tuesday 29 October – I had such good results from driving up the secondary road a bit before getting back on the highway when I was in Adel, Georgia, that I decided to try it in Roanoke Rapids.  Of course there’s a complicated intersection by the interstate-exit motel-cluster.  I was stopped for the light when the driver’s side door of the Dodge Dakota pick-up truck next to me opened.  A tall, lean man, maybe in his 30s, with an impressive mustache, stepped out into the street, retrieved a soda can from the edge of his truck bed, turned around and stepped back up into the cab and closed the door.  I don’t know how far he’d been driving.  I don’t know whether he was as cool about having left his soda on the truck as he looked, or berating himself for stupidity, or cursing someone for distracting him, or pleased that the can hadn’t tumbled away into the street, or laughing a little on the inside – because it was, after all, pretty funny.

Rosemary Baptist

In the next five miles, I saw four churches, a tabernacle and a religious ‘outreach center.’  There were lots of small houses, mostly single story, some trailer-style.  There were scrappy little general stores and an industrial laundry and several feed and farm stores.  I did not see farms on this short stretch of road, but I’d seen cotton fields from Route 95, and what seemed to be hay fields, and I’d seen a sign somewhere that suggested there were peanut farms in the area.  I did see three or four semis in my ten-mile round trip, all going in different directions, loaded with more-or-less tree-length logs.  The landscape was gently hilly, with lots of tall trees of many breeds, but I did not see any stretch that looked like it might have been the scene of a recent harvesting of trees.

I stopped at one of the farm stores because it was advertising 25% off shrubbery, and I thought a shrub might make a good hostess gift for Sister3, toward whose home I was aimed.  A store clerk greeted me in a voice that explained what the desk clerk last night meant when she asked if she sounded ‘country.’  She sounded ‘warm kitchen with honey somewhere;’ this man sounded country.  He invited me to make myself at home, look around, ask him if I had any questions, and then he just kept talking and talking.

He pointed out the 25%-off, noting that it applied to the roses.  He’s never done anything to his roses, now you might look them up on the computer and it may say to do something – maybe a little fertilizer – but he’s never done anything to his, and they do just fine.  He said all of that at least twice and maybe three or four times.  “Look them up on the computer.”  He was white, about 60, lean and a bit shorter than average, and nice as a puppy.

I picked out a gardenia, which by the way is insane.  I love how the flowers smell, but NoVA is a bit cool for gardenia, although they do grow outdoors here if carefully situated.  But I’m probably moving north, and anyway this was supposed to be a hostess gift for my sister outside Philadelphia, where there is no site careful enough to sustain a gardenia.  And I might not even have a home; maybe I’ll move in with a friend or get an apartment.  I really, really love gardenias, though, and maybe I’ll find a home with a little greenhouse attached.  Plus, it was 25% off.

McLean, Virginia, overgrown shrubbery

The clerk kindly carried my gardenia to the car, since, as he said, I’d have to do all the work of planting it.  I did not tell him about the imaginary greenhouse.  He advised me to drive carefully, and asked where I was headed.  On learning of my Virginia home, he told me he’d been to Maryland recently, to visit family.  He seemed not to think much of it; there were a lot more people in suburban DC than there are here in Roanoke Rapids, and all moving faster – "a rat race."

I mentioned that I was coming to the end of a 9,000-mile trip.  “Bless your heart,” he said, and told me about a recent trip he’d made.  He drove the two hours or so to hike Big Meadows park, near Charlottesville.  I think this is in the Shenandoah Mountains, and most likely beautiful.  There was a lengthy story about finding an iPod in the parking lot, and phoning the various numbers listed on it.  The third number was the owner’s daughter; when feed-store guy described a hiker he’d seen on trail and the cars he’d seen in the lot, she recognized her dad.  Dad was thrilled to get his iPod back; his life is on that device.  Etc.

When he goes to Big Meadows, he makes a day of it – leaves at 8:00am, gets back about 8:00pm.  There’s no place around here as good, he told me.  There’s a small mountain (this may be Medoc Mountain, but I’m not sure), but he wouldn’t recommend I go there as it’s not a good area.  What does that mean?  And did he miss the part that I’ve just driven all around the country, and am headed to Washington, DC?  Or maybe he figures that after 9,000 miles, I might be in the mood to jaunt over to Medoc Mountain and take a look.  He did keep inviting me to come back again, as they’ve got all sizes of rock, beach sand, mulch... which is clearly missing a point or two.  Eventually, he tapped the trunk twice and headed back into the shop.

These were great little stories, and a snapshot – maybe a collage of snapshots – of one person’s life.  I really enjoyed them, and to the very slight degree necessary, encouraged him to talk.  Well, maybe just didn’t discourage him.  But occasionally, listening to him repeat some part of his story, I would wonder about this.  When a total stranger pulls into my tiny corner of the world and tells me she’s just seen dozens of places I’ve never been; never imagined being, I want to hear about it.  I start asking questions, not telling stories.  Still, I’m glad to have heard his.  And frankly, as much as I like telling you about my travels and my thoughts on these pages, when we meet in person I’ll probably try to get you talking about your adventures.  I am an INTP, in case you’re interested in that sort of thing.

George Washington, mounted.

The gardenia nestled on the floor in the back, I took 95 up to Richmond, the capital of Virginia.  I came in past Marlboro smokestacks, a Peterbilt yard of some sort, and structures I believe were tobacco-drying sheds:  a tatty industrial neighborhood on the outskirts of the city.  Then I crossed over the James River, and into the high-rise, steel-and-glass downtown.  Steel, glass and marble, with lots of stately seats of government and many, many statues of heroes of the colonial era, the revolution and the confederacy.  I read an essay recently by a commentator dismayed by the number of U.S. government facilities named forconfederate politicians and soldiers, on the grounds that they were, in fact, traitors to the U.S. government.  I’m willing to believe it’s more complicated than that, but in my Union-bred brain, confederacy just equals slavery.  And slavery equals indefensible, inexcusable evil.  I was glad to have seen, finally, the capital city of the commonwealth in which I’ve resided for almost ten years, but I was perfectly happy to leave.

Sublime Potomac

Two hours of trees – evergreens mixed with deciduous, now decked in yellows and dull oranges, with occasional glints of greens – got me back to DC in time for rush hour.  So I stopped in at a friend’s house, wandered the glorious woods and stood awestruck on a cliff over the Potomac.  I have stood in this spot a dozen times, and others very like it dozens more, and I hope I am always awestruck by that sublime view.  My friends eventually got home from work, and we chatted and caught up for a bit, which was very grounding.  I headed north again – three hours – once the traffic had dissipated a bit.  By the time I made it to the Delaware Welcome Center Travel Plaza rest area, most of the restaurants had closed.  It wasn’t much past 9:00pm, so I was wildly disappointed in the recently-razed-and-rebuilt Delaware Welcome Center.  If the highway doesn’t close at 9:00pm, the rest area shouldn’t close at 9:00pm.  Sheesh.

Sneaking into Sister3’s house at whatever o’clock at night, I felt a door close on a great adventure.  Then I opened the next one.  (Sister 3’s house has a sun porch, so you have to go through two doors to get in to where the bedrooms are.  Ha!)

Wednesday 29 October to Friday 1 November – Love the lovely family.  Love the cute, mostly-well-mannered dogs.  Love the cute and financially-inefficient little town and the children dressed up for Hallowe’en.  Niece6 was Bubbles from the Powerpuff Girls, and Niece7 was Rosie the Riveter.  I love these girls.  They take the road less traveled.

Proper foliage at last.

As I drove home again, the superhighway was a perfection of fall foliage, and I took pictures through the sunroof.  New Jersey was as beautiful as could be, with leaves of every shade of red, orange, yellow, and lots of greens and muddy purples.  There were brilliant blue ponds and streams, and the grass was mostly non-sparkly green with patches of brown, and orange where the pine needles had dropped.  About five miles before the Delaware border, I saw a cornfield.

Love the lovely EZPass, but strongly dislike the toll booths on the Delaware Memorial Bridge, which insist I slow to five miles per hour.  Leaving the state less than 30 minutes later, the Delaware toll plaza lets me speed right along the real highway, with sensors in a technological-marvel roof hitting up my transponder for four bucks.

Havre de Grace, Maryland, has a beautiful river view and a beautiful name.  I have stopped there a few times, seeking grace and a fancy sandwich, and have left without even a decent lunch.  So I don’t try anymore.  I just roll by, enjoying the stubble fields that come after the river.  Even the oft-traveled bit from Baltimore to NoVA did not feel like just another nuisance, this time.  I wonder if I’m really changed forever.

Almost home.  Weird.

Migrant Nation

It’s a melting pot, right, America?  People came here from all over, people are coming still, and within two generations the Mexican-Americans are speaking Spanglish and the Korean-Americans are eating cheeseburgers with their kimchi and the Hungarian-Americans are marrying Ethiopian-Americans.  This nation is supposed to be one of risk-takers, pioneers, people comfortable with change.  Assimilation is a way of embracing change.  Travel is a way of embracing change, too, and one of the elements that makes assimilation happen.  One thing that struck me over and over as I traveled was how few of the people I met had held still much.

It wasn’t just the Alaskan massage therapist who’d done her training in Honolulu.  Even the cucumber technician in rural Georgia had detoured through semi-cosmopolitan Athens, GA, and near-New York North Jersey before coming home.  There was a man on the plane from Anchorage who’d grown up in Alaska – and he looked like many, many generations of his ancestors had done so, too – and joined the State Department.  They posted him all over the world in a 30-plus year career, and now he was headed to Vietnam again to see how it had changed since the 1980s.  The diner where I stopped on Route 66 in Seligman, Arizona, is owned and run and much of the food cooked by a German woman, over 70 and on her feet in this and other restaurants for much of the last 50 years.

There’s a Mid-westerner who lived most of her adult live in the mid-Atlantic and is now in the Southwest who’s involved with an effort to persuade landowners to remove long-disused fences.  The fences, put up when the Southwest still had water enough to support ranching, are no longer necessary for livestock.  (With extreme measures, there’s plenty of water for people and golf courses, but it’s too expensive for beef.)  They linger nonetheless, disrupting wildlife migration patterns.  The roads we use to travel everywhere we want to be, or away from where we don’t want to be, disrupt those patterns, too.  When I posted a photo of pronghorns on this blog, two friends – one in Virginia, one in Texas – wrote with concerns about how severely curtailed migration has affected those animals particularly.

There’s a West Texan who hated Utah but is happy in the middle of Pennsylvania.  She’s white; attends a majority-black church; sometimes forgets there’s a difference.  There’s a mixed-race Pittsburgher who loves New Orleans, likes urban California, couldn’t stand suburban Kansas but is okay in downtown Kansas City.  There’s a couple of Canadians who found themselves in K.C., loving it.  There’s a native New Englander who spends part of the year in New England, part in Florida, and a little-bitty part in Hawai’i, plus trips abroad.  There’s an English couple who created a tea house in St. Louis, a quintessentially American city whose city hall is designed to look like the Maison de Ville in Paris, France.  There’s a Chinese-Vietnamese-American from California who loved the east coast but is enjoying the Midwest.

We should not fence each other in.  Emily Dickinson notwithstanding, we should be able to move around, geographically and metaphorically.  It helps keep us strong.

Day 36: Savannah, Georgia, to Roanoke Rapids, North Carolina

Forsyth Park fountain - that's at least baroque, right?

Monday 28 October – The Forsyth Park Inn is, in fact, right on the western edge of Forsyth Park, a decent-sized chunk of real estate with some baroque fountains that would fit seamlessly into Vienna (the Austrian one) and several rules about where and how fast and in which direction one may bicycle, walk, run and rollerskate.  I started my penultimate road-trip day by circumnavigating the park a couple of times.  Lots of others were out with me, and we smiled politely as we passed each other the second and third times.  No one seemed especially eccentric, à la Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil.  The air felt clean and the whole scene rather small-town, or at least exclusive-neighborhood-in-a-small-city.

The Forsyth Park Inn, as seen from Forsyth Park

The hotel offered an excellent hot breakfast; a single entrée that they described the night before, so guests could make minor amendments (“No sausage, thanks.”).  There were also the usual cold buffet options, but I was quite content with my quiche-in-a-biscuit-y thing.  The waitresses were quiet and friendly, black Southern women, and I thought the second-swankiest hotel of the trip was well worth the credit-card points.  Most of what I knew of Savannah, before visiting, came from the movie cited above, and I felt like an Econolodge would be the wrong choice for this city.  So I got a lush courtyard and a big tub with whirlpool jets and a plethora of antiques (or at least second-hand furniture) in a basement – excuse me, garden-level – room.  The Inn also offered evening hors d’oeuvres, afternoon tea and all-day cookies or something, all available for imbibing on their very ante-bellum open porch overlooking the park.

I took another big walk through the downtown area, mostly to look at the architecture and landscape.  I’ve read a lot about the Savannah College of Art & Design (SCAD to its graphic-designer friends), and the forward-thinking and flair it provides the city, but didn’t see the typical signs of art-school influence.  There was a lot more evidence of Juliette Low’s and John Wesley’s contributions to the world, in fact, than facial piercings and sculpture apps.  For me, this was a very beautiful place I’m delighted to have seen, but not one I’m eager to visit again soon.  The energy level was low (this may reflect my feelings about coming to the end of my journey), and the place was just a bit precious.  They issue Certificates of Appropriateness, for heaven’s sake.  Maybe they mean it as a joke, but what if they don’t?

Beautiful Savannah - the pretty part, with a
mildly eccentric vine.

Away I went.  The deep blue sky of morning had turned the palest blue it could be and not be off-white as I drove away.  Back through the less-desirable part of town, and onto the interstate, and there’s someone transporting a fair-sized plywood structure, about one-and-a-half highway lanes wide, on a long, low flatbed truck.  It was decked with red flags, amber lights, and police blues, and accompanied by two Georgia State Patrol cars (“The Georgia patrol/was makin’ the rounds”) with their lights flashing, pluse three ‘certified safety vehicles.’  Those last were small pick-up trucks loaded with lights and unidentifiable but very important-looking cargo.  Two of them had long poles rising vertically from just behind their cabs – much longer than the old whip antennas that used to give away unmarked police cars.  They looked like they might be useful for fishing keys out of storm drains, but that seems unlikely to be their primary purpose.

I left them behind me in Georgia, though, and crossed into South Carolina past a welcome sign with flowing script, bordered by the kind of brick walls one sees at high-end horse farms, with flowing lines, that ought to be flanking ornate gates.  Glancing back, I saw the same flowing script thanking south-bound motorists for having visited.  I suppose a gated interstate, no matter how architecturally-appropriate the actual gates, would be impractical.

There are shotgun shacks by this highway, right up close to three- and four-lane Route 95.  They have no noise-reducing walls; first-world problems, sure, but not one with which the residents of the high-income suburbs of Washington, DC, grapple.  You want to live near the capital beltway, you get a massive noise-reducing wall.  I bet around here, the shacks came first, and didn’t get a lot of consideration in the transportation infrastructure-planning process.  But, you know, I could be absolutely wrong.

Fifty miles into South Carolina it was starting to get chilly, and a very light rain started to fall.  How light was it?  So light, I drove about fifteen miles before I needed to close the sunroof.  And not long after that, I needed a nap.  Too much fresh air and exercise in Savannah, plus staying up late to read in the whirlpool-be-jetted bathtub.  So I pulled into a rest area, dropped my seat back, and fell asleep.

I awoke to the sound of the beeping noise my car makes when the headlights, turned on for the rain and forgotten, have successfully drained the battery.  Rude awakening indeed.  AAA sympathized, and their partner service provider was by my side in less than 15 minutes.  His name was Jonny, and he joked several times that he was “sorry it took me so long.”  He’d been right nearby, at something called Santee Plantation, which he characterized as a rich-people’s resort.  When I thanked him with a chocolate bar, which he said he wouldn’t share with anyone except maybe his woman at home, he showed me the mini flashlight his Plantation customer had given him.  Then he offered it to me, as he has a real flashlight.  He got it out and showed it off to me; it’s very large and magnetized, so he can stick it to things and work hands-free.

Back on the road, I kept thinking I heard distant, low rumbles of thunder.  Eventually I realized it was noise from the Walter Harris CD I bought the night before.  Someone just recorded him, live, playing outdoors by the Savannah River.  So there are all kinds of background noises on the songs, including the sounds of his hands on the guitar and the strings hitting against the wood.  Musical people I knew in my 20s used to wrestle with those problems.  Now everyone I know just wrestles with 401(k) choices and vacation plans.

The burial mound, turned into a fort by the Brits
and captured by the Americans.

By the time I’d figured out that there wasn’t a storm brewing, the roadside signs were offering to show me the Santee Wildlife Refuge, which offer I decided to accept.  I’ve put all the photos in an album, so you may look at those if you like.  SWR is by a constructed lake, Lake Marion.  The human-made part surprised me, as the area seems extremely wet.  Why build a lake in a swamp?  There was also a burial mound used by the Santee Indians for burials, and by British and American forces as a fort in the Revolution.  We won that battle, by the way.

Spooky/beautiful

Staircase to, after all, somewhere.

I took a short circular trail through the reserve, and looked at spooky swamp trees.  I did not see any snakes or gators, praise be.   I have no desire to see snakes or gators (though a few weeks later I did see a black mamba, in Namibia, and oh my were the interns jealous).  I did not see anything especially exciting, actually, though at one point I rounded a corner and saw a staircase, in the middle of the woods, leading up toward the sky.  It rather prosaically supported a viewing platform, but the first sight of it was surreal enough to be memorable.  The platform actually had stairs on each side, but one set was blocked by an enormous spider’s web, so I went back down the way I’d come up.

I got back to the ranger station and welcome center thinking a bathroom would be nice to see, but the place closed at 4:00, and it was now 4:15.    I poked around outdoors a bit – no port-a-potty, but a collection of shells and skulls curiously displayed on utility cases.  When a ranger drove up, I asked about them, and she told me staff had found them and they were the remains of animals killed in the refuge, probably by poachers.  We bemoaned poachers (me thinking, “though if they’re killing alligators...”  Joke.  Alligators, important part of biosphere or something.  Got it.) and she let me use the bathroom though after hours.  Love the lovely ranger.  I paper-towelled off as well as I could; this SWR provided the kind of humidity that makes a person glad she didn’t figure out how to route herself through Louisiana, where the serious swamps are.
closed at 4:00, and it was now 4:15.

I powered through the gloaming, and on into the night.  The highway was, for some miles, bordered by cotton fields, looking mostly harvested.  Were they that much farther along than Lubbock’s cotton, or were Texans busy harvesting now, too, eight days after I left there?  Cotton fields, shacks, and yet I feel like I’m in a very different place than I was a week ago.  I think that’s telling.  There are certainly many fewer cultivated fields in this part of South Carolina than there were in the parts of Texas, Iowa, Illinois that I traveled.  I suppose, too, that I was actually looking around me with different eyes.

Those eyes seemed useless and absurd as the signs for South of the Border began their assault.  I’m not certain what South of the Border is, even now, but I can tell you a few things about it.  It owns or rents a ridiculous number of billboards.  It offers:  36 holes of miniature golf, a reptile lagoon, RV hookups, ice cream, fireworks, pools, WiFi, Virginia sturgeon, super suites, around-the-world imports, burgers, gas and more, more, more.  And it tells travelers all of this in about a 70-mile stretch of highway.  Even with all the attractions to highlight on these signs, many of them simply show silly, colorful cartoons with the announcement that SotB is coming in 43 miles, 34 miles, 27 miles...  One of the billboards had a car – an actual car, a dented sedan – affixed to it, with the legend, “Smash Hit.”

In between SotB signs there were small clusters of homes and gas stations, getting smaller and farther apart as I moved north.  There was a white church on the western edge of a big cornfield, with three ornate steeples rising from a red-shingled roof, and it was beautiful and interesting and distinctive and probably, for someone who knows the key, meaningful.  And in the rearview mirror I could see layered shades of rose and gentle, pastel orange stacking around the fireball of the setting sun.  My attention drawn again to the sky, I noted that it really is not as big here as it is in the west.  Montana has plenty of trees, like the Carolinas, so it’s not the trees that bind the horizons tighter.

I haven’t seen a deer-warning sign for ages.

Country; it seems to me there are much worse things
to sound like.

I was close, by the close of this day 36 on the road, to something like home turf.  In Roanoke Rapids, North Carolina – never been before – there was a Quality Inn.  The desk clerk sounded beautiful, and I complimented her on her voice.  “Does it sound country?” she asked, sounding worried.  I told her no; I didn’t tell her it sounds welcoming and comforting, like a warm kitchen on a rainy night, with something good, something with honey in it, baking.  Maybe that’s what ‘country’ means.

Shift

I like to shift gears when driving, and insist on a manual transmission for my car.  It keeps the drive interesting, it requires some (not a lot, but some) skill, and it helps me pay attention to what I’m doing, which is such a useful attribute in a driver.  As a general rule, I am not good at shifting – myself out of bed in the morning, for example.  Or, sometimes, back up to fifth gear when I’ve dropped from 70 to 35 in four or five stages, and then moved gradually back to 70 again.  Whoops.  Shifting piles of junque off my to-do pile and into the trash is an issue, too.

An awareness of the need to shift mentally has never been my strongest suit, either.  (What is my strongest suit, you ask?  I think it may be paying the check before anyone else at the table knows what I’m up to.  I only know one person who’s ever beaten me at this.)  When I was a girl, maybe 40 years ago, I read a book in which an English boy tries to imitate the accent of his new, American neighbors.  I was thunderstruck by the idea – it’s English people who have accents, I thought.  Americans (except Southerners) talk normally.  Or do they?  Shift.

When I started taking photos of wildflowers, I didn't take
one of white clover.  It's just a thing you walk on, not,
to me, a flower.  But it is a flower, however common.  Shift.

Big deal, though.  Nine-year old kid has never thought about accents in a global context.  So flash forward 15 years; I’m reading Calvin Trillin.  In one of his food essays, he discusses his wife’s inability to believe he doesn’t particularly like asparagus.  To her, asparagus is so delicious no one could fail to love it.  My thought?  “Is he saying he doesn’t love asparagus?  How could he not love asparagus?!  Asparagus is delicious.”  I totally, entirely understand that some people don’t like fettucine alfredo, though I do, or dislike Joni Mitchell, whom I love, or hate Boston, one of my all-time favorite cities.  But I just could not absorb this asparagus idea into my conscious brain.  I have kept trying since then, and I’ve largely succeeded – but I suspect my subconscious still doesn’t buy the whole asparagus thing.  Also the song ‘Walkin’ on Sunshine.’  How could anyone not like this song?  It is so happy.

Hopping along another ten years or so.  My brother-in-law’s best friend from college, Stephen, is an Englishman, an artist and godfather to my goddaughter.  Stephen’s art is primarily collages made from found objects, some manufactured and some natural, and mostly tiny.  He notices tiny things, like seeds and the differences between two apple blossoms.  Never mind forest and trees; while I am ooh’ing over a distant vista of lakeside hill with sunset, Stephen is awestruck by a particular twig, or three leaves here and two just under those.  Incidentally, he seems to shift easily from small picture to big.  I’ve gotten better at shifting from big to small after a few nature walks with him (“Hold out your hand; I need to collect some of these pods.”), but I still have to think about it.

My instinct is to look up and out.

 

And this is the 'trees' perspective.

But sometimes I'll focus in closer

and see curling bits of leaf-peel, or whatever this is.
Thanks, Stephen.

I have loved the moments of shift on this journey.  A lake big enough to have waves that matter?  An unending view of grass enrapturing me?  Seeing the world, behind me, narrowed to a small mirror, and noticing how different it looks.  Remembering pears in the desert are different than pears in the small farms of New England.  Sleeping on a couch, in a car, in a king-size bed high above Chicago, under a future-heirloom quilt in the guest room by the indoor pool, in dodgy sheets at a crap motel, in a four-poster in an elegant city.  Eating a dried-up crust in an ‘Alaska-luxury’ hotel bed, overpriced mushrooms in Pia Zadora’s Las Vegas restaurant, roasted-squash soup in a friend’s kitchen in Kansas City.  Driving farther than I thought I would ever want to in a day, giving myself permission to stop before I planned.  A main point of a trip, for me, is seeing something new.  Seeing something new should create some sort of shift.

Becoming a career woman, twenty or so years ago, required a shift in thinking, or perspective, or world view.  I stumbled into investment management through a temporary assignment as a receptionist, when I was earning the money for graduate school.  After I got my Master’s in literature, I went back to the gleaming skyscraper where the rich people worked, and gradually, and not without angst, made my way to vice president over the course of ten years.  My field was financial services, and I had always thought of myself as a word person.  That shift – to the belief I could be both – was gradual.  I didn’t really notice it happening, but when, occasionally, I would smile with joy and satisfaction at having successfully analyzed a financial, I could recognize that it had.

I was really, really good at my work.  And yet... my career stalled.  I wasn’t working for the caliber of company I wanted.  I was in it for the money, but wasn’t making the big bucks some of my colleagues were, and I surely to goodness wasn’t getting rich on stock options.  My peers respected and liked me, but I got much more liking than respect from my bosses.  I was out of work for almost two years in the recession.  My compensation and titles were moving sideways or down.  One colleague, who has done very well in our profession, tells me it’s largely the luck of the draw, but when the company that needed me desperately, for which I’d done excellent work, decided it could do without me – for budget reasons – I was convinced there had to be more than luck in play.

For several years, the moments of frustration, irritation and boredom had usually outweighed those of joy and satisfaction.  That, and the depth of the too-frequent frustration, often had me yearning to quit.  Without another job to go to (and it’s hard to find a new job when you’re working 50 hours a week, especially when the universe has other plans for you), I didn’t dare quit.  When that last company terminated my contract, I was flabbergasted, liberated, frightened and elated.  I worked my last four months, and when I was done, I quit my career.  It felt great.  It felt like achieving an ambition.

Big shift.

The one with the ex is harder to describe, and out of respect for his privacy I think I’ll refrain from doing so in detail.  In fact, I’ve been trying for an hour now, and I just wiped out everything I’d written for the fourth time and decided it’s too nuanced, too intricate and too subjective to record.  And it would take a long time, probably bore you, and inevitably misrepresent something.  So.  It was good a lot, and lousy sometimes, and there was lots of laughing and shouting and crying and sitting together on the couch, my feet on his lap or his head on my shoulder, newspapers spread about or a movie on the laptop.  He was too often mean to me, and I thought about leaving, but there was so much good, and I was really comfortable, and we both loved to throw parties.  I stayed.

He did not.  When he terminated our relationship, I was flabbergasted, liberated, devastated and – just a little bit – pleased.  I had been with him for ten years; I’d been defined as someone’s girlfriend; I’d considered his needs and preferences and desires before making decisions; I’d had someone to talk to whenever I wanted and a hand with moving furniture if needed.  When we actually ended, I sobbed and begged, but he was unmoved so I tried to sleep.  By morning I was resigned.

Huge shift.

That I quit my career and lost my primary love relationship, and in consequence of those two events had to leave my warm, elegant little home, and everything determined in less than two weeks, was more than a shift.  It was a cataclysm.  ‘Cataclysm’ usually connotes something disastrous, but my dictionary says I can also define it as “a violent upheaval that... brings about a fundamental change.”  I thought it might have the same root as ‘catalyst, but it doesn’t.  (‘Cataclysm’ is from the Greek for ‘inundate;’ ‘catalyst’ is also from Greek, but for ‘dissolve.’)  Nonetheless, my cataclysm was also a catalyst.  I am changed.

I know people often like to say that people don’t change.  It is obviously not true.  The alcoholic who stops drinking (and hundreds do every day) changes profoundly.  People who have been alienated from their families reunite; people in abusive relationships find the courage to walk away; well-paid computer programmers move to Namibia and become unpaid rhinoceros guardians.  I have changed.  I may change back, or change in some other direction, sometime in the future, but for now I am trusting my instincts, believing in my gifts, and trying to live my authentic life, in right relationship with myself, my family, my friends.

Marvelous, wonderful, joyful shift.

Finding joy in unexpected places.