t’ = t / √(1 - (v²/c²))
I missed a thousand dinners with the family while working for Davenport. Or, thereabouts, as I did not precisely keep count. Nobody kept count, in a counting sort of way. But I was gone, doing something for the City, and there were conversations, and jokes and things to work through at the dinner table that I missed. I missed em’, and I’ll never get em’ back. There was also food I missed and, with all due respect to the Downtown Deli’s full embrace of “The Craigster”, the sandwich I took back to my City Hall desk just couldn’t compare.
Single source of workaday income for a family of four is rarely an easy assignment, and my failure to be an all-star MLB centerfielder is nobody’s fault but mine. The son’s observation as I was pecking away at the laptop keyboard on a Sunday afternoon in the Skistar lodge that I “work a lot” has echoed around the inside of the skull for fifteen or more years now, but the deal was Davenport City Administrator was a ridiculously difficult gig, and doing it at a level to sustain the family’s life in one place through elementary and high school required … a lot. Happily so, and without peer in tenure, it turns out.
So late last night I was explaining the thousand missed dinners and the thirteen plus years of no sick day dodging of anything difficult at Davenport City Hall to someone. Someone who makes their living there now, and has (likely?) read that explanation by now. We will see what comes of it. Always hopeful since … well, always.
Missed a dinner last night too. A rare two-plus hour Village Board meeting. My Seaside friends would laugh riotously at a two hour meeting being long, or rare. Seaside meetings go for five or more hours, and seven or eight hour meetings are not unheard of. Turns out, of course, I missed every dinner at home at every Seaside City Council meeting too. By like, two thousand miles. But those missed dinners kept the kids in college so … thank you, Seaside.
Walked home last night after our (still laughing in Seaside) two hour and fifteen minute meeting and was surprised to find the house empty. Then I remembered the beloved was at a Historical Society meeting upstairs at Village Hall. Well then, it’s back down the path, over the trout stream and past the ball diamond to Village Hall, where I waited on a bench with a book in the lobby as the Historical Society meeting ran a little longer than usual.
But whether I was sitting in the lobby of a Wisconsin Village Hall or on a stylishly midcentury bench at Old Orchard shopping center in Skokie, Illinois with a book outside Victoria’s Secret was not immediately easy to discern. For me, at least.
The courtship began with a Marshall Field’s intimate apparel department manager who became store manager of a string of Victoria’s Secret stores who - and this is the unbelievable part – drove an AE86 and called me for our first date. Smart as a whip poli sci major, extraordinary cook and kind. Gorgeous. Fun. Reasonably athletic and lingeried beyond reproach. Have I mentioned the AE86?
Of all the things I decided not to screw up … the first and most important.
I used to drive down after the Vernon Hills work day ended to be on the bench at the stylishly outdoor mall as the store closed. I’d walk her to her lissome little Corolla with the feisty 4AGE ready to rev, and follow her home. Make sure she was safe.
Whoever said youth is lost on the young must have never been young.
Historical Society meeting ends and she sees me on the lobby bench. Head out into the brisk March night together. Past the ball diamond, over the trout stream and down the path holding gosh the stars are bright tonight hands to home, where a hellarad AW11 ready to rev sleeps in the garage.
2025? 1989?
Hard to tell, in a counting sort of way.
