Brilliant Gloom

“I cannot endure to waste anything so precious as autumnal sunshine by staying in the house."

― Nathaniel Hawthorne, October 10, 1842

We have a surfeit of autumnal sunshine out there over the valley of the Chemung.

And yet, such gloom around this grand home, for both of us.

The obvious source seems to lie with the fact that I'm crawling back into the Columbia to fly back to Florida for an injunction hearing tomorrow, an event that could surely be done just as well by Zoom but we all need to suffer a little. So I'll be away from P again, risking as I do every trip that this will be the one that makes the news when the propeller stops spinning and I can't find a place to put the Columbia down. It'll come down regardless in that scenario, or course. Maybe just now in anything that could be described as a controlled landing.

I have no idea when I'm coming back here. There's another live hearing on the 10th, an even less substantive exercise than this one tomorrow, and only thirty minutes long. I've asked to attend by Zoom, but if the court denies the motion I'll stay for that one (no point coming home for two days), and then through that week and the next so I can try a case to a jury that comes down to a quibble between two cousins who can't let the other win. In other words, if my Zoom motion is denied, I'll be gone the better part of the month.

I've mentioned how I feel about my job these days. It's getting a little better as I gradually either fire clients or get their matters resolved, but I seem to have reached the point where I've had enough after three decades of lying awake pretty much every night fretting over that deadline or this unreasonable client or judge. I walk past a mirror and see I've aged a decade in the last couple years. It's starting to feel like time.

So that's part of it, I guess, this fall gloom that's settled over our household. My work is in transition, with all the worries that go along with that. Peg's is as well--the medical world is about to get rocked by the cuts to Medicaid and ACA subsidies, both of which will mean more folks coming through the hospital door with no insurance. For those of you playing at home, someone has to pay for the surgery whether there's insurance or not. The small, rural players will likely start folding--it's already happening, in fact. Meanwhile, providers have all been sucked from their independent practice groups into being employed directly by the hospital, which in turn is owned by venture capitalists (as is everything else in the country except the legal profession, which blessedly has an ethics rule against such arrangements) whose only goal is to squeeze more value out of these poor souls--same money, more call, more hours, more stress.

It's good to be old sometimes, at the end of this ride as the wheels fall off.

But for both of us, the vocational tumult is sandpaper to the soul.

Then there's the fall of the republic. That's been covered ad nauseum here and elsewhere. The practical effect for us is more shifting sands under our feet. Must we move overseas? What about the cats?

So to this point, there's been nothing golden about these golden years upon which we're supposedly embarking. Even this lovely home on top of the hill, the most spectacular place I've ever lived, isn't bringing much joy these days. If and when Peg calls it a day here as a CRNA, I don't see us hanging onto it. Not so long ago I'd have told you we'll retire here. I just don't know now.

But what I do know is that there's much to do this morning before my hearing in a couple hours and five or six more hours thereafter getting to Florida. Time to be productive, in the midst of this malaise and melancholy.