Lage Nom Ai

"Nordstrom had taken to dancing alone."

-Jim Harrison, The Man Who Gave Up His Name

A muggy one out there, mid-70s and Florida humid.

10:35 a.m.? How in the hell did that happen?

Well, the night terrors arrived around their usual time, a little before five. Then Slane sang the song of his people until six. Then I nodded back off and didn't stir until just before 8. Then P wanted to talk about real estate in bed for a while, and I thought perhaps her focus on the Boston area MLS might prove some sort of aphrodisiac, so I played along. Then we took our espressos looking out over the lake, Peg finding condos close to the kids on Zillow while I read about the bond collapse and the purge at what was once the DoD.

And just like that, it was 10:30.

Yesterday was a ten hour workday, so I guess it all balances out in the end. Still, at some level this is starting to feel like a soft semi-retirement, or a variation on "quiet quitting" that was all in the news a couple years back.

Last weekend we flew to Mass to see the kids and kick the tires on a couple homes that looked like the perfect relocation and retirement destinations until we saw them in person. Real estate there is just too expensive, basically triple what one would pay in western New York. If you're not already in that market and making what amounts to a horizontal relocation, it's hard to see how anyone buys a home there. So maybe we'll rent something, or buy a little pied-a-terre solely for the purpose of creating space to spend more than our usual quick weekend there.

I reckon everyone gets to an age where the pull to be closer to family gets stronger. All of my living family at this point is clustered in north and central Texas, but the thought of relocating there makes me nauseous because of its heat, politics, and general unloveliness, and when my stepmother goes over the rainbow bridge I don't see any of us spending time together. The other family metropole is, of course, Boston, which we love but which would require either liquidating everything in a down market or continuing to work like we're 40 well into our seventies (or both). That's not so hot, either.

And I still feel this pull toward equally expensive NYC, figuring I could be a happy old man in our little apartment with a favorite deli around the corner and season tickets to the Met.

So we're pondering on this.

Meanwhile, I find myself thinking a lot about a novella I just finished in the trilogy entitled Legends of the Fall, by Jim Harrison. The Man Who Gave Up His Name follows Nordstrom, a Wisconsin-born oil executive in his 40s who experiences a "crisis" in the classic Greek sense when his wife leaves him after a string of affairs. Realizing his life spent making money wasn't sustainable, he moves from California to Boston to work in a less prestigious job, takes up cooking, day drinks when he feels like it, and works out a plan that starts with leaving the country and ends with him working as a cook in a tourist dive in Islamorada, after giving away all of his money.

And, of course, he dances, the thematic thread of the story. He dances by himself, sometimes for a couple hours at a time, sometimes without music. Somehow the ritual, the liturgy of the dance if you're an Anglican like myself, brings him back gradually to himself, to living only in the moment and a place beyond caring about all those things that occupied his attention in the decades before as his life slipped away with nothing to show for it but a pile of money and a failed marriage.

Everyone around him thinks he's either odd or maybe a little insane, but like Sisyphus in Camus's essay he's finally happy in a world where he creates his own meaning.

I guess one need not be a Jungian psychologist to see why the story keeps knocking around in my head these days.

And the most interesting coincidence of them all is that I used to sing along with the Jimmy Buffett song Lage Nom Ai, which came out in the year I left the Air Force and started law school, not realizing it was a musical recounting of this story:

Nordstrom was a simple man

Who had some non-conformist plan

To save his ass

Every night he danced alone

And blotted out the monotone

That was his past

He packs his bag of mysteries

And leaves the lonely memories

Where they belong

They came and went so easily

This rising tide identity

Sings like a song

Let's sing . . .

He moved on up to old Bean town

And summered on the Vineyard Sound

To pass the day

Island hopping, Crab Key bound

Tendin' bar he thinks he's found

A better way

Now we're back where we belong

Without a clue and still without

A master plan

Incident or accident

It all depends on if you're meant

To understand

Lage Nom Ai Nom Ai

When you know that life is just a game

Lage Nom Ai Nom Ai

He's the man who gave up his own name

As it turns out, Buffett and Jim Harrison were buddies, and the story provided the ideal narrative for a Buffett song about escaping to the Keys.

I used to think T.S. Eliot's The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock perfectly captured this season of life, but Nordstrom's journey is better because it's a story of overcoming and reinvention rather than despair. The key, as it turns out, is letting go.