Not What the Fortune Teller Expected

"I can control my destiny, but not my fate. Destiny means there are opportunities to turn right or left, but fate is a one-way street. I believe we all have the choice as to whether we fulfil our destiny, but our fate is sealed."

-Paulo Coelho

Winter's back. When Peg left it was thirty outside, our high for the day. Tomorrow's sunrise promises to be barely into double-digits.

They're calling for a seventy percent chance of heavy snow today, but so far it's just a dusting, under the slate grey skies that are the norm up here this time of year.

Tonight will be our last in Corning for a bit. I have a Zoom mediation tomorrow morning, and then we start driving with clothes and books and cats over the Catskills and down the Hudson Valley to what they simply refer to here as "the City". I have a screen cap of the thing they'll scan to let me into our parking place, which costs $650 a month. I've saved the instructions on the app from our rental service to get into the apartment on Suffolk---I won't even tell you what that costs. I had hoped to get there during working hours tomorrow, but with my mediation to start the day and our earliest check-in at 4 pm, we'll just get there when we get there, and handle all of my administrative stuff at NYU on Tuesday, given that my very first in-person class (!) starts at 6:30.

That also happens to be our anniversary, so I've asked Peg how she feels about beginning our eighth year of marital bliss sitting next to me in a class about complex tax planning for estates. How very romantic.

But in a way, it is. What greater love than to emotionally and financially support (although I am in fact still working) this rather ambitious and risky re-tooling, in the City That Never Sleeps? She's one of a kind, a fact and a feeling that become more manifest to me every day.

She also helped me find my way to the front of the line to get this knee fixed. The news yesterday at the MRI reading was bad, but not as bad as it could have been. Surgery will take place a week from tomorrow, and I'll be limping and in a fair amount of pain for a bit, but not on crutches for six weeks as they had suggested earlier. Peg's hope for a little free time walking the neighborhood, visiting museums, etc. in Manhattan may still come to pass.

This morning's navel gaze found me pondering the turns one's life takes. This coming Saturday marks the thirty-fifth anniversary of my first combat mission in the Gulf War. It was a yawner, while the second and third had some pretty nasty moments. Sitting out on the concrete revetment at night looking up at the stars (so much of one's time in combat is spent sitting in the dark, it seems), I determined that if I came home from all that, I'd live a life with purpose, with no compromises. What did I think I'd be doing?

At first I leaned into my military career, with a chest full of awards and medals and a career arc that already seemed to point in one direction. That focus ebbed as I pondered spending the rest of my adult life in that huge bureaucracy, with no more air wars like that one in my future. There are guys who are wired to thrive in that very political environment; I was not.

So I moved on to law school, obviously still not particularly self-aware, given that my vision was to bring my resume to the Gulf Coast and after a few years of practicing law go into politics. I was already in a hurry, feeling like I was eight years behind the curve because of my time in the service.

That plan abruptly ended with the invasion of Iraq. I couldn't stomach it, couldn't stomach the lies and the hubris, the blood-lust from folks who'd never seen a shot fired in anger, much less at them. So I'd wandered out of the GOP tent long before Cadet Bone Spurs descended the escalator, and the party descended into utter madness.

I thought about all that this morning, when I read that the odious Dr. Dunn is retiring as our congressman, and an even more execrable swarm of candidates has begun to form ahead of the Republican primary. Old me would've already been building the infrastructure to run; post-2003 me couldn't imagine putting my checkered life story on display, would not have been able to say the things one must say to get and keep that job.

So here I am, halfway through my 62nd year, about to drag my bum knee up Houston Street and then to Washington Square and NYU to embark on a very challenging semester in a place that scares the bejeezus out of me, at so many levels. It's what my seminary instructors and spiritual guides in the Episcopal Church called "stretching", I guess--getting very far out of one's comfort zone on what is a hero's journey for the few willing to try. It's also a hell of a lot truer to that old foxhole promise to lead a meaningful life than some paint-by-numbers foray into elected politics.

And away we go.