On Living Simply

I know I don't get there often enough

But God knows I surely try

It's a magic kind of medicine

That no doctor could prescribe

I used to rule my world from a pay phone

Ships out on the sea

But now times are rough, oh, I got too much stuff

I can't explain the likes of me

But there's this one particular harbor

So far but yet so near

Where I see the days as they fade away

And finally disappear

-Jimmy Buffett

Sitting here listening to Slane cry while I try to muster the motivation to dive into my workday. It's a Sysiphean exercise, day-after-day for now going on thirty years, drafting documents and listening to clients complain and trying to avoid malpractice. But unlike Camus's Sysiphus, I don't find myself all that happy as I walk up to the rock, yet again.

But it's a very necessary thing, because the stuff and places we've accumulated demand monetary tribute. During this last annual inspection, my airplane mechanic told me what I already knew--the Mighty Columbia is approaching 2000 hours, which means it's time for the Major Overhaul this coming July. The biggest component of that exercise is a new or rebuilt engine, mandated because an engine with more than 2000 hours on it starts losing cylinder compression, meaning less power, less speed, less margin of safety. So it's time to set up the swear jar on our kitchen counter, because the engine alone is going to set us back nearly $120,000.00.

With a rebuilt engine costing around $106k, I don't see much point in trying to save a little money by going that route.

The point is that this sort of thing hits us pretty regularly, whether a new roof at Wyldwood or a party barn no one could afford to rent, or the $30k in property taxes we pay every year. I just paid the last of a total bill of a little over $10,000 to fix the wooden boat we never actually took out onto the lake because we weren't around enough, and the Cliffside condo still has a hole in the wall where they're fixing the fireplace before replacing the $5,000 wood stove we were forced to buy because the one that came with the condo, which worked just fine thank you, no longer met code.

So maybe it's time. I told a friend yesterday that I thought the line was from Clint Eastwood when I described myself as not wanting to go out "like some poor, wasted, rag-assed renegade", but AI gently corrected me this morning by saying the line was from Apocalypse Now, said by Martin Sheen in describing Colonel Kurtz. I guess that's apt, after all. Kurtz fled a civilization he found unbearably hypocritical, operated outside the Army that raised him in the deep interior of the jungle, but when he got old and sick it was time to end his self-imposed exile. Of course, in Kurtz's case he didn't go home; rather, the Army came for him.

Which is all a long way of saying that maybe this sojourn, six years if you count from Covid, eight from our displacement after Hurricane Michael, has reached its end. We love it in western New York, without question the most beautiful place I've ever lived, but there's not much for me to do up here, and with the healthcare industry unraveling by the day as Peg enters her 36th year of doing this, one senses her professional time here may be wrapping up. At that point, what are we even doing here, writing check after check while I stress myself into an early grave trying to keep a Florida law practice alive remotely?

The friends we have here are dear to us, but very, very few. I really don't understand how folks spend their life in one place, raise a family, go to church supper clubs, then retire and move halfway around the country, leaving that web of relationships and memories behind. We've lived a variation of that theme, loved our time in these steep hills and verdant valleys, with nary a tract home subdivision in sight, but in the end we're just a couple of Southerners gone off up north, as Roy Blount, Jr. put it. When he got old, Roy left New York and moved back to New Orleans. I get it.

I think I could live in the City--no one is actually from there, which makes the solitude a little less painful for some reason. My guess is that we'll still spend a chunk of the time we have left in Manhattan, even if we end up going home soon, which feels likely this morning.

Time to toil a little in the vineyards, so I have a little folding money to put in the swear jar. The bill for that new engine is coming whether I'm ready or no.