Roots, or the Lack Thereof

I am a fugitive and a vagabond, a sojourner seeking signs.

-Annie Dillard

Quite a morning out there, after an uneventful two hopper down here from NY after lunch yesterday.

I have about three-and-a-half hours to finish prepping for a fairly major hearing after lunch. The clients are coming to the office late morning, and I need to have my schtick perfected and in the can by the time they show up. I find the whole exercise exhausting.

It's started to dawn on me that we've lost something over the last five years by having no real community. The body of folks who remember me here diminishes by the day--I ran into my 92-year-old former law partner at Publix last night, and he had to ponder a bit before he recalled who I was. He blamed cataracts, but as much as anything I've just been barely around since the hurricane.

I don't see us coming back here to live--Peg has no ties, vocational or otherwise, to this place, and I've figured out how to make it work without being in MAGA land all the time.

The problem now is how to build something, somewhere else. The last seven years, since Michael blew my house down, have felt like an extended campout. We're always just about to go somewhere else, we're not quite sure we want to commit to one place or another, the country's falling apart, there's some place we may like better just over the hill. Rinse and repeat. For years now.

And along the way, we never join a church or show up for a midweek activity like EfM. Don't join the local Kiwanis or Rotary--why bother when you may move any day now? We're members of two yacht clubs and two country clubs and know hardly anyone at any of them because our commitment consists of paying our dues and showing up for a toddy or a steak.

I grew up this way, come to think of it. Except the country club part--Dad always thought they were looking down on him, and he may have been right, so we never set foot in one. We moved almost every year, and neither of my folks were really joiners in any event. We kept to ourselves, never fully unpacked when we'd arrive somewhere, never developed any real social ties to anyone. No wonder this season has lasted as long as it has for P and me--those first couple decades were obviously pretty formative. It's been surprisingly comfortable.

In fairness, the whole country's experiencing some variation on this theme since the lockdown. No one's joining civic clubs. The "loneliness epidemic" is a weekly theme in our dwindling press.

But I'm beginning to feel like there's something rather large missing here, this lack of community we're experiencing. Living part time in multiple places doesn't make you a member of all so much as a member of none.

It's worse for P than for me, in my observation. She's always been social, with boundaries. I get weary in a crowd, and could spend days around no one but the two of us and be mostly happy. At the same time, people tend not to thrive living like this for prolonged periods, and I'm sensing I need to get out more and hear some voices that aren't my own.

And commit to a community. We're living like the ladies' man who can't settle down because he'd have to forgo all of these other lovelies in his circle. But in the course of living that way he ends up alone, and misses the fulfillment of committing to someone or something. Or someplace.