One Man's Recession is Another's Bright New Beginning

About six months after my taxes were due and I still didn't have work I just realized one day that I didn't really want any and that I could unburden myself of the whole mess pretty easily. I'd been more and more feeling that will to divest myself of my stuff and the many complications of being a citizen, a father, and a business owner. Along with many other Americans, but really feeling alone, I was just tired of struggling month after month, year after year, to keep up with the mortgage, and all that struggle hadn't really amounted to much: minuscule equity in an unfinished house, worth less in this market than I owed on it; a houseful of furniture I rarely had time to sit on; enough kitchen gear to run a restaurant; piles and piles of stuff I never used, just taking up space. So sitting there that day I looked around and just felt crushed by all the stuff. I started listing my expenses in my notebook: mortgage and insurance and child-support payments totalled more each month than I was making. I had also come to hate my career, which had started in ambition and hope and quickly become bogged in soliciting regulatory agencies on behalf of my neurotic clients, fighting for every dollar, and only rarely finding any creative or intellectual enjoyment. I crossed the mortgage off the list, then my business insurance, then half my child support, then all but the minimum car insurance. I hadn't made a claim on my health insurance in years, so I scratched that off the list, too. I kept paring it down, and every time I crossed out an expense I felt lighter, until I was humming with an energy and elation I hadn't felt since I got my feet under me after my wife left. I felt young and alive, actually giddy. I started putting bits of blue tape on things I wanted to keep. Maybe one in five books, my favorite chair, the desk I'd made back when I was creative, my carving tools. It quickly became clear that this pruning job had some half-formed idea behind it, and as I thought, it became clear that I wasn't going to live in this house anymore. When I went to bed that night I lay awake for a long while picturing what would come next. I pictured driving a few pickup-truck loads of my belongings down to Kolob to my lady-friend's house. With this in mind, I saw that several of the things I'd put tape on wouldn't fit in her space and would be redundant, so I got up and pulled the tape off those things.

The next morning I woke up just as energized. I didn't even stop for coffee. I started moving the keeper stuff to the front door, piling it up across the living room by truckload. By supper time I had three truckloads, and had set aside many things that had once felt precious. Everything else I just left where it was. I ate a bit, and then loaded the truck and headed south in the dark. Sometimes a man's got to act alone, without discussion, without compromise, so I hadn't talked with my lady-friend, Blanche. I just showed up there in the middle of the night and surprised her. I had assumed she'd be happy about my sudden un-announced move, and she was. We stayed up for a while and giggled about it, but when she wanted to ask the obvious questions I said I was too tired and we went to bed. Over the next few days I got all the keeper stuff down to her house, and left most of it on pallets under tarps in her driveway while we figured out what would go where.

During the long drives back and forth I started feeling like a fool. There's no radio or cell phone for hours each way, so I had plenty of time to think and question my judgment, and my mania had pretty well worn off, so my mind was crowded with doubt and long lists of complications. I was telling myself why all of this was folly, why none of this would work. Mostly, I thought about the kids up in Salt Lake, and how this might seem to them like another abandonment. But I did finish my move. That last time in Salt Lake, I tidied the house, filled a few more boxes with things I might miss too much, and made a few posterboard signs advertising the house and its contents for the payoff amount of my mortgage. These I posted on my lawn and on the corners. I got no calls that day.

That night I picked up the kids from their mom's and took them out for pizza. I said I had some big news for them, and I told them what I'd done. It was tense with one of them, but the other two seemed excited, happily supportive. The other had become wary of my shenanigans in recent years, and she wouldn't meet my eyes and got silent. I tried not to present it as a done deal, but when we walked in the house and they saw it half-bare and clean, a little echo-y, they started seeing how serious I was. I can't tell you that the following days were entirely easy. Recriminations began in earnest when I pushed a pile of boxes from the liquor store into their room and told them to start packing their stuff to take to their mom's. Seeing their room all bare after years' accumulation of their girlish stuff caused me to suddenly choke up, and I felt the sentimental gravity of this big change.

By the end of the weekend we were moved out. We left enough stuff that a small family could move in and bring only their clothes and food and be pretty comfortable. I received a call from a company that manages estate sales. I didn't like their terms, but I relented on the condition that they have everything cleaned out within the week. Even twenty cents on the dollar left me with a fair-sized check. I cashed it, and withdrew the rest of my accounts as cash. Fifteen years of work, and I walked away with a few thousand dollars. But I did have the sense of walking into a new life of relative freedom. I imagined that my new freedom was a mix of the hopefulness and unencumbered enthusiasm of childhood with the skills, wisdom, and perspective of adulthood, and I was aware that these two rarely come together. Usually, a person growing up trades hope and playfulness for security, only to gradually learn that security is an illusion. To learn this and to act on it, to throw yourself back into the world after years of self-imposed solitary confinement, is a bracing and enlivening experience. You get to keep your accumulated learning while shrugging off the anchor of domestic culture. We're naked apes, so we can't dispense with domesticity altogether, but it is a revelation to know that you get to choose how domesticated you're going to be. It's as easy as letting go of your heavy luggage, shrugging the kinks out of your neck, and heading off to where your curiosity directs.