New Morning, New Day

It is with great optimism that I greet 2015.  The tumult of 2014 appears to be satisfied with staying in 2014.  Like a dog who nips at your heels until it gets to the end of its territory.   With the filing of divorce papers on January 2, the county clerk's stamp will be the 2015 coda on the slow 2014 funeral march of our marriage.

Soon enough, February 22, 2015 will mark the one-year anniversary of my move from my gracious four-bedroom, three-bath house that I do not miss with even one grain of sentimentality.

That was both a hasty retreat and one that was overdue.  It was with such a sigh of relief to retreat to a modest, one-bedroom apartment in the student ghetto near campus.

My favorite contemporary poet, the deceptively accessible Billy Collins, has a little poem in his volume Ballistics entitled "Divorce":

         Once, two spoons in bed,

         now tined forks

          across a granite table

          and the knives they have hired.

Well, thankfully that does not describe our divorce, at least from my perspective (and I have been reminded of the importance of perspective through all of this).

My lawyer immediately recommended mediation and though it took a long time to set it up, a date was set for us (sporks?) and our lawyers (sheathed knives?) to meet at the mediator's office in one  of those weird office parks designed to look like townhouses and that provide space for a hodgepodge of businesses: soulless suburban places.  No granite table. Rather, me and my knife were in one room stocked with a mini-fridge of drinks and a bowl of Hersey Nuggets (the least the mediator could supply for $275/hour--that's for each of us), and she and her banker-looking knife in another.  The mediator bounced back and forth.  It was all so ordinary for him (a spatula?) and the knives. Extraordinary for me.  Don't know what she thought of it.  Probably never will.

The date of the mediation?  September 4, which just so happened to be our wedding anniversary. Our 21st wedding anniversary.  Divorce mediation scheduled for our last wedding anniversary.  Our marriage was now legal to drink and here we were engaged in its dissipation.  

After that, the divorce was a process of document exchanges.  The most challenging issue was the custody schedule.  Z's choice was two-week cycles with each parent, something my lawyer had never heard of.  The devil is in the details, however, and my lawyer found it impossible to find language that would adequately lay out how the two-week cycle functioned within the complicated framework of holiday visitation that her lawyer put forth.  I offered my lawyer language . . . for free.  In the end, he trusts we will remain sporks.

So 2014 was the year of the divorce.  It started with incredible fireworks over the frigid Pacific waters of Chile seen from the thirteenth floor of our apartment in Viña del Mar on New Year's--January 1.  It saw our departure from Chile on January 2 and our return to the United States on January 3.  February 22's evacuation from the premises.  The sale of our house later that spring for too little money. September 4's mediation.  Full circle to January 2, 2015, submission of papers to an Athens Judge who, as a lowly attorney 12 years ago, helped us adopt Z. A judge in Athens will put asunder what a minister united in Charlotte in 1993.  In the words of Jesus on the cross, "tetelestai."

Travels with Pablo?  You bet.  Because the journey has begun again.  And after a year of traveling in the valley of the shadow of divorce, I see the sun.  And it is warm and bright and beckoning me:  "Look around," it seems to be saying, "isn't it beautiful?"

Stayed tuned for more adventures--on bike and on foot, professional and personal, physical and spiritual, domestic and international.   Carpe fucking diem. 

A Different Kind of Journey

I wrote the following post in April 2014, and it has sat in my dormant blog's draft folder for almost nine months. Given that it has been incubating for almost as long as a gestating fetus, I believe it is time for it to emerge and stand as a post signifying a new threshold for "Travels with Pablo."

"Pull a thread on a 20-year relationship and it's amazing how quickly it unravels":  so wrote Tish Hamilton in the February 2014 issue of Runner's World in an short but trenchant article about how running functions during the breakdown of her marriage. The article is entitled "Untying the Knot."

It is rare indeed to read a sentence that so perfectly describes my life in that instant.  I read it as my own 20-year marriage moved from the ICU to hospice.

Since returning from Chile on January 3, I have been on a very different kind of travel than my 5 1/2 months in Chile, though the latter certainly had something to do with the latter.  The trip has been a swift, unstoppable unraveling of my life but it was not entirely unpredictable.  We are trying to untie the knot as amicably as possible, more along the lines that dear Gwyneth Paltrow has bestowed on us this week with the psychobabble-sounding term "conscious uncoupling."  Chile provided us with a way to see clearly just what our differences were and forced us to stare directly into the face of a reality that we had been palliating with the opiates of routine, obligation, and a long tally of mulligans that we were giving one another.

I am going to use this space to talk about my travels. I am not going to speak of my soon-to-be-ex spouse or our son.  I want to use this space to explore this terrain, which is new to me but all too common for far too many other people.  You will not find blame here (because there is none), you will not find acrimony toward another, you will not find salacious details.  What you will find is a man trying to emerge from the "uncoupling" of a marriage (but not the uncoupling of parenthood for either of us) to learn how to be a better person.  I want to learn from this.  I need to learn from this. I want to be a better parent because of this.  And I want to have better relationships with other people as a result of this.

Having a room of my own, with apologies to Virginia Woolf, has already provided me with insight into the last 20 years of my life  (we had our twentieth anniversary in Chile) and I can say that I am not having to try very hard to focus on and appreciate the high points.  We grew up together and discovered a lot of things over the course of two decades.  The last 20 years were not a mistake. They have been part of the journey.  The latest chapter, living alone in an apartment in a pistachio-green building, has been a kind of a retreat back to a standard of living reminiscent of PQ circa 1990.  With better furniture.  I found some mirth in going to Lowe's to buy cinderblocks, bricks and boards to customize shelving for a very weird space next to my kitchen range, but evidently constructing furniture out of building supplies is like riding a bike.

So, forgive me if this seems self-indulgent, but I do want to share what I am thinking and feeling (in a certain way) to others, perhaps because the one person that I used to share those things with is no longer available.