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.
