Light On Dark Water

Lost Weekend

This being the second Sunday of the month, I had planned to
continue my not-very-well-established second-Sunday routine of
writing on the subject of music. My subject was to have been the
music, or rather say the work, or rather say the post-1982 work,
of Tom Waits. I even had in mind the title of the piece, which is
unusual; most of my titles are tacked on at the last minute,
after I look back and see what I’ve written. The title was
to have been—and will be, when I eventually write the
piece—“Tom Waits and the Absence of God.” On
second thought, I may not write it at all, as the title pretty
well says it all.

But I’m not writing about music tonight because I
don’t feel like it. It’s been a demanding few days,
and I don’t feel up to thinking very hard about anything
very weighty.

I had a nice weekend planned. And before I go any further let
me say that I am devoted to my wife and to my daughter (the only
one of our children still at home, her siblings having left her
temporarily an only child) and I greatly enjoy their company. But
I also like solitude. It’s a rare treat for me and has been
for most of my life. I grew up sharing a room with one of my
brothers, and as an adult I’ve never lived alone for more
than a few months. That has been for the best, I feel sure;
I’ve always suspected that, left to my own devices, I would,
in some unspecified way, Not Do Well. But the weariness with simply being alone of which
so many single people complain is foreign to me. I hear what they
say, and I grasp it intellectually, but I have never experienced
it as they have, much as I’ve never experienced truly
serious hunger. This of course does not mean I have never felt
lonely—I’ve had at least my share of that—but
feeling lonely in the midst of other people is a different matter
from really being alone.

My wife accompanied my daughter this week to the All-South
Band competition at the University of Southern Mississippi. They
left Thursday morning. I planned to drive over and join them for
the final concert on Sunday. This meant three days of having the
house to myself, at least when I was not at work. I had hoped to
take a day off but it was a bad time for that. Still, I expected
to have at my disposal Thursday evening, Friday evening, and all
of Saturday. And I didn’t plan to loaf, or at least not
only to loaf; I’m working on a certain project which
requires extended periods of concentration and quiet, and I hoped
to make some real headway on it.

All this came to naught. At work we had planned for late
Friday a major reconfiguration of our network. It was supposed to
have happened last Friday, but had been postponed; at that time I
thought I saw a cloud no bigger than a man’s hand on the
horizon of my plans for this weekend, and I was right to be
apprehensive. The work was also supposed to have been done in two
hours or so, which I had mentally adjusted to four, but I was
wrong about that—it took far longer. Without going into
very boring and to most people incomprehensible detail,
let’s just say that some of us stayed at work until after
two AM that night and were back again in the morning to spend
Saturday there.

By the time I left work Friday I was, to put it bluntly,
infuriated at the thwarting of my plans for the weekend. I
managed to keep my emotions under enough control to keep from
doing eighty miles per hour down Highway 98 (the speed limit is
fifty most of the way), which at 2:30 in the morning on the
almost-deserted road would certainly have gotten me a ticket for
speeding, if not for reckless driving, which of course is exactly
what it would have been. (Or perhaps: Local Man Killed in
High-Speed Chase.) The dogs and cats at home, having been
shut up since seven that morning, were glad to see me, but I soon
gave them reason to change their minds. (CAT, n. A soft,
indestructible automaton provided by nature to be kicked when
things go wrong in the domestic circle. –Ambrose Bierce,
The Devil’s Dictionary)

I awoke Saturday morning, still grouchy, after four or five
hours of fitful sleep interrupted twice by the alarm clocks left
set for 5:45 and 6:00 by, respectively, daughter and wife. But
sometime after breakfast and coffee I realized I had submitted; I
had let go of my plans and my desires and was ready to accept
whatever I had to do for the rest of the weekend.

And [Saul] said, Who art thou, Lord? And the Lord said, I
am Jesus whom thou persecutest: it is hard for thee to kick
against the pricks. –Acts 9:5

In the end I had a few hours free Saturday night and was able
to enjoy them without brooding about how short they were. I would
like to be able to say I accepted my disappointment more
graciously. I did eventually get around to offering it to God as
a Lenten penance, but considering some of the things I said
Friday night I doubt I did any better than break even. Still,
this is the way we get the rough edges of our self-will smoothed
out, and so perhaps the weekend was not lost after all, but
found.

By the way, I didn’t actually kick the cats. But
I did shove them out of the way with somewhat more than necessary
force.