12. Essays; "Words"

Thursday 5 December.  8:45 a.m.  Cloudy.  Mass, then worked on essays to submit for competition.  First blue sky in several days, but we don't mind the clouds.

Last night I dreamed I finally got a job (for some reason I needed a job or was looking to get one) -- as a bus driver!  (Now that I think about it, it may have been the bus company that needed me and I volunteered.)  The day I was supposed to go to work I fiddled around and enjoyed myself with friends until way after starting time.  When I finally made it to my bus, got my equipment and picked up my passengers, hours late, no one seemed to care about how late I was, and when, busily chatting away or trying to figure out how to work all my equipment and paperwork, I missed the Motorway off ramp, it was no big deal, even though that put me even further behind schedule.  I remember that, in my dream, I drove on the right side of the road, as did all the traffic.  I had a feeling that I needed to do something (write, perhaps), but whether or not I ever got around to it people didn't really care; though they were grateful when I finally produced.  Oddly applicable to my current situation!

Off to mass.

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WORDS

 We have now lived in Essex for four months, a half hour's drive to pick up the children in Cambridge and an hour's train ride to London to see the sights.  I am midway in my year long sabbatical from practicing real estate law in Las Vegas, Nevada and to say that we all enjoy our surroundings is an understatement.  If we miss the blue skies, we do not miss the brown landscapes.  There are more shades of green here than any place west of the Mississippi River, and it does not take much to impress a desert rat.

We are here because, when I was eight years old and my father had an itch to change fields in medicine and a hankering to revisit his World War II London stomping grounds, we lived in England for a year.  Our home was Horley, close to the new airport, Gatwick, and I attended St. Hilda's School for Girls (which, despite its name had a number of boys).  When I was twenty-one and old enough to appreciate my good fortune at having lived overseas, I vowed I would do it again someday. 

Ironically, thirty-three years later, we happen to be close to another new airport, Stanstead; and though St. John's is five times bigger than St. Hilda's, the blazers and the ties will be something for the children to remember some day, as I did, when they are older.   

Words, however, are what finally brought us here, not the fond memories of childhood.

First and foremost were the words which kept the dream alive: the twenty years of journal writing, staying attuned to the thoughts within, from the first day, when, as an eighteen year old freshman at UCLA, I proclaimed myself a poet, to the 100,000 word autobiography I wrote for myself in 1989 and 1990 in hopes of revealing what I wanted to be when I grew up.

There were the words which paid the bills: the hundreds of contracts and mortgages I wrote and rewrote in my sixteen years as a lawyer. 

There were surprising words. The speech given at the UCLA alumni dinner by a woman who had flown around the world, and who returned to say, "Have you ever wanted to do something really crazy?  Well my advice is do it."  My wife, Cathy, beginning to waiver from disbelief to belief, thought it was a set up.

There were words of wisdom, new and old.  When I told one of my partners that if I didn't take a sabbatical this year I would probably take the same elevator to the same floor for thirty years, not sixteen.  After all that time at work, so many days away from watching my children grow up, what, I asked him, would I have to show for it?  "A good form file," he said.

The old words of wisdom were the words of Andrew Marvell which rhythmically repeated themselves as I circled the jogging track at Bob Baskin Park, and looked over my right shoulder.  More than once I thought I actually heard "Times winged Chariot" behind me.

There were good words.  After twelve years of subtle and not so subtle influence, Cathy said, "Yes," finally believing that living in England was not just a dream.  Words of my partners who, incredibly, agreed to something I did not dare ask six months before.  Words of friends and relatives who would miss us and promised to come see us.  Words of another partner who prophesied a la Kevin Costner in Field of Dreams, that the long awaited fee which would finance the trip would soon come, "If you leave it will come." 

But I never heard the words I had really wanted to hear. 

In 1986, I had walked along the beach at Del Mar every day for a week praying for guidance, a message or a sign that would reveal if I should change jobs or do something crazy like my father had in 1958.  I heard nothing but the patient rolling of the waves.

When we decided to leave, there was no way we could do it.  There were too many obstacles.  I continued to jog around the track at Bob Baskin, praying for an answer, "Tell me, Lord, how can we do this?"  How was it I had led us down a road which seemed impossible to take? 

Meanwhile, I rented a mini warehouse and started to pack things away, a little each weekend.     

In hindsight everything fits together so nicely.  The dream, the hard work, the prayers, the patience, and the promise all seem to lead inevitably to the desired end, the year abroad, the nice house in Essex, the good school, the weekends in London.  The ingredient lacking, however, is the invisible glue that kept it all together, and the only one I see is the silent answer to my prayers.  It seems silly to believe that God brought us here, that the silence which permitted only one interpretation was meaningful, but then I remember my grandmother's words many years ago: Trust God. 

And there it is.