Preface to Journal

 

In June, 1991, my wife, Cathy, and I and our four children, Robert, Mara, Jeffrey and Thomas (ages 10 to 3), left our home in Las Vegas and moved to England for a year's sabbatical.  At the time I had worked at the same law firm since graduating from law school in 1975, and Cathy and I had lived in the same house for ten years.  Why were we doing it?  What would I do?  How many times were we asked! 

The first question seems rather stupid.  What 40-year old husband and father, if he could afford it, wouldn't take a year off of work to be with his young family?  My strong sense of the shortness of our lives refused to give way to the more prevalent concern we all have about security for the length of our lives.

In my mind, the real question was not, "Why?" but, "How?": how could I afford to take a year off -- a question most people were too polite to ask.  In a nutshell, the answer is that our financial ship came in that year; and, having been educated by both my mother's mother and my father in the spirit of Horace (in my own mind the phrase was Andrew Marvell's), we seized the day, though it might also be said, we blew the wad.  I think of that, every now and then, as we suffer through our financial ups and downs.  If we had not gone off together on a lark, we might now have a nice little nest egg: a college fund, a swimming pool, the living room furniture, a savings account. 

But it wasn't a lark.  It was a dream and I don't regret it.  If I had to do it all again, there are, of course, things I would change; but we would still have gone.  Time will tell whether I'm right or not, but, when I think about what we did, it seems to me that spending that year together in England, as a family, traveling across Europe, being together every day, was more valuable to my children than a four year ticket to the private college of their choice.  I like to think of it as investing our money early in the children, rather than later.

It seems to me that a sabbatical is more of a process than an event.  Have I changed?  It seems to me I did, though the changes are subtle and may have come anyway. 

This journal tells the story of how we prepared for that year, where we went and how we spent our time.  More importantly, this is the story of how I came to believe in a dream and, in doing so, make it come true.