RootsRain

After the PGA Championship weekend, I was allowed to take Tuesday off so I drove back here to Greenville on Monday night alone to work on the attic. Emily had been at the house all last week packing things up so when I walked in to a house completely bare except for boxes stacked everywhere, something inside of me just about broke. It’s been the strangest feeling… like the house is evicting us. It’s a lot like being rejected by someone who used to love you. You feel like the person is still there and they look the same but all the things that used to make you comfortable around them are gone and there’s only the impassive shell… their presence is so close and yet so irretrievably lost…

I just never figured I’d feel this way about a house.

I guess since Emily packed away all the pictures, lamps, dishes, books… it’s like the house and I have finally ended our relationship. Up until now home was always here and I was just staying at my brother and sister-in-law’s. Now I don’t have a home. The house has chosen someone else and I have no place of rest and familiarity to retreat to. This may sound like a bizarre pity party, but I’m just amazed at this feeling of utter desolation. Being the homebody that I am, I haven’t until now gotten a taste of how painful it was for the Son of Man to have no place to lay his head. It really is a feeling of being utterly alone.

Of course, it’s also been making me think that Emily is the closest thing I have to home. While staring at blank walls, empty closets, and the single bare alarm clock on what used to be a cluttered night stand, I kept thinking: if Emily were here this would feel like home again. Things would be okay. It’s been making me extra thankful for a wife. I’m honestly not sure how single people do it… I guess when you’re single your roots only go down so far. You’re fairly ready to move on to the next thing. But when you get married something happens: germination begins and you push out in all directions, growing taller and reaching farther out while also digging and gripping deeper into the soil of the familiar. And you have to. The wider your experience grows, the more you need that tether to a center. Otherwise, the falcon cannot hear the falconer.

Well… the world is out of joint. The mirror has cracked. All paths are bent.

I just wish my last night in the house weren’t so filled with this echoing emptiness.

And I really wish Emily were here.

A few nights ago I had another of these odd, citified, Turner Sports evenings. The entire PGA and NASCAR creative teams were taken out to Strip Restaurant at Atlantic Station and treated to an evening of whatever we wanted. The waiter asked if anyone would like any appetizers and when everyone looked at each other (thinking: are we allowed?), our boss said “just bring out a couple of everything.” That ended up being fried calamari, spinach dip and chips, and two boatloads of sushi. Yes, boatloads. They were large wooden boats (about 2.5 feet long) with a smorgasboard of sushi on the top deck. There must have been about $300 worth of sushi in each one. And they put one of the boats right in front of me. Now, I’ve never had sushi, but when someone puts $300 worth of fine sushi right in front of you, you feel a little more adventurous. So I had a bunch… raw salmon with rice, raw shrimp with rice, seared (raw) peppered tuna, fried cucumber & salmon sushi with wasabi drizzled on the top… Well, I’m happy to report that I survived. And (sorry Jamie!) I don’t really see what people like about sushi. It was pretty tasteless and… well, cold. I enjoyed my 10oz. steak a lot more. Quite tasty. I’m getting hungry so I’d better change topics.

On the downside, during weeks like this past one, you feel like you’re worth way more than the endless stream of perks + the generous salary. I can’t remember ever being so busy. I’ve been at work 12 hours each day most days (with no lunch) working on the upcoming PGA Championship and every minute is spent revving my little designer engine to 9,000 RPMs. At one point this morning, I had one manager IMing me about changes he wanted immediately-or-the-world-would-explode while at the same time my boss came around the corner and wanted to talk to me just as I got an IM from the creative director asking me to come over to his cubicle to discuss a new project while at the same time I was already on the phone with a sales guy insisting that I had to get that darned Aflac duck animation finished by noon (AAALFAAAAC!). It’s pretty stressful, but I’ve been amazed to see how fast I can design and bang stuff out when I’m under a lot of pressure. You start wondering if you genuinely have a limit to how much work you can do in a limited time. Of course you do, but it’s been interesting realizing that my previous ideas about how much work I could do in a day have been self-imposed. When someone else grabs my schedule and makes wildly unreasonable demands on it, I find that they weren’t entirely unreasonable.

If any of my bosses are reading this, I have way too much work to do and that last paragraph was entirely a joke.