Sorry about the unannounced sabbatical. Severe writer’s block and an ongoing series of personal crises ruled my life over the past eight weeks.
Let’s enumerate:
On the day she left for her third semester at college, Adie’s boyfriend called out of the blue and broke up with her. Distraught, Adie drove to school, hit a rumble strip in the passing lane of an interstate, and over-reacted. She spun out and went into a guardrail.
Only after twenty-four hours later, I found out about it. The car was totaled but she came out of it unscathed. A week later, because she had no car, she couldn’t get to the pharmacy and being a typical twenty-year-old kid, blithely withdrew from some high powered meds that had been prescribed to deal with a general anxiety problem she has.
The meds were prescribed about six months ago and help her concentrate on academics.
The withdrawal symptoms were horrendous. Adie had hallucinations and became self-destructive. Again I only found out about this later, after getting a cryptic phone call in the night, and emailing her and her friends in school. Her friend sent back a one-liner saying that she had a “pretty rough night”, which I later learned included an attempt to jump out of a window.
Meanwhile B1 was calling me every day. It seems that the equity loans she took out on what used to be our house was against some sub-prime shyster and the payments were about to double. She was already behind in her mortgage payments, has a broken refrigerator, a nearly dead furnace, and is about one mortgage payment away from defaulting. She can’t sell her house, since the loan and appraisal was made back in the salad days of 2004. She is now in a negative equity situation, and can’t sell the house for the amount she borrowed.
Meanwhile B2 never calls me. She is still looking for a job and is at risk of losing her house. B2 has lots of assets (she owns three homes) but has borrowed from Peter to pay Paul. Paul is now showing up the door, with his thumb-breaking friend named Vinnie.
The next shoe to drop was a physical assault by Adie’s ex-boyfriend on a Friday night.
The assault was not sexual, but Adie was bruised pretty badly. After much prodding and a few phone calls to school administrators, Adie came forward and told officials of the incident.
So most of my time has been spent doing remote crisis management for Adie. Needless to say it hasn’t been easy, but it was made worse by cell-phones, which have spotty connectivity in the mountains of northern Vermont. Invariably I’d get a phone call, with
Adie sobbing on the other end, and then get garbled information that would be truncated by a dropped call. I was going nuts just trying to get in touch with her and clarify what was going on. Many places in the third world would be logistically easier.
After several trips by B1 and myself to her school during the weekends, we got Adie back on her medication. She went to counseling and support at the school to deal with any trauma regarding the physical attack, and is busy finishing her semester while sending applications for transfer to some large universities in Boston. Given that Boston is less than an hour away and has pretty decent and reliable communication infrastructure, a transfer sounds like a blessing.
Oh, I have met and started dating a wonderful woman, named L. She has endured two months of this nonsense and has been more than supportive. To add some comic relief to my personal life, L and I got carried away on a weekend and put us in the precarious position of worrying about becoming fifty-year-old parents. Thankfully, L’s pregnancy test turned out negative. I immediately marched down to the doctor’s office and arranged for an appointment with an urologist to get myself gilded. Since then L and I have been dutifully restricting ourselves to holding hands and watching old movies.
Presumably in five weeks I will be officially sterile. As Forest Gump said, “One less thing.”
I find myself quoting Gump a lot recently.