Still Life With Psychiatric Hospital

I wrote this last week to Rob and Rich. I thought this prequel might provide background to my real blog entry (below). Sorry for hogging all the space to get started. Who's next?

=     =     =     =     =     =     =     =     =     =     =     =     =     =     =     =     =     =    

At the start of the summer, I had some big plans to be productive which, for an English nerd, means writing. I had some time and some good ideas and I was ready to get rolling. My summer Harry Potter class loomed in July, but I could handle that. It was fun, in fact, to plan for each day of that course. I had a commitment in Kansas City grading AP exams, a task I truly despise, but we needed the money, and so I said yes. On the way there—the first week of June—the air conditioner in my car died at the Illinois-Wisconsin line. The temp that day soared into the high 90s and I was driving right into that flaming orb for hours and hours. I got dehydrated without really feeling it coming and then started feeling really, really rotten somewhere west of St Louis. GPS took me to the nearest hospital, and the good folks there rehydrated me and monitored me for two hours while I recovered. They seemed a little surprised to see me for some reason. A half dozen nurses were in my room at one point just chatting. It was a fun night in the emergency department. I found out later that this hospital was actually a psychiatric hospital for women that has a lightly-used emergency room due to the regional trauma center just a mile down the road. I was big news in this place, a patient neither female nor in need of psychiatric treatment. Funny!

I spent the following week at Tim’s in St Louis recovering and waiting for the heat to break a little bit. I got a ton of good Harry Potter prep done that week, part of which I spent at the Wash U library. Super impressive. Finally, I just decided to drive all night to avoid the sun on the way home to Appleton.  That brought me right up against the start of the Harry Potter course still feeling a bit hazy. I jumped right back into my second job as a college counselor. On my return, my dean asked me if I would help him do some personnel work at UW-Manitowoc. I said sure, and that brought a fourth job into my summer, one that required a lot of travel. It more or less killed my late June and all of July for writing, but we need the money. I kind of like academic hiring process, anyway. Lots of interesting people out there.

Why is money so tight these days, you ask? Well, Gwen (who is 12) is playing hockey now at a very high level. She’s got a lot of travel opportunities these days and has already met informally with a college coach (RIT). Exciting stuff. The newer news is that Imogen spent three weeks in Brooklyn this summer dancing at a pre-professional program in classical ballet. There were fifty girls in the program and two were asked to join the year-round professional training program. Imogen really wants to make a go of a professional career in ballet, and so we pulled the belt even tighter and said yes. We had to figure out a way for her to live, and so the tentative plan was for her to stay with my parents in North Haledon, NJ (next door to Jeff), and commute each day. That’s expensive and time-consuming. Our preliminary budget put us well over two grand in the hole every month. Then Liz’s miraculous wedding happened, and we got to talking to one of my first cousins, Katie, a woman I had not seen in decades. Her dad (my uncle) married into Oklahoma oil money—lots of it—and now Katie happens to have an extra apartment that they never use on 72^nd St between Central Park West and Columbus Avenue. Katie offered it to Imogen for as long as she wants it. Is that incredible luck, or what? But Imogen in NYC on her own didn’t sit right with us, and so now Susan is quitting her job and moving with Imogen to NYC from September to May to be her stage mom. If she is able to make some money while Imogen dances, then we might be able to pull this off. If not, then we’re truly sunk. Bankruptcy sunk.

But my philosophy has been that we get only one chance to raise our kids. We’ll have plenty of time (we hope) after they’re out of the house to try to work out net worth back to zero before we retire for good. And so we’re going for it. Banzai. No regrets. The full monty.

I am here in Milwaukee tonight at the rink typing this while Gwen skates with her team, the Milwaukee Jr Admirals (an affiliate of the AHL team of the same name, minus the Jr). I finished my second day of school today and am too tired to think about sleeping, let alone the two hour drive I have home tonight from this rink. We’ve got no money. I’m working three jobs. Our little family is splitting into two pieces for the foreseeable future, and I desperately miss my wife and daughter already!

If I think about all of it, I feel something like vertigo.

Writing helps.