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Yesterday, the casinos opened back up in Hancock County. Half the information I hear is that we are moving too fast into more trouble ahead. Half the messages I read is that we are returning to normal.

I keep my guard up for normal’s arrival. It’s only now in the long morning walks and evening bikes rides that I have come to realize why normal is elusive. I grew up out of step, out of time.

My father moved us around as if we were military. Packing us up and flying us off to Managua, San Salvador, Panama, Puerto Rico, and driving us through all hours of the night towards Manhattan, the Bronx, Atlanta, Pensacola, and back and forth and in and out of New Orleans too many times to count.

He did this because he could earn a living anywhere as a doctor – with my mother as his nurse if it was his own practice. I lived in hotel rooms, my aunt’s rooms, my Maw Maw’s rooms, and many apartments, rooms and houses that we occupied as a family.

I never once experienced a life like my friends, where their father, mother or both went off to work at a certain time, and came home at a certain time, and they vacationed at a certain time, in a certain place. Our time and places dwelled in uncertainty.

I stumbled into a career as an investigative reporter, helping to build a company, with a regular paycheck, benefits, and a certainty and one day it imploded. I’ve spent nine years trying to claw back to that steady paycheck, the knowing what my days and months and years would be, the certainty that what I produce would be rewarded.

I spend a lot of time trying to make money out of my gifts and talents, trying to assuage the fear of not being able to pay my bills. And just when I thought I might master this puzzle, a pandemic hit, and whooshed away any thoughts of actually making money and instead offered me a sea of time.

Time to meditate, walk, take bike rides by the waterfront, not think about the mastery of money or schedules or work but instead time to contemplate a whole world reduced to a collective breath and uncertainty. It feels like home to me. And I realized I have been chasing the wrong currency all along.

This entry was posted on Saturday, May 23rd, 2020 at 6:55 am and is filed under Main. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.