Get Me to the Church On Time!
My life is chaos, and I mean chaos! For over a year our neighborhood streets have been torn up by a comprehensive utilities upgrade, the last twelve months the neighbor has numerous vendors cluttering the street for their gut remodel, and the last four weeks we’ve been moving to a new condo. The past two weeks I’ve been wrestling with the HOA and property management team over software glitches, parking passes, registrations and payments, and a variety of other screwups. I’m trying to acclimate to a new gym, new surroundings, and the currently crazy living dynamic. And last, I’ve been agonizingly watching our Seattle Mariners struggle to make a breakthrough, only to fail in a last gasp seventh game to reach the World Series for the first time in their history. Yes, the only major league team to NEVER appear in a World Series.
I didn’t even care if we won it – I just wanted us to get there! We want to be able to say we went to a World Series game, saw the fall classic in person, that we experienced the tension, the intensity, the gravitas of it all. The scintillating plays, the incredible hits, the explosion of emotion by 47,000 baseball-crazed fans. Now all we get to say is we had a chance, maybe next year. Maybe next year… how many times have we heard that before.
But now it’s back to reality, the current grind of trying to assimilate three people into a 2000 square foot condo from a 3,300 sq. ft. home. Actually, it’s worse than that. Janice and I moved in with her cousin, understanding it was ultimately a temporary stop between selling and buying. So, we put a bunch of stuff in storage. Then, what with the reality of extended traveling, all of us realized sharing a home might be the best solution for all parties. So, a waterfront condo became our new residence. It’s beautiful, but we’re all wrestling with parting from long-held treasures. As you might guess, the life-long gatherings of two couples don’t easily fit. Hard choices and decorating compromises await.
I’m finally, after four years of storage, being reunited with some of those treasures. It’s been a breath of fresh air. Many of our old works of art are seeing the light of day again, the wardrobe reappears from boxes; we’re getting to spread our wings after being couped up. But all is not perfect. There are still troubling consequences.
I’m scrambling to rent convenient additional parking for my two sports cars. Surveying the condo community has been tedious and, so far, fruitless. Worse, there’s some petty hoarding of spaces, even those not in use. Gotta figure out how to break through that, but it strikes me as so juvenile. I’d like to just take those people out back and slap them around for a while. Small-minded idiots. The world is full of them. Ah well, I’ll keep plugging at it; something’s bound to turn up.
Our place is only thirty miles south of my dear West Seattle, but it’s a whole new world. At once familiar and new again. It’s much like traveling back thirty years, when West Seattle was a more leisurely, less harried, less crowded place. Where people smiled and greeted each other on the street, where traffic flowed, where a relaxed sense of community dominated. Maybe I’m being deceived, but Tacoma still has that sense to me. Guess I’ll find out once the chaos subsides. I’ll let you know. For now, it’s on with the struggle of finding my place in the world again.
