end of the road

(Adapted and expanded from a Facebook post from May 2018)

I’m standing in front of my hotel in east London at 4 AM waiting for my Lyft to arrive. On the last day in the UK I finally get to see just a wisp of one of those famous London fogs that everyone goes on about.  Not impressed. I do however suddenly have a craving for a cigarette.  Maybe it’s the urban setting that’s doing it but the craving passes by fairly quickly.

I decided to give myself a treat after two weeks of ‘roughing it’ and got a room at an upscale hi-rise hotel. A glass and steel spire with nice new streets, expensive roof top restaurants, and all night bars and clubs where the current crop of stylish 20somethings hang out. So this is how the other half lives.

The temptation to stay another two or three nights was strong but all vacations have to come to an end and soon the night wound down fairly quickly as I had a dawn flight out of Heathrow.

The next morning up pulls an E-class Mercedes and the driver comes out wearing a peaked cap. I didn’t ask for a fancy car and I suddenly felt rather scruffy in my travel-worn clothes and my travel backpack.

We whisk down the empty streets of London towards Paddington station. Even on empty streets it would take about an hour to get to Heathrow. The Paddington express would get me there in fifteen minutes.

The driver turns on the radio. A morning DJ is doing what morning DJs all over the US would do. Playing songs, talking to callers, getting people pumped up for the work day to come.

I could live here. I could get used to using the underground and walking everywhere and the smaller houses and running from one small store to another to get things instead of finding everything in one store.

I could probably make a go of it in any of the countries that I visited. You can learn local languages and customs fairly quickly if you want to or are forced to.

At the Airport I swap out the last of my English pounds, Euros, and Korunas for good old American dollars.

I’m thinking about how I’ll get home once I step out from Hobby airport in Houston and what the weather will be like.

My mind is shifting back out of vacation mode. I planned everything beforehand so I had little to think about during the trip. I just went to my next destination and it was there waiting for me.

While people around me went about their jobs and lives I wandered round with nothing to do. Except… joggers. Walking around London and Paris in the middle of the day I would encounter joggers and I would wonder what kind of job that they had that allowed them to take a jog in the middle of the day.

For the last two weeks my room was cleaned, my bed was made, my food was cooked, and my transport was arranged but now I’m going back to the real world.

Bills to pay, appointments to arrange and keep, checklists and schedules to make. Beds to make, meals to cook, places to drive to. A life.

My first real vacation in four years. My first real mental break since my dad died. I have come to terms with the fact that he will no longer play a part in my decision-making process.

For the past five years I’ve planned my life round his needs and now that chapter is closed. I can now put my needs in the forefront. The thought frightens me a bit.

I feel a bit like a soldier that’s just come home from a war with no clue about the future.

I had my daily routines, my schedule, the course of my life all built around him and putting him ahead of everything else so that he’d never want for anything or that his health might suffer. But that’s gone now and I have to do things for my benefit and I find that hard to do.

During the vacation I tried to remember what my ‘life plans’ were before I committed myself to take care of my parents. Those notions of what was “going to happen” seem like they belong to some other person.  My life path has gone onto a totally different course.

Twelve years ago I realized that my dad would need care and what and who I could depend upon to help. Ten years ago I bought a house to take care of both of my parents, a big Four bedroom house with front and a back lawn. Totally impractical for a childless bachelor but something that would give them the space that they had been accustomed to.  Five years ago they came to live with me.

I gave up a normal social life. The invites to events and parties trickled down to a few and then to none. No point inviting me if I always said I couldn’t go. I’ve become contented with a movie or a play on the weekends.  The parents and the job filled most of my waking hours.

The job I didn’t particularly like but it would let me work from home and stay close to them so I had to keep going. This came in particularly useful in the last year of my dad’s life when I had to rush him to the hospital more than once.

But now I’m coming home tabula rasa, with a clean slate. My dad is gone, my job is gone. I lost my job in March.

Maybe my mind couldn’t concentrate on the work anymore, or maybe I didn’t see the point in staying at a job I didn’t like with no compelling reason to stay, or maybe after 15 years of doing inside sales I just burnt out.

Sales was never a good fit for me. I’ve never been a born salesman. Somehow I kept it going because I had to. But I don’t see myself going back. Not to that company at least and probably not to the sales field.

Don’t ask me what’s to come for me. I don’t know. I’ve got savings so I’m okay for a while. I told myself that I was taking this trip to get some inspiration or some new idea of where to go and what to do. I think I knew that wasn’t true.

Truthfully I just needed time away from me.

Maybe now I can force myself to look at my situation and see something that I wasn’t seeing before. Get a clue about what to do.

Landing in Ireland and running to my next destination.