signing off
Hello. This will be my lost post in the Couch Surfing Blog I submit from Portland, OR. I’m leaving Sunday. It feels like it’s been a real good run, being here in Portland, on my own (mostly) for the first year and then luckily going on a ‘Match’ blind date and meeting a woman who became the love of my life, and my soulmate. In the last 11 years here I’ve become an artist, I’ve published two vastly different Blogs over a number of years, and I have self-published eight books – four of poetry (a big go figure) and three fictions and a non-fiction. More on that last one in a minute. This has all been under the umbrella of the wife’s acceptance of my setting out on different paths and sort of morphing into the person I am today. Sort of like a scholarship.
Then seven weeks ago Susan said “No more” and here it is a Friday morning and there’s something like 48 hours remaining in this house which has been my vibrant home, and then back the next day to pack off the kid for his new life – one for which he is excited, and stimulated in good ways, and likely on occasion he’ll miss his old man pretty good too.
Sunday I move into a room I bartered for with art in the next town over – Milwaukie – for the rest of the month. The younger woman offering me this kindness of shelter is for sure a katrillion times more hip with electronics and the internet age, meaning I’m hoping with her help (mostly her) to have my soon to be disassembled computer re-assembled and me back here offering up these daily “weather reports” which pretty much flow out of my soul, via my two index fingers.
Sometime the very end of June, no later than the first day of July, I will say a final thanks to my very temporary roommate and head off to – honest, I ain’t kidding – parts unknown. I do know the direction in which I’ll point the Toyota Camry – and assuming I am back here early next week, which may be Tuesday what with the son’s Monday move over to another surrounding town – Gresham – I will begin talking clearly and honestly – and, it being me – rather goofily about what I believe to be in store for me next. The geography of my “next”. My one book of non-fiction, noted above, is titled “Get in the Car”. Maybe you’ve read or perused through it. Its overall theme – spelled out and implicit – is to just go and get in the car. Go someplace. Make something happen. Be bold and expect, rightly so, mighty forces to come to your aid. It’s part metaphor, the “get in the car” thing, and more actual.
And it is what I will be doing soon enough, traveling on a new path I didn’t and never would have asked for but now see as another chance to live a different life. Maybe one pretty cool. Another chapter. Friends have helped to get me there, to get me ready for the car. And the blue, blue highway. Helped more than I can say. I say Thank you.
But this post right here is the last one from right here. It is heart-breaking. And it’s a new window as well. One to crawl through. Some new highway miles too.
One door closes, another opens. We just have to remind ourselves to be brave enough to walk through it. Peace, Brother.
One door closes, another opens. We just have to remind ourselves to be brave enough to walk through it. Peace, Brother.