I'm home, awake the night before taking a trip to T.O. to see my fella, taking stock of what it means to be 36.
I have to say that the part of me that feels self-pity about being closer to 50 years old than to 20 is being kicked in the ass big-time by the news from New Orleans.
I don't quite know what I would do if I was asked to evacuate the City of Chicago. I could try living with my Dad in McHenry County, about an hour away. But they have little space and little money and perhaps, in the case of a disaster, little refuge.
I could take to the road. Lots of room on my credit cards and I could live for a while. That, in and of itself puts me in a rare place, I realize. What would it mean if I had no money, no credit, no nearby, yet reachable family, no lifeline? Would I be holed up inside the United Center, waiting for someone to figure out how to ferry all 25,000 of us to Minneapolis where, without money or family or friends or mailing address or phone or anything I would be expected to make it work out?
That calculation, of course, assumes that I have no kids. The governor of Texas, where the current residents of the New Orleans stadium will soon be housed has pledged that his schools will be open to the incoming domestic refugees from New Orleans.
Good Lord but being a kid was hard. HARD. It was for almost everyone I know well. I am so glad that I was not obliged to have my childhood ass shuttled 350 miles from home to go to school and try to learn long division as a weirdo charity case.
I got a haircut yesterday and, as always, marveled at the increasing percentage of gray and white hairs in the debris left on the barber's cape. This is a good problem to have.
