Not any more. There is only one drop-off and one pick-up for both kids. We are in the era of all day school. From 9:10am until 4:00pm, my calendar is mostly open. And I don’t know what to do with myself.
I’ve had a week to think about this. I used that time to get important things done, like putting summer things into the storage unit, washing the car, and getting a root canal. Also, I bookended the week with liquid lunches. It was a productive week in only the most basic sense. We ate and breathed. The children were bathed. Nothing lives in our house that did not start the week living in our house.
That respite kind of has to end. There’s a really good TED talk about procrastination. The kicker is his last slide that shows one box for each week in a 90 year life. There’s not a lot.
So, it’s on to making use of my open days. And, yet again, I am looking for a personality.
The first time that I realized that I was on the threshold of a personality change was when I mowed my own lawn for the first time. Yes, we were in the suburbs. Yes, we had purchased a vehicle large enough to move several people. Yes, we both commuted to work. However, it wasn’t the suburbs that was the personality change. It was the lawn itself.
I needed a lawn care personality. Was I growing a hippy naturalist wildflower jungle? Was I growing a manicured putting green? Or should I just pave the damn thing? Somewhere on the spectrum between Hippy and Hank Hill, I needed to sketch out the boundaries of the ways I wanted to spend my time, and by extension, the way I wanted my house and my life to be perceived.
I settled on a medium that was a little less OCD. Drawing on a lesson from planning school, I decided where I was going to mow weekly, monthly, and never. The front lawn got a weekly trim, monthly edging. The backyard got a monthly mow, both because it was pretty shaded and grass was getting trampled down by the kids. We covered a lot of that with mulch for the swingset. Behind the swings, I roughed out a line, and simply never mowed past it. The area was a conservation area, and I threw a bag of wildflower seeds down every year. I did weigh into the area to hack through some English ivy that became a nuisance, but mostly the Wayback got left alone.
Although we did knock down a shed and replace it with sod. I reveled in that sod, so thick and luscious, and dead in three weeks because we installed it right before the longest stretch of 100ยบ days that the state had ever seen.
It took a little while to fall into this reasonably happy routine. I wasn’t going for Field of Dreams. I was going for Yard of Play. You don’t need a ton of grass if you want the kids to run around. It took a while to figure out where we were comfortable playing and sitting and lounging and gardening. And where we couldn’t see the neighbor’s pile of junk.
It should be noted that when I stood there on that first day of lawn care, I actually decided that my lawn personality was going to be P. Allen Smith. Little bit of New England formal gardens - hedge rows and lawns with bright highlights and so much clapboard. Maybe a trellis or five. Bought a couple of his books too. At least the container garden one has been useful.
Needless to say, the actual lawn evolved much differently. As did my lawn care personality.
Looking back beyond that, there have been a few personality adjustments over the years. The obvious ones are Obvious, like starting at a new school or moving to a new town or producing a new person.
But some have been more subtle adjustments. I don’t eat Zebra Cakes anymore, although they formed the cornerstone of my high school diet. Cheap calories, and they just were not that good. That goes hand-in-hand with avoiding cheap beer. I slowly came to the realization that football is a fun sideshow, but personally meaningless if it doesn’t involve spending time with friends. And I take a lot less pictures of things and more pictures of people. If we were to meet without the veil of nostalgia and failures of memory, I don’t know what young me would think of old me and vice versa (probably “dickhead”, both ways). But like skull fragments scattered across the geologic record, the evolutionary points connecting the two do exist.
So, perhaps I don’t get to decide on the personality of my day. Perhaps I’ll decide on the things I’m going to do, and their order. Then it will get blown up, rearranged, dismantled, remantled and then thrown away. Like all personalities, including my own I guess, it will evolve. We'll start with the 12:00pm yoga class.
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