Frozen

This isn’t about the latest hit musical from Disney. It’s about a life. A life on hold. A life, well, frozen.

U-Haul calls them rooms. I call them storage units. In them sits the difference between life before and life after the Great Recession of 2008. They’re three-dimensional barometers of the downsizing the long-term unemployed have absorbed.

Ours is filled with furniture, appliances, clothing and kitchen ware; the list goes on and on and on. These are the things my mate and I hold onto. The things we have invested with the hope that one day we will have use for again.

Call them objects of faith.

Putting them on e-Bay or giving them away or throwing them out would be to acknowledge that things aren’t going to change. And we can’t do that. Not yet.

So we pay a monthly storage fee equivalent to two tanks of gasoline (and this is with a discount from a friend who’s an employee at the facility) to indulge our fantasy. Or deny the future. I can’t figure out which.

I touch the sofa that used to be the centerpiece of our living room. Thumb the designer shirts which no longer fit because of my stress-fueled consumption of junk food. I gaze at the washing machine and drier we picked out, and wonder if they would even work after being inactive for so long.

I realize, ironically-enough, that I would actually enjoy putting a load of wash in them, if only to enjoy the significance of such an act. I also realize how unlikely this is to happen.  
Perhaps this is a tomb.

I retrieve the book I came for, pull down the metal door, secure the padlock and head to the front office where I pay the rent. 

Hope, for better or worse, springs eternal.

Waiting on a Friend

Sometimes, everything is difficult. Even your friends.

It should have been a good thing when Lucky called Sunday night. It should have been an opportunity to catch up on each other’s lives. Share a laugh. Commiserate about work and aging parents. A pause in the rat race.

But Lucky is feeling the sting of late middle-age. And with it, the realization that whatever he hasn’t done will, at this point, likely remain that way. It has its talons deep into his flesh, especially in this, the age of diminished opportunities.

While marveling at his quarter-century with a single employer, I realize it was hiding more than anything. A college degree should have been a fresh start. But there was a fear in Lucky, a fear of leaving his comfort zone and trying something new.

Despite what we say on Facebook and on Twitter, change provokes anxiety in all of us. But in Lucky’s case, it was something more. It was paralyzing. And now his sense of life having passed him by has curdled into something ugly. Anger. Rage. Jealousy.

Sunday night, it careened into finger-pointing and accusations. He brought up a long-ago dinner he paid for, a dinner I had in no way, shape or form solicited. "It's on me" he said with a casual wave of his hand.

Now I know better. It was on me—for accepting it. It made me a parasite in Lucky's eyes.

It was a shot so cheap it deserved shelf-space at Wal-Mart.

Thankfully, there's another side to the story.

Understanding is an awesome responsibility. Sometimes, it asks us to tolerate the intolerable. In this case, knowing the depths of my friend’s discontent made it difficult to respond as I normally would.

But you can only do so much. You can only listen and try to empathize and offer the hoped-for solace of shared feelings and experiences.

It's not always enough.

Like my friend, I am in many ways embittered and sour. I struggle to subvert my anger and cynicism and jealousy at those around me who I perceive to have better, more-fulfilling lives. At those who, through no fault of their own, haven’t suffered the ravages of the Great Recession to the extent I have.

But Lucky left me something. Unintentional as it was, Lucky gave me a refresher course in what we become when the worst elements of our personality get the best of us. How we sound when the howling beast of regret takes center stage.

And how we so often (and so unwittingly) can subject those who care about us most to the worst we have to offer.

It was a cold, hard look in the mirror.

And that may be the greatest gift friendship has to offer.