Read Duck and Cover at the Blue Pyramid.

Read Duck and Cover at the Blue Pyramid.

Trying to ride Obama’s coattails into ticket sales? Trying to distance itself from the Bill Bavasi era? Trying to highlight an ABCABC three-letters-or-less rhyme scheme? Trying to simply point out that tomorrow is, indeed, another day?

Whatever the motives behind my beloved Mariners’ new marketing slogan, I’m wildly excited to be attending my first game at Safeco in nearly six years tonight. Today opens a 4.5-day trip to the Pacific Northwest, the last venture therein as part of the West Coast Farewell Tour. Emily, her sister, and sister’s husband will be meeting up with me tomorrow.

Tickets to a whole three-game series? Check. Randy Johnson’s return to Seattle? Check. Ken Griffey Jr. vs. Randy Johnson? Check. The only three-day sunny streak in the Puget Sound all year? Check.

It’s 5 in the morning and time to get to the plane station. When I return, it’ll be time to have discipline and get serious about things again. In the meantime, I’m looking forward to rooting for the home team.

Read Duck and Cover at the Blue Pyramid.

Read Duck and Cover at the Blue Pyramid.

Last night, I had one of the most transparent dreams of my entire life. Fresh from some emotional goodbyes at Glide in real life, I dreamt that a bunch of people I knew in my life, consisting primarily of Glide folks, but also including friends from throughout my time on Earth, were all staying at this big lodge. It was this labyrinthine place with crooked staircases and random working fireplaces and shmancy parts – as though the spirit of the La Fonda were infused into five different hotel styles that were all then jammed together.

In the dream, it was the fifth or seventh year of all of us coming together for some unofficial but very expected regular gathering, that was basically a big pajama party of everyone running around this crazy lodge and hanging out for a long weekend. And while the dream eventually insisted on becoming a bit of a nightmare (I got into some major argument with a stranger in the lobby restaurant, was threatened, and eventually had to leave in fear), the message of the heart of the dream was all too clear. I’m going to miss these people and I am adding to the tally of scattered people who I will be missing in the future. Deep in my heart, I just want us all to hang out somewhere relaxed and without responsibility where we can just be.

Life affords us few chances like this (my dream was clearly partially referencing my wedding, the last time when so many from so many walks of life were so assembled) and they are profoundly important to treasure. In the meantime, all we can do is say meaningful goodbyes and promise to not lose sight of these people. Ironically, of course, I attribute much of my trouble with staying in touch with people to working. But working has brought me more people. Such is the way of the world, the nature of life in an age that has advanced beyond the feudal farm.

This morning, waking from that dream and starting my typical morning routine that will be exceptional from here on out, everything really started to hit me broadside. This is it. After counting down and contemplating, planning a transition and carefully ensuring that my work goes on, it all ends today. Freedom and loss. Joy and sadness. The old emotional gobstopper, more moving for all I’ve been too busy to notice it creeping up on me. Glide is one of the very few places (college debate is the only other I can think of for sure) where I have felt thoroughly in my element, where I have felt at home and comfortable in the environment, among the people, navigating through its twists and turns. Where I feel I’ve “figured it out” and been able to capitalize on that to be successful, to make friends, to find a home. (And what does it say about this phenomenon that I’m returning to a college debate setting, coaching at Rutgers for the next two years?)

Walking away from that home is incredibly difficult. I don’t even realize how much so yet. The crazy place on the corner of Ellis and Taylor with the throngs of people in need has been my place. And starting tomorrow, it won’t be anymore. It will be a place that I was, where I loved and worked and tried. It will be a place of memory and the past. I am tearing up as I write this, for the second time in a young morning. This is life. And it’s all worth it, if only for the departures and losses that make one understand how important the pieces of one’s life really are.

This is it. This is it.

Give me a moment to hang on to, to hold forever, plunging into the future.

Read Duck and Cover at the Blue Pyramid.

Read Duck and Cover at the Blue Pyramid.

Read Duck and Cover at the Blue Pyramid.

Read Duck and Cover at the Blue Pyramid.

When I used to work at the Seneca Center for Children and Families, I spent a good part of my last year wondering about my last day. My friend Kevin was going back to grad school and gave plenty of notice and prepared the kids and they said their goodbyes and had a party and closure and all the right things. It’s true that he’d sat out part of the worst parts of the late spring with a random non-kid injury, but he still took the time to do it the right way. I admired it and wondered if I’d be so lucky.

Shortly after, we went out to camp, which really tested my faith and patience. And that’s when I started wondering how I would depart from the job. The way they handled camp (for another post sometime) converted me from seeing Seneca as my destination job indefinitely to starting to look for a way out. It had been almost exactly a year by the end of camp, right on cue.

I thought about my own departure and when to pull the trigger. Discussed it most every day with Kevin’s replacement, Cameron. Brought it up at staff meetings, a naive call that may have been a mistake. Held on through the toughest, seeing it as a personal challenge. The fire extinguisher incident, the clear warning, the bright neon sign to get out. Heedless, I held out for danger, for real exposure, for crisis. And then the dragging postmortem, trying to come to staff meetings while I fence-sat about still (!) possibly going back, weeping openly outside the door, and the awkward meeting, and finally (sweet relief) the decision to just cut bait. To quit again. To settle into my comfortable pattern of departing in a ball of flames.

You see, I attended 13 schools in my youth and between one of my preschools and high school, I didn’t leave one of them at the regularly scheduled or appointed time. I closed out the year properly, on the scheduled last day, in 1st, 2nd, and 3rd grade, but those were at three different schools (three different states!) and the 2nd grade was my third enrolled school (plus some homeschooling time) that year. In 1st grade, I knew I wouldn’t be back, and the last day of school tugged at my teardrops as I bid farewell to barely made friends for the foreign sounds of Washington DC, following in my own father’s footsteps as he repeated his history. In 2nd grade, I had no idea what was next, but had a pretty good idea that this was it after such an infinite year of upheaval. I was back after 3rd grade, but had no way of anticipating Broadway and the crises that would follow. The day of being swung around and stuck in a locker by nemesis Rick and the subsequent yoink – no goodbyes, no closure, just the vision of the hallway that would haunt my dreams as I was carried out, eyes full of sadness. The endless meetings at CCC leading to similarly unceremonious departure with dubious W’s. The Broadway deja vu at Star of the Sea three years after, almost to the day, when my parents and the priest found the Columbine-style Kid Pix aimed in my direction. Yoink again, a quick goodbye, but this time I knew to get addresses of friends (and I hadn’t had friends at Broadway anyway, save the short twins Matt and Mark perhaps).

The point of all this? By the time I got to the Academy’s Senior Project and subsequent graduation, I was convinced that something would fail. That some crisis would descend unpredicted to keep me from walking, from diplomas, from the peaceful transfer of life on to the next step. As if to create my own crisis, I turned in my Senior Project final paper, the only mandate of said project to earn graduation, with just an hour to spare, having started it at 1:00 that morning. But I donned the black robes and the goofy hat and it all happened. And again four years later, against all odds, another manufactured crisis (my arts requirement grade), and yet I overcame my seeming destiny to walk and receive paper.

And then a soft sweet compromise, meaningless in some ways, as I departed libraries to get married and find meaningful work. My shock at being given goodbye parties and parting gifts. So this is what it’s like to leave properly. Only for it to go down in flames again, the old standby, within two years.

The point of all this? That as I look ahead to my goodbye party three days hence and final day at Glide two days thereafter, I am flooded with memories of how things have ended in the past. As much as I have resented being tied to schools and jobs over the years, they have truly defined almost my entire life to this day, for better or worse. And as a writer, a reader, an observer of humanity, I probably care about endings more than any other critic. And so I face another just ahead and can’t help but wonder what crisis might raise its specter to rob me of another properly done departure.

I don’t have the same faith in this unpredicted crisis that I did on the eve of high school graduation. I have learned something from it all working out in Albuquerque, in Waltham, even the small touching farewells in Walnut Creek and Fairfield. The outpouring of love and support from Glide and its staff since my announcement two months ago has convinced me that, even more than those deadline-pushing graduations, I have finally figured out how to make an exit. Knock on wood, fingers crossed. For someone who has made a lifetime of being a quitter, three decades is a pretty low and slow learning curve. But this week, I’ll take it. I hope.

Read Duck and Cover at the Blue Pyramid.

So I was listening to the Mariners’ radio broadcast via MLB-TV’s audio package and this ad comes on the radio advertising tickets for the Giants’ series in Seattle, marking Randy Johnson’s return to Safeco. And I realized quickly that I already had tickets to all three of those games. And that it would be after I was free of day jobs and school for the first deliberately chosen time in my life.

And that was really cool.

Read Duck and Cover at the Blue Pyramid.

Read Duck and Cover at the Blue Pyramid.

Read Duck and Cover at the Blue Pyramid.

Read Duck and Cover at the Blue Pyramid.

I finished a book tonight that would’ve been more fitting to finish on my last day of work and it was all I could really think about as I was walking home from the train doing one of those walking stutter-step things you do when you haven’t quite timed the completion of your book correctly but you can’t simply let it linger over the overnight and somehow it doesn’t seem right to finish such a roadbound book in the confines of the house at six o’clock PM when the world is just darkening and everything seems at its most depressing and anger inducing but I’m not there yet I’m swinging my backpack around my shoulder to deposit book and sunglasses and contemplate the end of Oscar Wao and his world and whether it all came to a satisfactory end or not and all these tourists are staring just past me over the overslung shoulder at Godzilla or nothing at all and I don’t bother to contemplate for the storm is blowing in hard and I really can’t wait to be out of it before the rain that was supposed to be here earlier but isn’t yet and I’m suddenly rooted to the ground despite my rush by the vision of this pile of books that’s just strewn out on the sidewalk and one would normally think abandoned with a free sign that blew away but somehow this looks different worse much worse like something that was punitive and there are CD’s too and just enough peripheral stuff that it looks like someone flew away in a hurry or said you want your books huh THERE have your books how do you like them now and it was clear that they hadn’t quite been rained on yet but they would be soon and always the eternal dilemma that somehow gets to me of whether to scoop and salvage or whether the offended would be back for them soon and sometimes it’s even more complicated because there are times I think someone is meant to lose something they leave behind and another to find it and any intervention from me sometimes feels like its just abridging free will almost like I don’t think I can be a participant in the lives of others at least of strangers at least of those who seem to be on a predestined course that I should do my careful level best with not to interfere like picking up the books which just feels wrong despite the droplets I can see envisioning somehow it would be like picking up a dead body or something it just seems a monument to things I am not meant to interact with and I’m stumbling back across the Abbey Road crosswalk almost before I think of looking up to see if anyone is stopping because I’ve already burned time looking at the books and the rotting banana on the cardboard just after that seemed to tie so perfectly to the book just finished and rumbling back around in my head and I wonder how much agency he felt he had and how it compares to mine and what if you were stuck in a really beautiful prison with guards and fellow inmates who treated you well and you somehow intellectually knew it was a prison but still were so comforted by so much of it that it felt somehow strange to leave after a sentence of say three years and maybe it’s good to have rotten-to-the-core days like today because they remind you that it is a prison and there’s not even the hint of doubt about what you should be doing even though there’s times that what you think you really need IS a prison but no metaphor so much as a real prison with walls and guards and no computers or games or recreation or friends just you and just enough access to pen and paper to appreciate it enough to make it work after all you’ve talked about a hospital before or something similar but pain can be exhausting and makes for unreflective drivel like you’re barely able to chunk out now between the moments of startling exhaustion things that your father would call self-indulgent and you recognize as mental chaff but think it’s helpful too for the writing or for you or for something anyway maybe but it doesn’t matter you’re almost falling asleep on your feet falling through the gate and thinking about the dark dreary insides of the house and your one-hour no-contact foul mood and the unsatisfying release of a video game and whether the Mariners can do something today and there’s a package you weren’t expecting and an invitation you definitely weren’t expecting and you realize for the thousandth time this year how badly you’ve neglected everything that matters while in prison and the thought of nine nine nine nine nine nine nine sings you through the door like some trippy Beatles song and you know you must capture this moment and express it to yourself for one two three years hence when you’re on the brink and ask yourself like Oscar Wao flying back to the Dominican Republic goddammit is this ever going to be worth it again do you really want to live like a zombie can you ever get through this and so close to the edge that all you can do is see the walls and bars anew and wonder if you’re really going to make it or if you’re too broken down to even care and you realize that all these debates are why you haven’t been able to write anything or codify what you’re feeling and there are all the people who you do care about and believe in what they’re doing in prison and how can you explain that their paradise is your prison and your prison is still better than anyone else’s prison and now you’ve gone and upset everyone else and this is a hard lonely road to talk about with people who almost all feel differently and nine days away is just no time to make final seminal statements when you’re still in the thick of it and you have to wonder how long after nine how long after zero will you still feel in the thick how many dreams of stress and nightmare will you awaken to like this fruitless spoiled morning when you had something really due that day that then wasn’t as opposed to the school assignments the debate rounds the Seneca kids all the past things and you know that you will be haunted by this forever and somehow God please somehow let this all have been worth it.

Read Duck and Cover at the Blue Pyramid.

Read Duck and Cover at the Blue Pyramid.