Mulligan

A few years ago, I became somewhat befuddled about what to do with my life. Okay, I was completely befuddled. The cause, as I put it at the time, was being downsized from my job, displaced, severanced and bridged to an early retirement.  My fifteen-year-old daughter put it this way: fired, broke, preparing to sell the house and move away. Bim, Bam, Boom. Don't you hate it when your kids get it exactly right?

Anyway, befuddled, betwixt and between, I did what anyone else would have done in my situation, I created two new holidays. One, which  I called CentJours, was a celebration of the year's first 100 days on April 10 (4/9 in leap years), on which you spent $100 any way you chose as long as it was fun. The other holiday was Arrival Day, any day in the week before Thanksgiving. On this day, the celebrant takes a roundtrip on the Staten Island Ferry, across New York Harbor going out, and, more importantly, coming back. Coming back past Ellis Island and the Statue of Liberty, you imagine yourself as an actual immigrant, with all of your belongings in a bag and your life savings, maybe $50 or $1,000, in your pocket. You have no job, no office, no place to live, no relatives, only a dream. You alight from the ferry in lower Manhattan. What do you do?

That was the object of the holiday or exercise, if you will. You wanted to put yourself in the immigrant's shoes, not for politically correct feel-good reasons, but as if to say: okay, here I am, where do I go, what do I do, where do I stay? How do I build a life? A good thing to do on Arrival Day, as I did earlier this week, might  be to walk for a while, up past the WTC site, where you notice thousands of busy people walking, but there is not a sound. Eight years have passed since the buildings came roaring down and our world as we knew it also came tumbling down, but we still treat this site with a reverence that is so profound it goes almost unnoticed. Some people want to build it up, but I would simply leave it as a grassy shrine, an outdoor secular cathedral.

When you lose your job and income at fifty-eight and a half in our culture, even if you are relatively wealthy, you have a problem. At least you have a problem if you've been paying attention to your life and realize that what we generally call "retirement" should be an accounting term, not a life term. You never want your life to become a noun; you always want it to be a verb. This is why I like celebrating Arrival Day. In my case I can keep walking north past the place where my grandfather, Adam Welstead, was born at the corner of Bedford and Barrow Streets in what we now call the West Village.
This was a guy, who got through the eighth grade, got a Tammany Hall job in the tax office and commuted from Matawan, NJ to Long Island City. Eventually, Mayor LaGuardia appointed him Tax Commissioner in Queens, he bought a house in Forest Hills, thrived during the Depression and entered the upper-middle class. But that's someone else's story and the object of the exercise is to ask,what's my or your story going to be?

Arrival Day. A good way to clear your head of all the ideas, schemes, plans, dead-ends, worries of the year gone past. Arrival Day: a big do-ever, a Life Mulligan.

But, you might ask, who cares? Why bring this up, when most of us have jobs, look forward to retiring and haven't had many dead ends this past year? Good points.

I bring it up because this year, when I asked myself what I would do in order to forge a new living in this new world I imagined for myself and family, writing a blog did NOT jump to the top of the list, at least not this one.  And so, this is my long way of saying that thirdgarage is going on hiatus, while I focus creative attention on more promising ventures for the next year.

From time to time I may be tempted to update you or to entertain you, and there's always the chance that this blog will morph into another one. But I doubt it. The world will progress very nicely without my two-cents worth of opinion. We already have too many opinions. I'm going to use my Mulligan to be quiet for a while, then I'm going to work on something longer, more meaningful, more helpful.

Happy Arrival Day. Happy Thanksgiving.

Yours,

Mulligan