I should be an empty nester. But I’m not. I’m a semi-empty nester. While all the other geese are headed south, I’m still here raising the most wonderful miscalculation of my life. I believe he was the result of a Christmas party where the egg nog was exceptional and as such resulted in Jackson Cooper.
While I have two in college and almost out the door, Coop is just starting
the big run through middle school, high school and college. It occurs to me that I’ve been standing on the sidelines of football, hockey and lacrosse games for fifteen years with the last two and I’m still looking at ten to twelve years with this one. Meanwhile all around me my contemporaries are bolting for the islands, divorcing, downsizing and even remarkably upsizing. I have a good friend whose wife is so enamored with the idea of having a big place for the grandchildren they are buying a bigger house. That’s true love.
I, on the other hand, am faced with the inexorable pull to divest, unload, get rid of and dump anything and everything. The first sign of this was last Christmas when the two older children came home from college only to find a giant dumpster in the driveway.
“Before you get any presents from me, you have to get rid of at least 500 cubic feet of crap,” I said as I tossed 25 years of ratty stuffed animals and ancient sports equipment out the upstairs window. By the time this exercise was finished, we had shed over two tons of stuff. Two tons. That’s what the weigh bill stated. Know what that tells me? Tells me I got rid of two tons of junk and still have a house full of stuff. I have way too much stuff. Interestingly, Mimi stated that everything she wanted in this house she could carry out in a suitcase, figuratively speaking. That’s a start.
Now comes the conundrum. We are caught between the gravitational forces of divestiture and the necessity to provide a stable environment for eggnog boy. I believe this is what they call a mid life crisis with a twist. As such I have been considering a number of options. They are as follows:
• Run like hell. Unfortunately this is not a good one as I do love the boy and his mother and as such would be pretty miserable without them, so that’s out.
• Sell this big ‘ol house and move to a smaller house. Pretty classic maneuver for empty nesters, as it frees them from the responsibility of large manors and allows them to travel and do the things they’ve always wanted to do while waiting for the fledglings to learn to fly. That’s a possibility except for the fact that we’d just be living in a smaller house and still teaching eggnog boy how to fly. No travel, no
adventure.
• Sell the house and buy a very small house and an RV. When he’s not in school, we could head out across the country and have some adventures, but I’m not really an RV kind of guy. In fact I hate the things. I hate them when I’m behind them on the highway and I’m sure I would hate the thing the first time I pulled into the gas station and paid the equivalent of a semester’s tuition for fuel. Not to mention the fact that parking one of those things in a Yogi Bear campground with a hundred other denizens of the RV world is not my idea of a great time. Sitting around in folding chairs and comparing RV features with Fred from Peoria is not an option. Nope. That won’t work.
• Sell the house and buy a very small house and a big boat. That would of course entail a career change as I would need to move to the coast where the very small house would probably cost me more than that which I old my very big house here, thus no money left for the big boat.
• Sell the house and just buy the boat. This has possibilities. I wonder if the school bus would come to the marina? It would have to be a huge boat if we’re going to live on it. That’s cool. It would have to be a sailboat as big motor yachts consume more fuel in an hour than most RV’s in a day. In my recent research on the subject, I found that a modest twin diesel yacht of about 50 feet in length gets about one mile per gallon. At that rate we could perhaps cruise up to Nova Scotia for the summer, but then I would have to get a job for six months in order to refill the fuel tank and come home. The only other option there is stay tied to the dock. Sailboat it is.
This option seems to offer the most practical and perhaps romantic daydreaming possibilities. Cooper will be in college in six years. That gives me six years to learn how to sail a 50-foot sailboat without crashing into the dock, running aground, or sailing blithely into the eye of a hurricane. But once accomplished and Cooper off and running, I am free to sail the seven seas. I’m thinking the Bahamas in the winter and the Canadian Maritimes in the summer. I think I would look pretty good with an eye patch, a parrot and a little Jimmy Buffet on the stereo. This is sounding pretty good.
Now I just need one thing—the correct numbers for this week’s Powerball ticket. Hey, you never know. Until then, I will simply continue to get rid of stuff, mow the grass, enjoy watching Cooper’s athletic endeavors and keep dreaming of fair winds and blue oceans.◊
Paul Fersen, aka Bucko, is a regular columnist for Stratton Magazine