#2 A decision made years ago

I've made plenty of bad decisions, many of them reckless. At least as reckless as a good, rule-observing Catholic boy gets, well, perhaps not that rule-observing. For instance, in my freshman year of college, on the weekend before Thanksgiving, my friends and I dropped acid and hitchhiked from Madison to Milwaukee at dusk. What can I say? I was less than a year out of a solid 12 years of Catholic school including a stint in the seminary, I was free to do stupid things. On another occasion I opened a restaurant. The ride to Milwaukee in the very old, unheated car of a morphine-addicted World War II veteran with lights, patterns and sounds sizzling around my head was a trip to the park compared to the restaurant. It's one thing to make unwise decisions when you're 20, another at 55.

When  it was clear I'd be living alone in a big house in the suburbs I decided almost immediately to move to a condo, people came out of the woodwork to tell me not to do it. "Wait a year," was on the minds and lips of nearly everyone with whom I was even remotely acquainted. "Don't be reckless," someone who barely knew me emphatically told me. But it wasn't reckless. I was never going to spend a year alone in a house that would only remind me of misery with the added kick of a 20 minute commute at the beginning and ending of each day, alone in a car, to reflect on it. So I bought the place. The only place, as I've said, that I could reasonably buy. Somehow though, even then, I knew it would be only a parking spot until I figured out what I was going to do or where I was going to be. The crystal clarity of the exact problems with the place did not immediately present themselves and even when it was clear I chose to ignore it for years. In the meantime I planned to move to another city and went as far as updating my resume, registering with creative employment agencies, and researched best places to live in Atlanta, for instance. I went on and off anti-depressants, bought an apartment in France, speaking of reckless, and remodeled, tiled and repainted it. Yeah, there was the restaurant in there. And then I bought a cottage and remodeled that.

Maybe 6 years ago, right after I closed the restaurant, I decided it was time to move.