A bucket is on my bucket list

I wish I had a bucket today.

Instead, I towed three overstuffed bags into an airport to fly to a new job and home in California. There is no word to describe the state of my wardrobe within those bags. It’s something less than ‘folded’ but something more than ‘wadded.’

I suppose I am in a career that when luck and timing are folded in it can be exhilarating. That range of thrill can be good, bad, or good and bad. It’s never neutral. And it can open old wounds or bring fond nostalgia.

With age it gets harder to move to a new place, but it gets easier to recognize you must. It gets more bitter than bittersweet. We all seek a home and friends. Thursday lunches. A favorite bar. Your parking place.

Two years ago, I moved with my dog Kimi Raikkonen from Las Vegas to Norfolk. We drove cross country—just the two of us. She was starting to slow down then as she pushed 15 years of age. Over those five days we shared a road trip. With her carrier wedged between a window she could look out and the first guitar I ever bought, we talked a lot about a lot.

We talked about leaving friends and the prospect of making new ones. Good luck and bad luck. And that whole pandemic thing. Kimi hated wearing masks and while driving through Utah we argued extensively about the virtues of modern science and vaccines. She was overjoyed to choose her own bone at a Petco near our hotel outside Denver and all was right again.

When we didn’t talk, I listened to Norm Macdonald’s book, ‘Based on a True Story: Not a Memoir,’ as I drove while she slept with the aid of some magic doggie anxiety meds. The strip of highway through the heartland stretches for decades.

With each place I land in this career new friends come. There was a regular Thursday lunch in Norfolk, and I felt I belonged. And there was the bar that could foresee what kind of night I was going to have the moment I walked through the door. They were always happy to tell me the next day how the night before went.

New stories come as well. I haven’t written in two years and regardless of if I’m any good at it my mind constantly spins tales that I hope someday will be told for someone’s fun. The tragic and joyful characters we encounter become more obvious as we get older. Some poor saps seem to fall from Coen Brothers’ tragedies and others from Steve Martin novellas. My attraction to the absurd causes character-driven stories to bang around in my skull looking for a way out. It’s the unbelievability and the surprise twists that hook me every time.

This is why I mentioned that Kimi and I talked about a lot on our way east two years ago. I mean, c’mon. A talking dog?  I can hardly believe it myself—and I was in the car.

I didn’t set out in 1991 to live in ten American states chasing—or being pulled by—a career where there is only one employment opportunity in only some cities across the continent. If something is out of whack in any of those situations one is left with a Hobson’s choice. Often, those who do what I do just can’t go work for the other team across the street. There isn’t one.

Therefore, moving and good-byes are part of it unless the timing-and-luck mix kicks in a little. Otherwise, it’s easy for one to become a nomad or drifter.

Okay, okay. . .  I agree with your likely assessment. I could say we are hired guns who go where we are needed. But John Prine never wrote songs about those folks, and the folks who do write songs about these folks kill them off at the end of the story.

And so, I wish that over the years I had a bucket into which I had placed the friends who accepted me so they’d be alongside me on this lastest move. I’ll miss my newest friends made these past two years, especially the ones with the wheezing laughs and the powerful hugs.

As for Kimi, she left me in late June. She survived two rounds of cancer and a few of my unwise relationship choices. She tried to warn me about all those things before she could talk. And together we licked those things. But we can’t lick time, and if anyone could have it would have been Kimi. She could lick anything.

Kimi isn’t making the trip this time. And I’m sad. She would have just loved the idea of being in that bucket. I know, because she told me.