Advent 24: It’s Done

Whatever it is, it’s done.

The brisket is done. The latkes are done. The third night of Hanukkah is done. Christmas Eve is done. Presents are done. For better or worse, whatever it is, it’s done.

My husband is also done. Done with the job he’s had for 37 years as the head of a nonprofit economic development organization. He’s done with his office on the 7th floor, done with his classy furniture and the extraordinary view of the city, and done with getting paid. It’s this last part that makes me shudder.

He’ll be working on projects, one of them is essentially to tell the life story of the organization he founded when he was 32. I remember him then. He wore jeans and a black leather jacket when he dressed up and jeans and a black hoodie the rest of the time. With the hoodie on, he looked like Marty Feldman in Young Frankenstein.

So he started his organization by himself in a hoodie in an abandoned fire station where the pigeons had flown in through broken windows and left vast seas of guana which had hardened in the Wisconsin winter so he had to scrape it off with a putty knife. He did this every day for months while he drew unemployment and contemplated his organization’s mission.

And so a legend is born.

He is a legend. Successful, irascible, persistent – as in working years on a project or a deal before it comes together – relentless is a word often used to describe him. And he did a lot of good. And stopped a lot of bad. You’d have to know about economic development in a seriously disadvantaged neighborhood to get the full impact of that. My guy, he has been a warrior. In ways big and small.

So right now he think he is done.

But he’s not. I know that but he doesn’t. At least not yet. His life is still unfolding, like everyone’s except we often don’t look at life that way, as something that is fluid and mutable. We think life has fixed points, this happens and then that happens and then we shift into whatever being we need to be to fit the event. I think life is more like floating around in an inner tube – sometimes you get snagged on tree branches and sometimes you’re coasting down the river so fast you lose your shorts.

I’d tell him that but he’d roll his eyes.