Chapter 3

Jim decided to take the whole two weeks of bereavement leave. He stayed in and around his house, taking care of some maintenance things like painting his hallways and the living room. He spent a whole afternoon rearranging his closets and getting rid of the junk that just seems to accumulate when you aren't paying any attention. He laid new linoleum in his kitchen and replaced two leaky washers, one in the master bedroom's bathroom sink, and the other on a faucet in the kitchen. While the work needed to be done at some point, he was doing it then because it was busy work and he could still think while his hands were busy.

He thought mostly about his dad, trying to imagine what things must have seemed like from his perspective. He wondered if his dad had just resented his mom or if he'd also resented he and Phil. While he knew that he'd never be sure, he felt that his dad had loved them both, at least at some level, and he'd certainly always provided financially for them until they were grown and on their own. Other than for the long, unbroken, pattern of benign neglect, Jim couldn't really fault his father. One thing was sure though, he wouldn't have wanted to live his father's life. Jim tried to objectively assess where his own life was at and how it stacked up against his father's when his dad was the same age. His conclusions weren't that reassuring or pleasant.

After a week of staying home and thinking about things, Jim had come to certain conclusions, and then, had resolved to make some changes. He mostly was determined not to continue just drifting, without plan or purpose, letting the actions of others control how he lived his own life. Like his mother, he decided that he too wanted to experience some happiness as an adult. The difficulty was in deciding what it was that would make him happy. His job, while certainly tolerable, didn't contribute to his happiness, other than providing him with the means to live a certain lifestyle. Other than Donna, Sandy, Jill and Lupe, he really hadn't formed any significant adult friendships. He really wasn't, he acknowledged to himself, a people person. Most importantly, he concluded that he'd never been a big risk taker, he'd almost always played things too cautiously, settling for less rather than risking failure or loss. In that regard, he felt he was repeating some of his mother's mistakes. Since it had turned out so poorly for her, he had no justification to believe that it would work out better for him.

He had found some positive things about his current life too. He liked California, he liked his condo, he liked having enough money to be able to make choices in how he lived. He liked being independent, answerable only to himself. His life wasn't bad really, it just wasn't happy. He had been very happy at times with Donna, but it had always eventually required him to endure large amounts of unhappiness. In all his adult life though, other than those good periods with Donna, he'd never been happy. He had convinced himself that those good times had come with too high a price tag in misery. He decided to phone his mother.

"Ma, I need to ask you this and I'm sorry if it causes you more pain. If you could go back and change it, so that you and Vince never had met, never dated, so you'd never known him at all, would you?" Jim waited, holding the receiver to his ear, fully expecting his mother to get upset with him.

"Jimmy, I've asked myself that same question at least once a month for over 35 years. Sometimes, when I was feeling very low about my life, the answer was yes, that I wished I'd never met him. If I didn't ever know how much I could love someone it would have been a lot easier to love your father. I was convinced during those times that my life would have been better just with that one thing. Jimmy, I've often thought that your dad's life and your life and Phil's would have been better then too. Your dad changed a lot when he gave up on loving me after he was sure that I would never grow to love him. He'd been pretty much a happy man up until then. Most of the time though, the great majority really, I remember my excitement, the raw power of my feelings, I was so alive, all of my senses were heightened when he was around me. I can remember specific times when we were together, as clear if it had been yesterday. I remember being so full of the joy of simply having him touch me, of him whispering little nonsense things that made me almost jump out of my skin with desire. No, Jimmy, most of the time, to be honest, I wouldn't have traded five minutes of those special feelings and of being so alive, not even for ten years of the rest of the time. It wouldn't have been a fair trade."

"I thought that maybe you wouldn't Ma, I just needed to make sure. I've been doing a lot of thinking since dad died, thinking about my life, not wanting to live like he lived or like you've lived either. I don't want to look back when I'm old and feel like I've wasted my life. I want to be happy, but the problem is that I don't want to take any chances on being hurt or disappointed. I'm pretty convinced though that I've got to take those risks if I want to be happy. I'm just not sure that I will ever be able to. Maybe I'm more afraid of the possible bad than I'm wanting the good. Anyway, ma, thanks for talking with me about it."

"Jimmy, feelings aren't like math problems, or like other things where you can carefully measure out the different potentials, submit it to risk/reward analysis and receive a host of quantifiable probabilities. Feelings are different. What you want from me is some equation where "x" amount of happiness is equal to "y" amount of sorrow. OK, this is as close as I can get to giving some kind of measurement for you. If I could go back and have one more week with Vince, another perfect, happy week, I'd gladly trade it for whatever life I now have left to me. I hope that answers the question that you really wanted answered. I know it's selfish, but I'd make that trade." After that, neither of them having anything more to ask or answer, they said their goodbyes and hung up the phones.

Jim went back to the bank when the two week leave was over. It didn't take long for him to get back into the same routine. Lupe had done well in his absence and the system had functioned fine while he had been gone. She was still so excited about Baby Jesus, who she had taken to calling Jesse. It seemed to Jim that not a day passed without the baby reaching some new milestone. He was happy for Lupe's happiness, but wasn't really able to mount much enthusiasm himself about the baby. To him, the baby was 100% Lupe's. He saw himself not as the father, but as a friend of the mother. By the time Christmas came around Jim was feeling depressed. No real changes had taken place to help him lead a happier life and he saw opportunity shrinking as he felt himself shying away from taking any decisive steps that might facilitate change. He began to set an artificial deadline in hopes of motivating himself to undertake some positive action. He was already almost 28 years old, he'd decided to only give himself until he was 30 to make some big changes to make his life, better, happier and more fulfilling. He knew that was pretty much just kidding himself, but he was desperate to feel like some change was in the offing.

Jim had been talking pretty regularly with both Donna and Sandy. In a way, he felt that they had moved on with their lives and he was somehow being left behind. Sandy was almost 16 now, fully involved in a social life built around school and her friends from school. She seemed excited and happy almost all the time, really enjoying this period in her life. Jim was happy for her, and was a bit envious as well. Donna was different. She was doing well with her studies, but didn't seem, lately at least, to be having very much fun in her life. When Jim would ask her about what she did other than study she would talk about not getting enough sleep or how difficult it was to get everything done for her classes and still work part time. She claimed that she was always tired, whenever he spoke with her. She was no longer the high energy person that he'd been used to, and had so enjoyed. She almost never laughed or teased him anymore. He mentioned this to Jill and Sandy both, but neither seemed too worried and they, at least, actually saw her from time to time, so they'd be in a better position than Jim to know.

In May, Donna called him to tell him that after completing her sophomore year she was giving up her scholarship at UCLA and was going back to Chicago to take some time off, to "work out some issues". She wouldn't discuss what any of those issues might be. Jim was sad to hear that Donna was dropping out of school, but happy to learn that she was making an orderly change. Always in the past it seemed that she just took some sudden, abrupt action, without regard to the consequences that might ensue. Here she was completing her course work, withdrawing from school and seemed to have some definite ideas about what she wanted to accomplish. He wished her the best and asked her to please stay in touch.

In June, Jim quit his job, put his condo up for sale and made plans to move back to Minnesota. He was happy when he found out that the bank was promoting Lupe to his old position. His mom had found it difficult to sell her house and Jim, for whatever reason, had offered to buy it from her. Part of his reasoning had to do with wanting to keep the house in the family, but part of it was to allow his mom to realize her dream of getting away and of finally starting her new life. The condo sold quickly and brought a good price. California real estate values had been going up for many years, but they'd really gone crazy for the past three or four years, and Jim was surprised at how well he had made out. He could afford to buy his mom's house for cash and still have enough to live on for a couple years at least. He wasn't looking forward to the climate of Minnesota, but he did feel he was making some changes, at last, and that change was a good thing for him.