Full adult

1.
We rarely get ready for work at the same time
so I don’t hear her think out loud
about Vice Presidents and Controllers
other jobs in other hospitals
staff, rivals, and strategy.

between manage and execute
there’s a long stretch of full adult

She puts on her suit –
she wears full suits now, with impeccable jewelry –
adjusts the hem of her pants
kisses me, a brush of antiseptic lipstick
I knew her, I think, I kissed those soft lips
when she was just fifteen.

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2. She works hard, and harder still, and then she brings work home and slashes away on her laptop until supper. Nonetheless, there are still legions of incompetent people and personal situations that spiral out of control and become public embarrassments. Consequences are threatened, imposed, withdrawn, made provisional, and publicized, in codes tallied on open web sites that remain perfectly secret because no one looks at them. The federal government pays for great chunks of the services that are provided, at rates that it sets in a closed process. It already had the exact pieces that the anti-‘s wailed about when the healthcare bill was passed. The irony is that the accountability measures enforced by the CMS bureaucrats and the accrediting agency elites are the only effective restraints on an industry that is potentially the most lethal of all the modern confusopolies.

T is the embodiment of accountability, the voice of common sense, and a tireless advocate of policies and standards. It is not a job for the amenable, and she never did suffer fools. We have supper, heated up or brought in, and the children and I ask her an odd question that tells us how she might be feeling tonight: “How many people did you make cry today?” The answer is often more than one. The only victory is that it’s never her.

The situation would be fine (for her) if not for an arrogant, inadequately qualified vice president who slots in above her. As summer begins to heat up, the situation becomes untenable. There is nothing she can stand less than being pushed around by someone who is wrong, and who won’t listen. In yet another of her Star Trek “beam out while the enemy ship is exploding” moves, she slips the knot of incompetent leadership at one hospital and joins a rebuilding effort at another one as a VP. It could be the perfect opportunity for her. She seems exhausted by the closeness of the escape, but it’s no surprise that she has become a master of timing.

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3. I work hard, and bring work home so often that it feels strange and uncomfortable if I come home without a bulging computer bag. From November through April, I work solid sixty-hour weeks, with the last two or three hours each day being spent at the dining room table at night after everyone has gone to bed. Still, I still get the nagging feeling that I should be doing more, because there are times during the day when I’m not producing. I have an analytical procrastinator’s tractor brain – like a farm tractor, capable of exerting great torque when the implement is engaged, but idle otherwise.

In contrast, the world’s effective movers and shakers have high-output racecar engines that howl inside their heads. The ineffectual mover wannabes come to my door and say, “Hey, johnx -,” which just ensures that neither their project nor the one I am already working on will be done by the deadline that has been set. The real shakers disrupt or preempt the other projects first, and then rush in to pull me off site and monopolize my time in the gap.

For a few months I am too busy to drink, and the last few year’s habit of two or three bottles of wine a week with some beer become none. Alcohol works so well as an emotional anesthetic, but eventually it achieves its own internal sentience and seeks to crowd out competing activities. After I have stopped for a while, I am surprised to find that I am no less angry, and that going to work in the morning is no less dreadful if am well rested than it is if I am raw, tired, and sour. Nonetheless, the persistent sense of desperation is replaced by a measure of balance.

I’m at the age where I see with certainty that I will wear out before I am done working, before I have learned everything that I would like to learn, and before I have become satiated with everything that’s consumable.

A few years ago, when things were the worst, I read about the strategy that the Rock Island Railroad fell into as it was approaching bankruptcy in the Seventies. Its route map was a redundant tangle of disused branch lines. It had been trying to merge with a larger railroad for over a decade, but permission was delayed and then finally denied. Its track was in a shambles and its equipment was beginning to fall apart. As locomotives and cars broke down, they were abandoned on sidings with the switches wired closed. They called it “fail in place”.

At the time I read about it, I was still at the bottom of the talus slope of depression and accumulated responsibilities. Fail in place seemed to be as good a solution as any other. I was going to work, where being tired does not change the train schedule and where missing a deliverable deadline does not cause the factory to close. I was going home, where the boxcars are all spotted, the laundry is loaded, and the children are put to bed by 9:00. A systemwide shutdown – suicide – was not an option because it would take everything away from everyone at once. Drinking, every other night or so, was.

I am at risk of over dramatizing how I really felt. I’m not the railroad, but even after the depressional threat of bankruptcy eased, the little deaths of hangovers didn’t seem so bad. The anticipation of a drink, even a few days away, is the anticipation of that one shady evening on the steps when the world went transcendental, or that night at the computer keyboard when a beam of clear light shined out, all the way through the dark horizon. But I’m at the age now where I know every brilliant moment can’t be recreated.

I start up again with much less, avoiding weeknights and excess. Sometimes finishing an opened bottle of wine in the few days before it tries to take itself back to the fermentation tank in Sonoma or the Columbia Valley seems almost a chore. I am back to trying to fix what breaks now, along with some of some of the abandoned things that I find along the way.

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4. On a Sunday in late spring I cross the Blackwater at sunset, driving toward a gathering storm. There is a rainbow in the clouds, which I find cheering. But the world is turning faster than I am driving, and the shadow cast by the horizon tips up into darkness. The bottom of the rainbow lifts up into the sky ahead of me, rising out of reach before I can get closer to it.