Afternoon walks, and what it’s like to be unemployed for a long time

I was reminded of this recently when I took walk one afternoon along a familiar route of six or seven blocks in an old and quite beautiful neighborhood of Charleston. It was a beautiful late Winter afternoon. The live oaks, just like I remember in New Orleans on similar walks, were still holding on to the previous season’s leaves in preparation for shedding them in March and April, as they do every year. Shortly after that, the new growth starts its subtle leafing out. On the sidewalk were last year’s remaining oak leaves, so distinctively small, crisp and hard, but so potent a reminder of New Orleans to me, a city that is filled with live oaks. They surrounded the house where I grew up. They were everywhere.

So on that walk, I recalled similar walks I had taken from my brother’s house on Laurel Street during an extended period of unemployment in 1989 and 1990. The route was only a few blocks from the Mississippi River, up Valmont and over to Pitt Street, thence left across Jefferson Avenue and down Octavia Street. I had to look this route up on a map because it’s been so many years since I’ve walked there, but it was a daily uptown New Orleans ritual for me, week after week, and month after month.

Sometimes I’d ride my bike over to nearby Loyola and Tulane universities and enjoy being on the campus, visiting the bookstores, etc., and this also gave me a temporary lift, although the busy and preoccupied students and faculty contrasted with how little I had to do, and with the amount of time I had to leisurely walk and bike and read and think. I felt guilty. I didn’t think too highly of myself at this time. It was as if I were retired or something, and I was only 38 years old, in the prime of life. Not a good age to be in that situation.

It was absolutely essential for me to get out like this every day, even if the weather was less than congenial, for to stay in the house and look at classified job ads, find new and different employment agencies, write cover letters send out resumes, and even try to find some kind of part-time job was very depressing. Ironically, though I detested job hunting, as I think most people do, I did very well in interviews, when I could get them. But nothing seemed to be working out for me. All I knew was that sooner or later, I would probably go back to South Carolina.

On those walks, as I headed toward St. Charles Avenue, I made a special effort to notice as many things as I could about my surroundings. In certain states of mind you tend to look at things differently. You don’t take as much for granted. Ordinary objects and things you’ve seen a hundred times before have new meaning and depth, simply because you are aware of them, really aware, and your surroundings have something to say to you as you pass by. But you can’t say anything back. You are an observer. No one notices you. Your walk continues. It’s like you are on a movie set watching the scenes being filmed, take after take, the same action, but a slightly different outcome.

I almost dreaded coming home sometimes because those walks were highlights of the day, focal points. I returned to an empty house, but I liked to time it so that it was near supper time and I could go about that comforting ritual of fixing something to eat, maybe turning on the TV for the first time that day.

The end of the day in those dismal times was a great relief. I could relax most completely then, for I could temporarily forget about the effort it took to feel that I was still a part of this throbbing world of busy, engaged people. I could just curl up with a book, take a nap and watch the night descend, the crickets begin their song, and the neighborhood become a softer, easier place to be in the darkness and quiet of evening. Sanctuary — until I awoke at sunrise with the same mockingbird singing his song, and it once again dawned on me: where was I? What was I going to do? Why was I in this situation in the first place. Surely I didn’t deserve this.

Those mornings brought on a gnawing, dreaded sense of anxiety. The day ahead was a huge void. As far as being a productive person earning a living, that seemed very far off somewhere in the future. Time seemed both not to exist at all, and to be endless.

At Month Nine of what at times was a pleasant and manageable interlude between what I knew would eventually take me out of this ordeal, and the stark reality of the present, I began to sense a change. Feelings of blankness, hopelessness, and encroaching depression were deepening. The evenings were my salvation. I could fix myself a hamburger and a pot of mashed potatoes, eat, then retreat to my room to read and enjoy the solace of the night ahead. I’ve always been a Night Owl, more so than ever now, all these years later. And remember, this was half a dozen years before the Internet and World Wide Web arrived on the scene along with the widespread adoption of personal computers. Job hunting and life in general would have been infinitely easier in comparison to what seemed like the primitively old-fashioned methods of job hunting that I was enduring. The Internet with all its rich offerings would have lifted me out of the darkness because I was so perfectly suited to what came with that revolutionary new technology. But that was just science fiction back then. Who could have known.

I was making no progress in the job hunt. Maybe I should again try to get a job at a community college teaching journalism. Maybe going back to work as a newspaper reporter or editor was the solution. But nothing felt right. There seemed to be nothing worth going after. My two previous careers in teaching and journalism seemed over, finis.

I didn’t leave the house much in those days except to take the life-enhancing walks I wrote about earlier. One day, however, I recall taking a drive to a wildlife and Nature preserve about 20 miles out from the city. It was a wild and beautiful place. It contained many acres of forest, marsh and swampland that could be accessed via a low boardwalk.

It was a warm Spring day. It was nice to be away from the city, but the strangest feeling descended on me that I think I’d ever experienced. It’s almost impossible to describe. Not something as bad as 12 years earlier when I struggling for a way out of a terrifying battle with clinical depression. I lost my job and was out of work due to that illness.

The experience ten years later was the closest things I can recall to a sense of disassociation, like my very self was separating ad disappearing, and would be lost. Basically, I felt that I was literally losing my mind. That’s what month after month of having no fixed guide star of hope and possibility in life can do. It’s why such terrible fates befall the long-term unemployed, people who want to rise out of their grim situations, but who can’t seem to do it. Many become homeless. Some can’t take it any more. I was getting to that point, but was in denial.

However, i was fortunate in that I had a place to live and family that loved me. I shudder to think what my experiences with depression and joblessness would have been like without them.

But I couldn’t live at my brother’s place indefinitely, though it provided the life raft that kept me from going under, that and years of the single life which hardened me to adversity and being alone.

A week or so after that strange and hallucinatory weekend outing to the nature preserve, I got an urgent call from my aunt in South Carolina who had been watching the classified ads in the newspaper religiously, apparently, and told me a small newspaper in the eastern part of the state needed an editor.

They needed someone badly, it turned out. I talked with them by phone, and within a week I was living in a small town producing a 24-page weekly community newspaper. Every skill I had learned in the business years earlier came back to me instantly. I had no time at all the worry about whether I could do the job. I had to and I wanted to.

I became immersed in the job, grateful for this new chance at life that put me in daily contact with many good and interesting people. I was starting over. Again.