My girlfriend, Mary, says that I just love wasting gas. She says I’ll look for any excuse to drive when I could just as easily walk, or take a bus or a train for long range trips, or avoid a trip altogether. She doesn’t like that I refuse to get a new car to replace the old one I’ve had since college, and that I continue to put a lot of miles on it. I guess I do like to drive, but more than anything, I like to be in Asheville, walking around, feeling the way I had before I gained as much as I have now, all of which I measure in dollars.
I don’t think this is me. One day, I just woke up and when I looked around I had a girlfriend that I wake up to everyday, a son that wakes me up every time I think I can steal a moment to shut my eyes after a long day, a job where sometimes people yell at me in my face and I have to be professional, and even a nice apartment with wood floors and fancy faucets that are touch activated in a complex in South Charlotte that makes people who knew me before look at me differently, as though I am a richer man than I am. I don’t take it for granted, I am proud to be a provider for a family, but this is not what I imagined my late twenties to be.
By the time I finished college in Asheville, I was a bona fide stoner and I had enough friends around me to make me feel like I could be something artistic, but it’s harder than it looks and over time, all that fiction gave way to the reality that I got my high school sweetheart pregnant when I begged her to go camping with me one weekend and she reluctantly accepted. She enjoyed it much more than she thought she would — snuggling close in a sleeping bag in a tent made her more interested than normal and we didn’t make the right choice in a certain regard. But, I love my son, he is my little buddy. My girlfriend hates that I call him that, she says it’s a sign that I haven’t fully accepted the fact that I am a father and that my son is a real person who depends on me for his survival. Maybe that was true, I was immature at first and I looked at my son like he was something my girlfriend had made that looked like me, but only she knew the best way to care for him because he seemed so fragile, and I can get nervous under pressure (why I’m not in the NBA). But I’ve gotten much better and as my son grows older, he doesn’t seem so vulnerable and he’s always tearing things up. I’m excited to see him grow up; I know he’s going to be a basketball player, he’s taller than other kids his age. But it’s hard to imagine all the stuff around him. I just can’t see myself in five years. I can’t imagine the choices I will make, I guess. I think about quitting my job all the time. It’s stress that I could do without, and even though it pays well, I know it to be true that more money brings more problems because it’s important to use your money to gain access to excessive things. Take the wood floors for instance, I suggested to my girlfriend that we stay in our old apartment when our lease was up, I actually suggested that we try to lock it down for as far into the future as possible, but she insisted that we move to one of the newly built models on the other side of the complex. Granted, I could afford it because of a raise I had recently received, but moving to the other side of the complex completely threw off my orientation and I got lost when I left for work in the morning for two weeks after we moved. Since moving to Charlotte, I’ve become much more methodical. The streets can be confusing to navigate without GPS because there are all these crazy dedicated right turn lanes and sometimes I get swept up in traffic and have to turn right when I meant to continue straight, or what looks to be a four way intersection will only be three ways and you’re forced to pick a direction. It’s not as bad once you get used to it, but our new apartment is tucked into the middle of the complex and I don’t have a choice but to find my way out of the confusing in-roads of Daisy Mill Commons. I can’t stand it, every building looks exactly alike and I hate to admit that if not for my GPS I would have just stopped driving altogether and only left the apartment when my girlfriend left.
That was a very long demonstration of the annoying problems that money brings, but it’s by no means the worse of them. I can’t believe that I can get paid on Monday, more money than I have ever received at a single time in all the years of my life by the way, and by the end of the week, I have so little left, like I’m going back to the bad part of college with no money to go drinking with my friends. And I know that maybe I shouldn’t be drinking with my friends all the time, but sometimes is not horrible and I’m allowed to get away; even Homer had Moe’s Tavern and he was the best father in US history.
I think I’ve always known I would be a father, it just makes sense, but I thought I would be in my thirties and I would have transitioned into fatherhood with a savings and more financial stability. My dad told me that he wasn’t stable when he had me and I wasn’t even my parent’s first child. I know I’m not the first guy to be surprised by a baby, but I guess I honestly thought that my life would be different. I really believed that I would get to travel the world and write things about the experiences that I had. But if everyone got to do it, I guess it wouldn’t be special.
This is sounding much more depressing than I meant it to. Let me reiterate that I love my girlfriend and my son, and I will always do what I can to provide for them and I am excited for the life I have ahead of me, despite my trepidation. The only reason that Mary and I are not married is because we both decided that it was unnecessary and she gets a bigger tax refund if we file separately. It’s one of the few immature things that I have left to throw in her face when she gets on me about ways I could act my age; she chooses not to acknowledge the fact that videogames are an acceptable form of entertainment for people of every age. But, we have fun I think; we like laughing about the ways that we cling to youth as we transition into more responsible versions of ourselves.
I’ve been trying to reconnect to my hometown since I’m closer now. When I left, I didn’t think about going back all that often, and Mary had no intentions of living in Ladoga. Charlotte is a nice place and I remember going to the city when I was a kid on what felt like the most special occasions. I saw my first circus in Charlotte in 1989 when I was six. I went to Discovery Place around that time and I remember it being much cooler as a kid. Charlotte has enough of a metropolitan area nowadays to make you realize that you’re in a big city, but it’s not crowded at all. Ladoga, my hometown, is much smaller, about an hour southwest on highway 74 and then onto interstate 601. It sits just on top of South Carolina and rivals from Monroe, Wingate, and Marshville to the north love to joke that Ladoga is Union County’s footrest. It’s only funny to nerds who look at maps, though. I think Mary likes the distance, but I hate it because I can’t help but be there at least once a week to see my parents or my grandmother, who is my only living grandparent. I can’t lie that I like to go back. I like to play basketball there; it’s the only place I don’t get nervous and miss shots for no reason. I was pretty good in high school, but when we made it to playoffs, I was always on the bench. The coach knew not to trust me in pressure situations after I missed every free throw in my first playoff game as a junior. I knew that I couldn’t hack it in college, but it didn’t bother me too much because I was also really into the news when I was a kid and I wanted to study journalism. I always watched the six o’clock news with my dad when I was living with my parents and I would spend hours in high school reading articles online. I have always been fascinated by politics. I think it’s a show that we love to gripe at. By this point, you would think that more Americans would demand more than the appearance of the ideal civil servant, but we will always vote for the prettiest people who yell the loudest because it makes for good tv. I don’t think American politics will ever recover from the divisiveness that emerged from the Bush and Obama administrations. The two sides are still whining and doing everything they can to undermine each other, which is a masochistic move seeing that we’re supposedly all in this together. I’ve always been interested in writing and books, but when I went to college, I thought about becoming a tv personality and people said I had the face for it. I ended up drifting back towards writing, though, and by the time I graduated I was an eccentric who barely went to class and always smelled like marijuana. I didn’t go to Asheville to become a pothead, I went because it felt different from all the other schools I had visited. It wasn’t as homey as Chapel Hill, where the journalism department is much more impressive, but Asheville felt like a cool place to live for a while when I visited.
Ladoga is a cool place too and I’m happy to tell people that. I don’t think that I want to buy a house there because Mary doesn’t want to, but every time I go I feel like I never left.
I had a dream about Lagoda recently; I was in the park playing basketball and all of a sudden a big hand came out of the sky and ripped the court up from the ground like it was all a prop. It was a funny dream, not the nightmare that it sounds like, and everyone that was on the court ran away like it was a cartoon. The hand pulled up everything and left just a white background. I woke up to a strange sound then; the bedroom window was up and I crawled out of bed to close it. Mary was sound asleep. When I lifted the blinds, I saw that the sound was coming from a car that was struggling to start. I watched a man and woman get out and pop the hood. I wondered why neither of them had phones to call for help and eventually I called down to ask if I could do anything for them. They said that I could and I wrapped myself in a robe and went down stairs. It was about 3am and the neighborhood was quiet. The man introduced himself as Wes and his girlfriend Valeria. They were an attractive couple and I couldn’t help but compare them to me and Mary. Wes is taller than I am, but I think I have a more mature face than he does. He is not light skinned, but lighter than me. Valeria was beautiful in the way that Hispanic women are and it’s hard to compare her to Mary. She is definitely attractive, but I think my girl is much more impressive. Anyway, Wes explained that he’d lost his phone and Valeria always forgot hers. They had taken the train to Charlotte for a wedding and borrowed a car from Wes’s grandfather to get around. They ended up in the apartment of someone they barely knew for an after party and apparently the car wasn’t in the best condition and had just given out on them when they were headed home. I offered to drive Wes back to his grandfather’s house before I even knew where the man lived. In retrospect, I don’t know why I was so generous. It just felt like the thing to do since I was up and able. I ran up and told Mary that I was helping some people before I finally thought to ask them where I was taking them.
“It’s really far, Max. I appreciate your kindness, but I can’t ask you to drive all the way to Ladoga tonight.”
I couldn’t believe the odds. It’s a small world I guess.
As we drove to Ladoga, Wes sat in the front seat and Valeria closed her eyes in the back with the breeze on her face and her legs stretched out. She looked exhausted and Wes looked like he was barely hanging on. Every now and then his head bobbed to the side when he drifted off. I talked to keep him awake, asked him about the wedding.
“Valeria’s father works in a restaurant in Charlotte. His boss is a good friend and invited us to his daughter’s wedding. Best wedding I’ve been to, so much fun. We’ve been dancing since six.”
Wes told me that he lived in Asheville, that he had recently relocated from DC where he did what I thought I would be doing with myself.
“It was a good time, honestly. DC is cool, and it’s the best place to be for that journalism stuff.” He sounded bored with it. “But I guess, after I got divorced, I just wanted to do something different. My uncle was working in a restaurant in Asheville and when I came to visit him, I knew that I wanted to live there. It’s fun but it’s not New York. It’s not big and there’s trees and mountains everywhere. I never thought I would like nature stuff, hiking and all that, but it’s the best part about it. My life is completely different out there.”
I wanted things to be different. I wasn’t envious of Wes, he told me that he took his divorce hard and he always missed being away from his kids, but it seemed like he’d gotten a pretty good consolation prize. I wanted to ask him if he smoked weed, but I didn’t want to hate him if he said he did and I realized that he had the perfect life by my standards. He was a good guy and when he told me about his fascination with the city of Ladoga, I wanted him to be my best friend.
“I think the entire history of my family until my dad moved to Virginia is in Ladoga. We visited when I was a kid, but to hear things about it now is crazy. It’s stuff you wouldn’t believe happened in such a small place that’s easy to overlook.”
By the time we made it to the home of Wes’s grandfather, we were both wide awake and trading stories about the things we had heard or witnessed first hand in the town. I also told him about my worries, that the old me was disappearing and I was becoming something that was altogether unrecognizable to me, and he said that I shouldn’t feel bad. “Change does that to a man.” And he offered me a chance to dust off my pen, to feel my old self again. “Why don’t we put together some stories about Ladoga?” We exchanged emails and have been in correspondence ever since.
By the time I got back to Charlotte, the sun was coming up. Wes and Valeria had both given me an open invitation to their home for dinner as payback for my generosity. Mary was proud of me but joked, “I’m glad you didn’t get murdered.”
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