Getting to Know You
Our First Year Together
My wife left me.
I shouldn’t have been surprised yet I was. She caught me off guard one day saying she was going to move out. “We need time apart.”
I should have seen it coming but didn’t really think about it actually happening. We had simply grown apart over the last few years both having dissimilar interests in life. She had been laying plans for some time evidently. A plan to move to the foothills of the Sierra Nevada Mountains in a small touristy ex-gold mining town near her girl friend who she had visited several times over the years. She liked it there and I supported her decision. I helped her get a few items of furniture out of the house and helped packing the U-haul truck she had rented. Then I accompanied her to nearby Napa where we secured the dolly to transport her Honda CRV. With everything ready to go, we said good-bye to each other and that was that. I watched her drive away as I sat there in my little VW Golf. On the drive back home to Santa Rosa I wondered now what?
I walked into the house and immediately felt it bright and cheery. The dark cloud of negativity that had been hanging for the past few years had seemed to have vanished. This is nice. I continued on with my life as if nothing had changed. Every day I would go to the bordering State Park to hike, jog or ride my mountain bike on the trails. Winter was approaching but this year I would not take a road trip to warmer climates as I had always done. I felt a responsibility to the house. The house was slowly becoming a drywall prison to me but I was oblivious to it. I thought I was happy but didn’t know I was really becoming very bored.
I had pretty much given up on watching television by now. Television merely was a wasting away of time when you think you have nothing else better to do. Over the coming year I eventually began watching NASCAR. That there should have been an indication that things weren’t right. Besides my love for reading my main source of entertainment were watching movies online and YouTube videos. I discovered these YouTubers who were living the life of a nomad, fulltime on the road in their RV, trailer, van and even passenger cars. This struck a chord with me. For the past ten years I had been making long trips exploring America. Here were people doing this as a lifestyle. Could I do this myself?
My cat Sinbad had accompanied me on most all my adventures. He was now getting up in years and had been on a special diet for the last two years combating the failing kidney problem most cats face in their twilight years. My second winter “single” was now approaching and I vowed to not spend it in the cold wet conditions of Sonoma County in northern California. I thought Sinbad had one more road trip left in him; a winter escape together in the warm sunny southwestern part of the U.S. But Sinbad had other plans.
I had left the house one morning for my usual outing on the trails of Annadel State Park. When I returned home I saw he hadn’t touched his food. The bowl of kibble looked the same from the night before, undisturbed. This is not good. Could this be the beginning of the end for my dear Sinbad? He seemed his normal self otherwise. As the days passed he moved around less, sleeping more and more. He had become even thinner than before and still had not eaten. One day I took him outside so he could lie in the grass one last time enjoying the cool feeling and smells. I could tell he enjoyed that moment. That evening he was by my side in my chair as I watched a movie on my laptop. He slowly stood up, jumped down from the chair, kind of staggered over to my desk and lay down underneath it. He had never laid there before. I got up and laid down beside him gently petting his soft golden fur and telling him it is was okay. He closed his eyes, purred and seemed to drift off to sleep. His breathing became fainter and less frequent. In a couple of hours he was still and my beloved faithful companion of seventeen years was gone. I had done all my grieving two years earlier when he first became ill and I thought I was losing him then. The vet helped him recover and with that special diet and medication we were able enjoy two more years together. I laid Sinbad to rest the next day in a special box I had built two years before.
I now was looking at going away for the winter cat-less. Sinbad and given me a gift and freed me from the trauma of him dying many miles away from home. Now I needed to make the best of his gift to me. All our trips in the past were trips of constant motion. We were always moving on to see what was over the next hill, around the bend in the road. This time it would be different. I wanted to test myself and see if I could stay in one spot for a long time without going bonkers.
Over the next five months I discovered Yes, I can do this. I attended what is known as The Rubber Tramp Rendezvous, a ten-day event held in the desert of Quartzite, Arizona in the month of January. I had heard of this gathering of nomads from watching YouTube videos. There I made new friends and was able to see how everyone lived the nomadic life, fulltime life on the road in their RV. Yes, this was the life for me. But how can I pull it off? I sat down and carefully crafted an e-mail to my wife. I explained to her that the money she was spending for rent could all be directed to her love to travel internationally (I had long since given up international travel for a host of reasons) if she were to move back to the house and I into the motor home fulltime. I said how I longed to follow my life-long dream of traveling and found that others do just that. She e-mailed me back in a short time saying she was for it. Yes! The die had been cast. Now I had to make good of it.
I said goodbye to my new friends sometime in March and headed for home facing the daunting task of disposing of my life there. I arrived home, walked into the house and was overwhelmed with what I had to do in order to begin this new chapter in my life. In what I expected to take weeks if not a month or more I accomplished in a mere ten days. Bags of clothing I hadn’t worn in years were given away to Goodwill and the Salvation Army. Boxes of personal effects (junk) were packed up and donated or tossed in the trash. It began as a difficult and scary process but once I got into it, it kind of felt good to rid myself of all of this “stuff”. I still had my little VW Golf to deal with. One day I parked it outside near the golf course that bordered our home with a FOR SALE sign on it. Before the weekend was over it sold, seen by a golfer whose daughter needed a car to replace hers that had been wrecked in San Francisco. I loved that car and knew it would be hard to part with but I was happy to see who it went to and even more thrilled as to how easy it all went when I feared it would be a trying exercise that would delay my departure. Everything was going way too smoothly. Was it a sign of this was meant to be?
I still had one more major task to accomplish – I was still cat-less.