Word got around Devon’s soccer pitch, and one day a soccer mom friend touched my arm while I watched my son practice. I knew who it was before I turned to face her, always Chanel No. 5. She looked concerned and said she thought I had a fatal disease, and was moving to France to check it off of my bucket list, before I kicked the object of such list. She didn’t understand my explanation.
“Why are you really doing this, Bill?” asked Janice. She was my occasional sushi companion and shit-shooter, but that day she looked like my grievance counsellor.
“What do you mean?”
“This is a big deal. Your whole family moving to France. Aren’t you worried about your job?” Janice tucked her dyed-blonde hair behind her ears to indicate she was prepared for a serious discussion.
“I am worried about my job,“ I said. “But you know I don’t like it.”
“I didn’t know that. You fooled me, and I’ve known you five years. What do you mean, you don’t like it? Nobody likes everything about their job. That’s why it’s a job.”
“No, I don’t like anything about it. Except the time I’m not doing it.”
“Ouch.” An errant ball from practice struck Janice on the shin, not hard enough for someone to say “ouch,” and she punted it back to the pitch. “So why is France going to make anything better, except get you a long vacation?”
“It’ll give me the chance to put everything on pause for a while, to think everything over. I don’t have time to do that now. I have to slow everything down before my life speeds by without a stop – that’s how I feel now.”
“You know your life doesn’t look too bad to me,” said Janice. “I don’t see how you could hate it so much.”
“I know it sounds like I’m complaining. I know I’m lucky. Why do you think I stuck with it for so long?”
“I don’t know what you think you’re going to find over there,” she said.
What was I expecting to find over there? I stared, unfocused, past the mini-Messis bouncing between their drills, past the pudgy middle-agers jogging the track, past the parking lot crammed with minivans and Suburbans. Something. Something different from this. At least a different me. At least a me with a plan.