Kate Takes A Vacation
Chapter 1. THE ARRIVAL April, 1991
The story you are now reading will be, and has been, unbelievable at times. Of course, I’ll pull the shades down a bit for privacy here and there, and perhaps a veil or two is adhered to religiously, but, in fact, it is as real as you reading this.
The facts began accumulating at SFO last December 8th . This was before the Persian Gulf War was fought at the local terminals and you could go to the gate to meet your party. And what a party this turned out to be. Spread the events of the last five months together as I’m about to do here and you’ll see for yourself this grand hooter of mine. But for now it’s a party of one. Jake Phillips, party of one.
Anyway, if you had been at SFO that sunny Saturday morning, you’d have noticed me quite easily. I was the one looking at the arriving feet, occasionally glancing up at the faces, but for the most part keyed to the floor, footwear. Looking for a pair of black cowboy boots. Considering this plane had just arrived from Austin, Texas, there weren’t that many feet riding the carpet in black cowboyishlygirl boots.
I hadn’t seen Kate in ten years. A lack of a photograph and other intimate relationships had conspired over the last decade to fade her image. She said on the phone she’d be wearing these black boots. So I looked.
Kate Kross was now Kate Northrop. Married about nine years. Two kids and a husband, Nick, who works overseas for six months of the year.
From the tone of her voice and from the state I was in -- feeling disconnected from intimate human contact -- I looked forward to meeting her again. I’d pick her up at the airport as a favor and we’d have lunch together. Contact from the past. Compare notes and move on, more enlightened about ourselves from seeing one’s reflection in someone else’s intimate eyes-of-the-past.
Kate was taking her first solo vacation in years. She was supposed to visit friends who lived in the Bay Area. I haven’t pulled the blinds down yet in case you’re wondering. One has to set up a level of honesty and trust before one commences to lying to save face and not get sued by the living. Lying plays an important part in this story. So hang in there if you want to see it at its best.
My head is bobbing up and down matching boots with bodies and faces. Strangers modeling unintentionally for my memory. I cringe each time I spot boots attached to an unfamiliar form. Kate has a picture of me. I haven’t seen her since our brief affair ended when she moved back to Texas. The boots stomp by. The anxiety increasing while waiting for an unwelcome hug; my knees even start to shake for a few earthquake-type seconds. I make peace with the lord and resolve that it doesn’t matter what she looks like now. Just get this over. Spend too much time alone. Everything gets exaggerated. Misgivings become insecurities. I’m just picking her up at the airport because no one else can make it. We’ll have lunch and that’ll be it.
How will a young woman who has loved me in the past view me now that she’s a Woman in the present? How will she react? How will I react? This can turn out to be a horrible embarrassment. I shouldn’t be here. One of these one hundred and twenty passengers at one time thought I was something special. Am I something remotely special, or an extra in the airport show today? Any second now she will come over and say, “Jake! You haven’t changed!” I will echo the same supposed compliment, all the while wondering why I had ever bothered to show up.
Two months earlier her unexpected phone call solicited my assistance with her travel plans. Imagine calling during the World Series and not knowing it’s being played in Oakland at that very moment. I guess I said yes because the A’s were losing and I needed something to look forward to. At least that’s the facade I presented.
Back at the gate I have this vision of on-rushing passengers herding through a stockade only to get their brains blown out. Stop and smell the fence post. Observe a blade of grass. It won’t be long for any of us. Smile …
Finally -- there she is, all in black but wearing blue running shoes. That unannounced garment change releases an all-eyes-turn-to-see-me nervous laugh. I notice her from her noticing me. It isn’t exactly visual contact. She kind of beams right through me which makes me feel I know her, although I don’t recognize her. Are you with me? What about the boot? That’ll come later.
Kate is quite attractive, especially compared to the preview show. Most of the other passengers getting off AmericaWest this mid-December morning have someone somewhere who also sees them the way I am seeing Kate. She said later that it was as if no time had ever lapsed since we were last together.
Kate has, I mean, had, as I am writing this, a slender body, strong neck and hands, and just enough life lines on her face to make her appear as a woman in her prime. I had thought a couple of children and living out in the prairie town of Wharton might have -- well, she looked great. We have an obligatory kiss then she heads for the ladies room. I watch her pass, sensual, serene. I’m not expecting to be so attracted.
She’s healthy and fit and here I half expect her to have cowshit on her shoes and a mother lode of excess fat. She has been running about five miles a day, until recently that is, but more on that later, at the appropriate time.
So here we go. Out she exits from the rest room:
“I’ve got to make a couple of calls.”
“What’s the matter?” I say.
“The person I’m supposed to stay with is in South America.”
“What?”
“I know, but she told me yesterday! Can you believe it? Said she’d leave the key with her roommate.”
“That’s good. A key sounds good.”
We start walking toward the baggage claim area.
“Yeah, but her roommate already has a whole family of visitors staying for the week. So, I’m not sure where I’m going to stay. I’ve got a few phone numbers to call. Where’s a --?” She turns toward the approaching phone booth.
“Why don’t you stay with me?” I blurt out, just a passing thought, made in logical sequential order to the problem at hand. Who would’ve thought that one line could potentially restructure the known world? In the beginning was the word.
She turns slightly around to me while in her purposeful stride, thinks at me for a moment, although it seems slightly less than that. She reaches the phone booth and starts to smile.
I continue, “You might as well -- we’re old friends -- responsible parents and adults. And you can meet my daughter. It’ll be nice.”
“All right,” she says and retracts her hand before it touches the in-transit germ receiver.
That was simple. I wonder how many other people in the airport are facing a similar problem and resolving it as easily.
That I’m even writing this is amazing. Someone has to, just in case... I’ve got to work it out of my system. Not to build a mountain out of a pile of pixie dust, but to prevent the volcanic eruption of one from my chest. This is my contribution to the science of relationships. This is the medium for the cure; a vaccine for all others who follow. Problems can be debilitating. Unsolvable problems can cripple. The ideas are hyperventilating -- let me sketch out the rest so we can get to the point --
We drive over to Noe Valley where the roommate is working in a pretentiously hip (says Kate) restaurant. After cruising up and down both sides of the street, finally we find the blue awning marker and Kate steps out and informs the woman she’d found another place to stay, but thanks just the same. We head out to Sea Cliff, Seal Rock area. It’s a wonderful day -- the sound and smell of the ocean combine with the warm sunlight and her presence feels like, eh, it’s one of those perfect days. The old amusement arcade occupies the first half hour; the player pianos and the antique games give us a nostalgic feel. She makes me drop a coin into the fortune teller gadget. For twenty-five cents I’m informed that marriage with the right one is imminent. She smiles knowingly.
“You believe in this?” I try to tickle her ribs briefly.
Kate grins, “You don’t understand.”
She’s right. I don’t understand.
We get a turkey sandwich and two beers then go for a hike down along the trail past the foundation of the old baths and the World War II bunker placements. We share our lunch, the surf, and the fresh air. It’s amazing what a single beer can do, if you let it. Alcohol is a much more powerful and potent phenomenon when one doesn’t have it regularly. Like sex.
This is a day for exploring so we continue along the rocks to maneuver down to a secluded area along the boulder-edged shore. What a fine day. It’s December but it’s spring. When we arrive at the water shoes and socks are stripped off and we negotiate with the on-coming waves until finding a dry patch of crushed stone that serves as sea-cliff sand.
There is a very large boulder jutting up off shore. A weathered, ragged monolith whitewashed with seagull droppings. She says it’s heart-shaped and frosted. Without saying another word we just lie down together on those subtle, solarized pebbles. Her head on my arm feels as natural as the sun on my face. The mist from the waves, the sound of the surf, the cloudless blue sky...
In the distance on a lookout point tourists are taking in the beautiful oceanic scene. They can see us, two figures reclining romantically -- such a desirous image, torsos entwined, the longing for a lover bringing a momentary sense discontentment. Now it is our turn. This is what it’s like to be happy and romantic and carefree and comfortable and intimate. It’s happening now. Enjoy the moment. She’d only be here for a week. Obviously she’d been yearning for something like this for a long while. So had I. It’s all in the timing.
She says destiny.
Timing versus destiny.
Ten years earlier we had been together not far from this spot we were now occupying. A whole decade has dissolved as if it had been a momentary glitch. That’s what’s great about intimate friends. You can ignore the time curve and stay straight in the present. She wishes I had asked her to come back to California. She would’ve come. She wouldn’t have married. It’s so nice to hear something like this; I don’t know what to say. I remember what she called love ten years ago seemed more like obsession and it didn’t appeal to me then. However it’s doing the trick now. I am melting into her. Maybe it’s the beer, the weather, her?
It’s the timing, I conclude.
Relationships are all in the timing. People have to need each other at the same moment and then it happens - contact, intimacy, feelings open up, thoughts gush out as if on a holiday. This is certainly all that. And like all holidays it has a beginning and an end. That’s what makes holidays work. You know you have to have fun within that certain framework, then it’s back to daily survival.
“It’s all in the timing.” I say.
She doesn’t buy that. She’s of the belief that it’s meant to happen. It always was and always would be the case for us.
“It’s our destiny.”
I don’t buy that. Destiny is too expensive. Timing seems more affordable.
“We see the same thing, differently.”
By the time we get to my Oakland apartment and climb the five flights of stairs we are ready to enter the portals of possibility that true intimacy brings.
She cares about Nick she admits, but it isn’t love, at least not on the same scale as her current feelings. It is her first solo vacation in years after having raised her young children mostly by herself while Nick was away for months at a time. She explains how her parents had bought them the house; her father recently bought her a car, and most of the furniture had been from her family. Nick had little to do with the home life she has arranged for herself and her children. He didn’t exactly want children either; she had to fight to have them. Anyway, enough has been built up to undermine her marriage. Now she is feeling love in its fresh, innocent, non-responsible form. We will have a limited time together, then back to responsibilities and adult realities.
We have seven days and nights. Kate says that a few years earlier she had had a premonition about this very event that is now taking place. Just as she said she had one in 1979 when we first met at a Philips Station. "This is just like a dream I had," she said to me as we negotiated the use of the one phone within a twenty mile radius. That comment led to our brief affair then.
We had exchanged pleasantries and names. "Jake Phillips!?" she questions and concurs making a special effort to connect my last name and the name of the gas station. "The gods use everything, don't they?" This is the kind of thought that made her feel she had psychic powers. Maybe she had, has.
She says we’re connected psychically. I doubt that but don’t say so. I’ve doubted too much of late. It’s good to hear her convictions, whether I believe them or not. Kate always comes across as being absolutely honest, so I trust what she’s saying is her truth, the truth she lives by, and I respect that. How have I become so cynical? Kate makes me rethink much of my disillusionment.
I have a deep reverence for the gift she’s bestowing upon me. But is this love for me, or just her need to love passionately? While she has been tucked safely away in marriage I have had a few too many relationships which seem to debunk and demystify the whole notion of forever&ever love. I am now a believer in timing. Love and destiny and the right one have disappeared from my horizon. But perhaps I am wrong. Is Kate showing me the way now? Is this what’s been missing -- the cornerstone, the key, the right one?
While I’m at work, Kate sweeps, mops and cleans the entire apartment. She rearranges and folds all of the clothes in my drawers. Maid service. French maid service. She can’t do enough to show how much she loves me. She seems to be in tune with all of my shortcomings. It’s eerie to have someone probe so closely to the bone, to the home. And it’s all free and innocent. So it seems.
Kate arrived just as I was having a custody tug-of-war over my daughter, Peggy. My four years of co-parenting child-volley is about to be changed. Her mother wants to move out of the neighborhood and sixty miles away. That would mean one of us, her mother or myself, would have to sacrifice, to let go. Co-parenting only works when both parents live in the same immediate area. The idea of being a weekend father is so repugnant; even now the thought of it is ripping me apart. Peggy's mother is screaming lawyers and courts and a costly battle that only lawyers profit from. Here is the romantic love disillusionment. And this is where I am when Kate enters on a seemingly peaceful Saturday.
If you understand the above, then this next part may make more sense. Somehow Kate and I had come to an agreement to prove the power of the thing that’s overwhelming us; a manifestation of this moment. It began as a vague desire, but by the end of her brief stay it becomes a conscious decision. A child would be emotional ballast against the loss of not being able to hold on to this moment. Kate’s rooted in Texas; I am in the Bay Area. The child would manifest our connection.
Kate loves being a mother. She’s all set up materially and financially to follow it through -- a couple of older siblings to help, a good yard and a safe neighborhood. Nick and I don’t equate to a full-time dad. She doesn’t mind. Kate is an independent woman. If one has to be married, hers is the best of all possible relationships.
She wants me to father a child, our child. I want another child. That she would even ask it of me while I’m thinking and feeling the same way gives credence to her destiny philosophy. It’s a very complex understanding between us, one we believe is right (although I can’t quite explain it now). We are in synch. Logistics, loyalties, distances, and family commitments, along with the laundry and the shopping, all will have to wait a few more days. We are on holiday.
Kate is on vacation.
Kate Takes a Vacation, Chapter 1 excerpt © 2014 John Kirkmire, all rights reserved
Chapter 1. THE ARRIVAL April, 1991
The story you are now reading will be, and has been, unbelievable at times. Of course, I’ll pull the shades down a bit for privacy here and there, and perhaps a veil or two is adhered to religiously, but, in fact, it is as real as you reading this.
The facts began accumulating at SFO last December 8th . This was before the Persian Gulf War was fought at the local terminals and you could go to the gate to meet your party. And what a party this turned out to be. Spread the events of the last five months together as I’m about to do here and you’ll see for yourself this grand hooter of mine. But for now it’s a party of one. Jake Phillips, party of one.
Anyway, if you had been at SFO that sunny Saturday morning, you’d have noticed me quite easily. I was the one looking at the arriving feet, occasionally glancing up at the faces, but for the most part keyed to the floor, footwear. Looking for a pair of black cowboy boots. Considering this plane had just arrived from Austin, Texas, there weren’t that many feet riding the carpet in black cowboyishlygirl boots.
I hadn’t seen Kate in ten years. A lack of a photograph and other intimate relationships had conspired over the last decade to fade her image. She said on the phone she’d be wearing these black boots. So I looked.
Kate Kross was now Kate Northrop. Married about nine years. Two kids and a husband, Nick, who works overseas for six months of the year.
From the tone of her voice and from the state I was in -- feeling disconnected from intimate human contact -- I looked forward to meeting her again. I’d pick her up at the airport as a favor and we’d have lunch together. Contact from the past. Compare notes and move on, more enlightened about ourselves from seeing one’s reflection in someone else’s intimate eyes-of-the-past.
Kate was taking her first solo vacation in years. She was supposed to visit friends who lived in the Bay Area. I haven’t pulled the blinds down yet in case you’re wondering. One has to set up a level of honesty and trust before one commences to lying to save face and not get sued by the living. Lying plays an important part in this story. So hang in there if you want to see it at its best.
My head is bobbing up and down matching boots with bodies and faces. Strangers modeling unintentionally for my memory. I cringe each time I spot boots attached to an unfamiliar form. Kate has a picture of me. I haven’t seen her since our brief affair ended when she moved back to Texas. The boots stomp by. The anxiety increasing while waiting for an unwelcome hug; my knees even start to shake for a few earthquake-type seconds. I make peace with the lord and resolve that it doesn’t matter what she looks like now. Just get this over. Spend too much time alone. Everything gets exaggerated. Misgivings become insecurities. I’m just picking her up at the airport because no one else can make it. We’ll have lunch and that’ll be it.
How will a young woman who has loved me in the past view me now that she’s a Woman in the present? How will she react? How will I react? This can turn out to be a horrible embarrassment. I shouldn’t be here. One of these one hundred and twenty passengers at one time thought I was something special. Am I something remotely special, or an extra in the airport show today? Any second now she will come over and say, “Jake! You haven’t changed!” I will echo the same supposed compliment, all the while wondering why I had ever bothered to show up.
Two months earlier her unexpected phone call solicited my assistance with her travel plans. Imagine calling during the World Series and not knowing it’s being played in Oakland at that very moment. I guess I said yes because the A’s were losing and I needed something to look forward to. At least that’s the facade I presented.
Back at the gate I have this vision of on-rushing passengers herding through a stockade only to get their brains blown out. Stop and smell the fence post. Observe a blade of grass. It won’t be long for any of us. Smile …
Finally -- there she is, all in black but wearing blue running shoes. That unannounced garment change releases an all-eyes-turn-to-see-me nervous laugh. I notice her from her noticing me. It isn’t exactly visual contact. She kind of beams right through me which makes me feel I know her, although I don’t recognize her. Are you with me? What about the boot? That’ll come later.
Kate is quite attractive, especially compared to the preview show. Most of the other passengers getting off AmericaWest this mid-December morning have someone somewhere who also sees them the way I am seeing Kate. She said later that it was as if no time had ever lapsed since we were last together.
Kate has, I mean, had, as I am writing this, a slender body, strong neck and hands, and just enough life lines on her face to make her appear as a woman in her prime. I had thought a couple of children and living out in the prairie town of Wharton might have -- well, she looked great. We have an obligatory kiss then she heads for the ladies room. I watch her pass, sensual, serene. I’m not expecting to be so attracted.
She’s healthy and fit and here I half expect her to have cowshit on her shoes and a mother lode of excess fat. She has been running about five miles a day, until recently that is, but more on that later, at the appropriate time.
So here we go. Out she exits from the rest room:
“I’ve got to make a couple of calls.”
“What’s the matter?” I say.
“The person I’m supposed to stay with is in South America.”
“What?”
“I know, but she told me yesterday! Can you believe it? Said she’d leave the key with her roommate.”
“That’s good. A key sounds good.”
We start walking toward the baggage claim area.
“Yeah, but her roommate already has a whole family of visitors staying for the week. So, I’m not sure where I’m going to stay. I’ve got a few phone numbers to call. Where’s a --?” She turns toward the approaching phone booth.
“Why don’t you stay with me?” I blurt out, just a passing thought, made in logical sequential order to the problem at hand. Who would’ve thought that one line could potentially restructure the known world? In the beginning was the word.
She turns slightly around to me while in her purposeful stride, thinks at me for a moment, although it seems slightly less than that. She reaches the phone booth and starts to smile.
I continue, “You might as well -- we’re old friends -- responsible parents and adults. And you can meet my daughter. It’ll be nice.”
“All right,” she says and retracts her hand before it touches the in-transit germ receiver.
That was simple. I wonder how many other people in the airport are facing a similar problem and resolving it as easily.
That I’m even writing this is amazing. Someone has to, just in case... I’ve got to work it out of my system. Not to build a mountain out of a pile of pixie dust, but to prevent the volcanic eruption of one from my chest. This is my contribution to the science of relationships. This is the medium for the cure; a vaccine for all others who follow. Problems can be debilitating. Unsolvable problems can cripple. The ideas are hyperventilating -- let me sketch out the rest so we can get to the point --
We drive over to Noe Valley where the roommate is working in a pretentiously hip (says Kate) restaurant. After cruising up and down both sides of the street, finally we find the blue awning marker and Kate steps out and informs the woman she’d found another place to stay, but thanks just the same. We head out to Sea Cliff, Seal Rock area. It’s a wonderful day -- the sound and smell of the ocean combine with the warm sunlight and her presence feels like, eh, it’s one of those perfect days. The old amusement arcade occupies the first half hour; the player pianos and the antique games give us a nostalgic feel. She makes me drop a coin into the fortune teller gadget. For twenty-five cents I’m informed that marriage with the right one is imminent. She smiles knowingly.
“You believe in this?” I try to tickle her ribs briefly.
Kate grins, “You don’t understand.”
She’s right. I don’t understand.
We get a turkey sandwich and two beers then go for a hike down along the trail past the foundation of the old baths and the World War II bunker placements. We share our lunch, the surf, and the fresh air. It’s amazing what a single beer can do, if you let it. Alcohol is a much more powerful and potent phenomenon when one doesn’t have it regularly. Like sex.
This is a day for exploring so we continue along the rocks to maneuver down to a secluded area along the boulder-edged shore. What a fine day. It’s December but it’s spring. When we arrive at the water shoes and socks are stripped off and we negotiate with the on-coming waves until finding a dry patch of crushed stone that serves as sea-cliff sand.
There is a very large boulder jutting up off shore. A weathered, ragged monolith whitewashed with seagull droppings. She says it’s heart-shaped and frosted. Without saying another word we just lie down together on those subtle, solarized pebbles. Her head on my arm feels as natural as the sun on my face. The mist from the waves, the sound of the surf, the cloudless blue sky...
In the distance on a lookout point tourists are taking in the beautiful oceanic scene. They can see us, two figures reclining romantically -- such a desirous image, torsos entwined, the longing for a lover bringing a momentary sense discontentment. Now it is our turn. This is what it’s like to be happy and romantic and carefree and comfortable and intimate. It’s happening now. Enjoy the moment. She’d only be here for a week. Obviously she’d been yearning for something like this for a long while. So had I. It’s all in the timing.
She says destiny.
Timing versus destiny.
Ten years earlier we had been together not far from this spot we were now occupying. A whole decade has dissolved as if it had been a momentary glitch. That’s what’s great about intimate friends. You can ignore the time curve and stay straight in the present. She wishes I had asked her to come back to California. She would’ve come. She wouldn’t have married. It’s so nice to hear something like this; I don’t know what to say. I remember what she called love ten years ago seemed more like obsession and it didn’t appeal to me then. However it’s doing the trick now. I am melting into her. Maybe it’s the beer, the weather, her?
It’s the timing, I conclude.
Relationships are all in the timing. People have to need each other at the same moment and then it happens - contact, intimacy, feelings open up, thoughts gush out as if on a holiday. This is certainly all that. And like all holidays it has a beginning and an end. That’s what makes holidays work. You know you have to have fun within that certain framework, then it’s back to daily survival.
“It’s all in the timing.” I say.
She doesn’t buy that. She’s of the belief that it’s meant to happen. It always was and always would be the case for us.
“It’s our destiny.”
I don’t buy that. Destiny is too expensive. Timing seems more affordable.
“We see the same thing, differently.”
By the time we get to my Oakland apartment and climb the five flights of stairs we are ready to enter the portals of possibility that true intimacy brings.
She cares about Nick she admits, but it isn’t love, at least not on the same scale as her current feelings. It is her first solo vacation in years after having raised her young children mostly by herself while Nick was away for months at a time. She explains how her parents had bought them the house; her father recently bought her a car, and most of the furniture had been from her family. Nick had little to do with the home life she has arranged for herself and her children. He didn’t exactly want children either; she had to fight to have them. Anyway, enough has been built up to undermine her marriage. Now she is feeling love in its fresh, innocent, non-responsible form. We will have a limited time together, then back to responsibilities and adult realities.
We have seven days and nights. Kate says that a few years earlier she had had a premonition about this very event that is now taking place. Just as she said she had one in 1979 when we first met at a Philips Station. "This is just like a dream I had," she said to me as we negotiated the use of the one phone within a twenty mile radius. That comment led to our brief affair then.
We had exchanged pleasantries and names. "Jake Phillips!?" she questions and concurs making a special effort to connect my last name and the name of the gas station. "The gods use everything, don't they?" This is the kind of thought that made her feel she had psychic powers. Maybe she had, has.
She says we’re connected psychically. I doubt that but don’t say so. I’ve doubted too much of late. It’s good to hear her convictions, whether I believe them or not. Kate always comes across as being absolutely honest, so I trust what she’s saying is her truth, the truth she lives by, and I respect that. How have I become so cynical? Kate makes me rethink much of my disillusionment.
I have a deep reverence for the gift she’s bestowing upon me. But is this love for me, or just her need to love passionately? While she has been tucked safely away in marriage I have had a few too many relationships which seem to debunk and demystify the whole notion of forever&ever love. I am now a believer in timing. Love and destiny and the right one have disappeared from my horizon. But perhaps I am wrong. Is Kate showing me the way now? Is this what’s been missing -- the cornerstone, the key, the right one?
While I’m at work, Kate sweeps, mops and cleans the entire apartment. She rearranges and folds all of the clothes in my drawers. Maid service. French maid service. She can’t do enough to show how much she loves me. She seems to be in tune with all of my shortcomings. It’s eerie to have someone probe so closely to the bone, to the home. And it’s all free and innocent. So it seems.
Kate arrived just as I was having a custody tug-of-war over my daughter, Peggy. My four years of co-parenting child-volley is about to be changed. Her mother wants to move out of the neighborhood and sixty miles away. That would mean one of us, her mother or myself, would have to sacrifice, to let go. Co-parenting only works when both parents live in the same immediate area. The idea of being a weekend father is so repugnant; even now the thought of it is ripping me apart. Peggy's mother is screaming lawyers and courts and a costly battle that only lawyers profit from. Here is the romantic love disillusionment. And this is where I am when Kate enters on a seemingly peaceful Saturday.
If you understand the above, then this next part may make more sense. Somehow Kate and I had come to an agreement to prove the power of the thing that’s overwhelming us; a manifestation of this moment. It began as a vague desire, but by the end of her brief stay it becomes a conscious decision. A child would be emotional ballast against the loss of not being able to hold on to this moment. Kate’s rooted in Texas; I am in the Bay Area. The child would manifest our connection.
Kate loves being a mother. She’s all set up materially and financially to follow it through -- a couple of older siblings to help, a good yard and a safe neighborhood. Nick and I don’t equate to a full-time dad. She doesn’t mind. Kate is an independent woman. If one has to be married, hers is the best of all possible relationships.
She wants me to father a child, our child. I want another child. That she would even ask it of me while I’m thinking and feeling the same way gives credence to her destiny philosophy. It’s a very complex understanding between us, one we believe is right (although I can’t quite explain it now). We are in synch. Logistics, loyalties, distances, and family commitments, along with the laundry and the shopping, all will have to wait a few more days. We are on holiday.
Kate is on vacation.
Kate Takes a Vacation, Chapter 1 excerpt © 2014 John Kirkmire, all rights reserved