Reflections from a hot tub interlude
- Mike Dewey: Life Lines
- November 11, 2023
- 357
The hot tub thermostat read 105 degrees.
It was a nearly full-moon Halloween night.
The Atlantic rolled in and receded, wave after wave.
I walked out onto the deck, dropped my robe and stepped in.
Call it nirvana. Call it bliss. Call it whatever superlative you like.
Immediately, I began to worry. Life, I thought to myself, isn’t meant to be this perfect, not for folks like me, a guy who’s never taken anything seriously, someone who just floats through, a man whose wife had just told him — again — that it was time to grow up.
When you’re in the midst of a dreamlike fugue state, though, the last thing you want curb-stomping your fantasy escape is reality.
It’s, well, too real, filled with anxieties and pressure, overflowing with responsibilities and commitments, far too unforgiving to allow even the most illusory interlude of peace and quiet to go unpunished, always a burdensome bill to pay when it’s all over.
Late last month my wife and I began a two-week wedding anniversary celebration in a cozy oceanfront cottage in Kitty Hawk, the kind of getaway we’ll probably never get to enjoy again.
For one thing it was prohibitively expensive, the kind of luxury we’ve hardly ever treated ourselves to, but with my wife’s creative bookkeeping and a nip-and-tuck approach to Christmas, the opportunity to go a little crazy presented itself, so we took it.
And now there’s a reckoning knocking on our front door, and like fugitives on the lam, we’re — to use one of my favorite Warren Zevon phrases — just a couple of desperadoes under the eaves:
“Don’t the sun look angry through the trees?
Don’t the trees look like crucified thieves?”
I could sit at this keyboard for weeks on end and never even approach the genius of a couplet like that. It’s just beyond me how the most gifted among us possess that kind of sheer mad talent.
Still, I’ve done the best of my work staring down deadlines, a gunslinger in a duel with fate on a dusty main street, tumbleweeds blowing across the line that separates me from absolute oblivion.
I was thinking about life and what comes after as I soaked in that hot tub, the moon creating a carpet of diamonds on the sea’s surface, the transistor radio tuned to an FM station that played Traffic’s “Low Spark of High-Heeled Boys — all 11 minutes of it — only to follow with a bootleg recording of “After the Gold Rush.”
When Neil Young sang, “I was lying in a burned-out basement with the full moon in my eyes,” I bookmarked the memory.
I’m on the high-end of accepted normality on the hypertension scale. I swallow a six-pill cocktail every day just to keep myself alive, having rung the bell at 220 over 110 a couple of years ago.
Last time the nurse at the doctor’s office wrapped that cuff around my bicep, she smiled and said, “111 over 69 … way to go, Mike.”
So naturally, the hot tub bore a warning about getting in if you had high blood pressure, and just as naturally, I relaxed for two hours.
“Are you still in there?” my wife asked, wrapping herself tighter in a thirsty bathrobe, shivering as the northeast wind cut through her.
“Why yes, yes I am,” I said with a smile. “It’s quite nice in here.”
That’s the thing about spending two weeks on the beach in October.
You tend to push the outer limits of what’s acceptable behavior, figuring you never know when you’ll pass this way again. I’m not suggesting my way is the best way … far from it. The last thing I’d want anyone to do would be to follow in my footsteps.
When you’re looking at 14 days away from work and all the hassles back at the house, though, the temptation is to ride the wave of risk to its conclusion, conscious of enjoying it all.
We’ve been down here in coastal Carolina for nearly 23 years, ever since I decided to leave my job on Dec. 31, 1999, believing the Y2K thing was a sign from on high that it was time for me to fly.
And now, well, I’m thinking about getting away once again.
James Corden, a late-night TV host, said this on his final show:
“I’ll miss everything. It’s been a brilliant adventure. But I’m just so certain that it’s time for us, with people getting older and people we miss. It’s time to go home.”
Someone cue up Jon Bon Jovi, please:
“Who says you can’t go home?
There’s only one place
They call me one of their own,
A hometown boy born a rolling stone.”
So that’s where my mind was drifting the other night in that hot tub overlooking the Atlantic, a World Series game on the radio.
One thing about heaven: You don’t want to overstay your welcome.
Mike Dewey can be reached at Carolinamiked@aol.com or 6211 Cardinal Drive, New Bern, NC 28560. He invites you to find him on Facebook, where good music and full-moon memories shine on.