The Longest Day

As is fitting for a guy who packed a lot into 24 hours, Mark was born on the longest day of the year. He loved summer, and fortunately for both of us, we grew up a hop, skip, and a jump from Lake Michigan. While I was an Indiana Dunes girl, Mark loved to go further north into Michigan and the Warren Dunes State Park. Weeks into our dating life he took me there and I never looked back. The Warren Dunes were untouched by commercialization, by noisy boats and wave runners, by throngs of people. It was perfect for me and my new hottie, explorer boyfriend. We’d climb the massive dune, trek into the woods and walk a trail, cool off in the water, eat at the snack bar. We always stayed until the sun was setting and drove home after dark. “Less traffic if we wait,” Mark would say. By that time nearly everyone would be gone and it felt like it was all ours.

When the kids came along and we’d be back in Chicago visiting family, we’d drive up to Warren Dunes for the day. First we’d stop at the Swedish bakery on the outskirts of town and then make the meandering drive to the lakefront. Upon entering the park it’s very wooded and doesn’t seem like there’s a lake anywhere, but then you’d catch tiny glimpses of blue until the trees thinned out and there was that beautiful lake. The kids would scream and say, “It’s as big as the ocean,” and Mark would yell, “Look to the right! Look to the right!” And there would be the other main attraction, the massive sand dune, and the kids would scream again.

Over the years we were gone the sleepy, little town of Sawyer became the hot place to build a vacation home. We were talking to a merchant one day about how much the area was growing. “It’s technically a suburb of Chicago now,” he said. “Why back in the eighties you could buy lakefront property for $20,000. Nobody cared about this place.” To which Mark said, “We cared!” We came here every weekend,” and then he looked at me and said, “We should have bought a lot. I mean $20,000. What the heck? Can you imagine?” Except we didn’t have $20,000 back then. We didn’t have it at that moment either. When I pointed out this glaring fact Mark said, “We could have figured it out,” and yet there we were with our three kids eating their donuts and no idea how we were going to afford their college tuition let alone a vacation home.

The days leading up to Father’s Day this year were fine. I got a huge raise at work, my garden is looking great, things were going okay. Then Sunday arrived and on social media there was post after post about wonderful dads and husbands. “Nobody loves me like my dad!!” “I didn’t know when I married my husband that I married the perfect dad!!” All I had to offer was a dead dad in one hand and a dead husband in the other. I got off my phone and went to Target. I came across a dad who looked so miserable with his family, kids who didn’t listen to a single thing he said, one who kept threatening to leave with the cart, another barefoot and dressed in an Elsa costume that kept following me and saying “hi” over and over. I wanted to tap him on the shoulder and say, “For what it’s worth, I think this day is shit, too.”

Three days later was Mark’s birthday. I met a friend at my neighbor’s house first thing in the morning and the three of us dug up her plants for her to take to the new place she is moving to. We worked for over an hour and when I came home I decided I’d figure out what to do with my little patio that was a mess. Mark laid it out many years ago and now the bricks are uneven, the weeds pop up everywhere. Last year I got an estimate to have it redone. It was $6000 and I laughed when I read that because it’s not much bigger than my dining room table. Deciding to live with its imperfections, I cleaned it, pulled weeds, cut a border, went to the pop-up nursery that was closing the end of the week, spent $15 on plants, and stopped by the hardware store for mulch.

That night I was watching a show on cabins. Each episode is ten minutes long and shows someone who bought a cabin, why they chose the land they did, the materials they used, how they live in it. It’s a peek into the life of someone else, and unlike similar shows, these are not extravagant by any means. One episode was of a cabin on a river in Oregon. I didn’t love the inside but the view was incredible. As the episode was ending, it showed the wife in the kitchen cutting up vegetables and from the picture window she watched her husband walking to the riverbank with his fishing pole.

And that’s when I lost it. My pretense and busyness during the week blew sky high, just like the dream Mark and I had of owning a little place by the water that we could escape to on weekends.

When the owner of the company I work for was giving me my review, she told me I was always cheerful and willing to help anyone who needed it. After she left my desk all I wanted to do was sneak away and call Mark at his office and tell him the good news, to hear him say, “Woo hoo!! Let’s go out for a steak dinner tonight, Moneybags.” With that not an option I went back to work on a client spreadsheet where I had to make sense of a hundred pending orders for their new house, a task new to me but that they want me to take on. A few days later I was talking to the comptroller about my increase and thanking her because I knew her influence was the reason I got the raise that I did. “It seems to me you live your life with integrity,” she said, “and your work reflects that. You deserve every cent.”

I was flattered and on cloud nine until a few days later the thought of it made me want to burst out laughing. Integrity? Most days I feel like I’m the headliner in an off-off-off Broadway show. A show that has a compelling story with a lot of promise, deep pockets to pay for it, a great set, everything to eventually make it a smash on Broadway. Then the critics come to see it and say, “Close this farce down, the lead actress is simply awful, truly unwatchable.” I’m abruptly yanked off the stage with a shepherd’s hook around my neck and I don’t bother defending myself because it feels true enough.

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