Monthly Archives: July 2008

One consequence of my summer travel tornado is that I’ve hardly spent any time at all in either Dallas or Atlanta. I fully expected my “around the house” work on things in Atlanta to slow or even stop at some point, but the freeze in Dallas was more of a surprise.

Last weekend I was in Dallas on a Saturday for the first time in two months. I finally took a big step toward making my apartment look like my home. I ordered about eight pieces of furniture to be delivered in a few weeks, hung some drapes, found a good photography shop to print and frame some of my very best pictures. When all of that stuff is in place my apartment will actually have some of “me” in it – long overdue.

Meanwhile, here in Atlanta this weekend I’ve got Home Depot coming over to measure for carpet in my daughter’s bedroom. The updates in there will soon be complete – new carpet, new paint, new window treatments and bedding. It will look a lot less “little girl” when we are done. She’s excited, I have mixed emotions. Ten years old is a mighty fine age for a dad and his daughter, but time marches.

The updates to her bedroom in Atlanta will be my last for a long while. The house will be about 50% remodeled at that point, leaving “only” my great room and kitchen as the public spaces which will need an overhaul. Since I don’t live here anymore there’s not much sense in rushing things. I’ll have to have the house ready to rent or sell at some point in the coming years though, and this work gets it done along and along.

My focus will shift to Dallas as I continue to settle in there, gradually gaining my sense of place between fits of travel for business and pleasure, moving toward making it home. Slowly forward.

This coming weekend will be the first time I’ve spent a weekend in Dallas since mid-May. That’s right – I’ve been out of town for the past eight weekends in a row. I’ve only been in Atlanta for two of those eight weekends. For a couple of months or so before that I scarcely saw Atlanta at all. When my daughter and I got together we were going on adventures elsewhere. It’s been “all good” as we like to say these days, my travels to other places and meeting new friends has been something I wouldn’t trade. But it has, at the present moment, consequences. I’ve spent hardly any time at all in either of my home towns since the early spring, and I honestly feel pretty detached from both right at the moment.

Trips to Atlanta feel like I’ve woken up Rip Van Winkle style. The place changes in leaps while I’m gone. Sections of roadway that I use to get between the house and my Atlanta office are resurfaced in the blink of an eye, without me having ever driven a single day on them while under construction. An apartment building is half built in an instant, a restaurant over here suddenly looks like it’s been boarded up for years, a piece of land over there is cleared off like it never had a tree. The checkout people at the grocery store are all different. The smiling guy at the dry cleaning counter who always had a lollipop for my daughter for five years straight is suddenly gone. Atlanta is leaving me behind. I see it only in snapshots scattered across the year.

By contrast, the apartment here in Dallas feels frozen in time. It’s crazy – I still need more furniture, I still need to put stuff on the walls, I still need to do a lot for the place to feel homey, for it to reflect something of me. The great sense of relief I had when I first settled in here back in December -  that closure of finally being done with the whole decision and process of relocation – has now been replaced with a sense of discomfort. At some level my place feels both sterile and stale all at once. Yuck.

Had I been here more regularly for the past few months much would have been taken care of by now. There would have been some progress to mark the time, some sense that things were moving forward, some sinking of the roots. But the stark sameness from then to now instead is the result of simply not having been here to do anything about it. Frankly it’s no longer acceptable.

This may sound surprising, but I’m glad that most of the summer is now behind me and that starting this weekend I can begin getting things here in better shape.