Henry McNamara, Irish immigrant and proprietor of a small but successful furniture design shop in Saint Paul, Minnesota, recently huffed, puffed and blew down thirty birthday candles in the company of his wife and two young children. Although he genuinely enjoyed the party and the love he has for his family is infallible, he sees nothing seminal about turning thirty. He felt the same when he turned eighteen, twenty-one, and twenty-five and so considering this trend he will almost certainly demonstrate equal ambivalence toward forty, fifty, sixty and seventy-five and maybe even eighty if he is still around. There are people who believe time stops for them alone so that they, alone, can bask in a numerical milestone that is ironically being shared by millions of others at the exact same moment. Time does not stop or slow for anyone and that comforts Henry inexpressibly.
If Henry is anything he is brutally nostalgic about the very recent past, which he defines as an emotional sphere of events experienced in the last five minutes to forty-eight hours. Lying in bed at night he is frequently brought to the brink of joyous tears as he reflects on, word by word and squeal by squeal, a rambling phone conversation he had that day with his daughters while he was at work. There is something wonderfully delicate about their purity and lack of concern for the meaning of time. His almost-tears are not because he wishes to live perpetually in that moment but because he wants to understand why emotionally significant incidents older than two days, those that fall outside the sphere, tend to quickly fade from memory.
The anxiety is usually put to rest when he reassures himself that these short term memory issues are the result of his vices but whether it is the medically prescribed or the self prescribed ones that are the true root cause he cannot tell, nor does he really care. He has sufficient control over the situation that it needs only minimal and infrequent attention.
Henry empathizes with the type of people that society has labeled as losers. He always has. He always will. He realizes that the unfortunates he empathizes with were once decent souls. In fact, the measure of their souls is probably unchanged but this callously contrasts with their new societal categorization. Henry is acutely aware that whatever sequence of inconvenient events transformed these people could come knocking on his door at any minute.
He secretly enjoys the proximity of the reaper. He even teases it from time to time, like a foolhardy boy pulling on the tail of a dog eating a bone. Some kind of hair trigger discipline pulls him back just at the point where the mutt could snap, every time. He sees the possibility of becoming a loser as opportunity! The idea of being toppled and having to rebuild from rubble is rather appealing to him. Weaknesses in the original architecture could be addressed second time around, better choices could be made, regrets from round one could be turned into conquests in round two…
Henry enjoys these self-hypnotic thought trains that have no origin or destination or sustainable fuel source for that matter. They always run out of steam. This does not depress him one bit. Many things do but this does not, not one bit. Dreaming is human nature. Its purpose is something that not even the smartest of us may ever understand.
The invisible axis that he stands so close to, who’s crossing would govern what he could become reaffirms to Henry that there is reason, fairness, balance and possibly even justice in the world. You just have to be aware of it.
He slugs the last of the tea, now tepid, turns his back on the large window of his workshop and resumes attaching the drawer slides to the cabinet he is building for a new customer. Drinking tea and staring out the window won’t pay the bills he reminds himself.
Nice.
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