Sentimental Journey

The long road to coming to terms with being an old softie

Hello my friends. I’m back with you this week after taking a week off following my recent move and the recent passing of my beloved orange cat and fuzzy consigliere, Brian Williams. I was not up to doing much of anything save for trying to settle my new space. As always, I am grateful for your support and did not want to stay away too long.

This week’s essay appeared in the recent edition of The Perry Herald, my hometown newspaper.

There seems to be a general consensus that it’s silly to be too sentimental. Feel the feelings if you want, but leave the rest of us out of it. It’s not unusual to hear someone apologize ahead of a sentimental thought or feeling, the acknowledgement somehow making the forthcoming mush more acceptable.

I don’t know how or why this all started, exactly, but I’m pretty sure I know when I became aware of it — had to be sometime in junior high. As I recall, everything then was a big deal. Everything. All the time. No exceptions. There was a perpetually swirling mixture of physical and emotional teenage chaos constantly triggering some version of what we would eventually come to know as “fight or flight.” 

That was inside. 

As for the outside, I recall working very hard to cultivate a sort of acceptably enthusiastic but largely unaffected ambivalence — an emotional chameleon just trying to blend in to the social landscape. I tried to channel my inner Arthur Fonzarelli or “The Fonz” — the iconic character who embodied high school cool on the TV show Happy Days.

(I’d like to note that I’m clarifying who The Fonz is because one time I used that reference with a co-worker who just stared blankly at me before replying, “who?” I’ve never been the same.)

Anyway, we care less about all of this as we get older but the inclination to be cool still manages to trickle icily through our veins. We’re conditioned to carry on like ducks on the water — smooth and graceful as far as any one can see, keeping everything else beneath the surface.

So, when I sat down to write this week — a day before I am set to move out of the apartment I’ve called home for the last six years — I took note that it would be the last morning I’d write here, the last morning I’d enjoy a relaxed cup of coffee in front of the fireplace, almost the last time I’d see the sunrise reveal the field and trees and small stream out my back window… 

I thought about the first time I saw that view, the first time I ran up the stairs to see the place, the times I laid on my back on the balcony with the cat — soaking in the sun…

I remembered the family of turkeys that wandered along the bank of the stream and the huge deer that suddenly just seemed to appear in the field…. 

I thought about all the geese keeping watch every fall, the rabbits munching the grass and how I drove in one day to find a snapping turtle walking along the road. I tried to snap his picture but then got nervous I’d drop my phone out the window and would risk my hand to get it back. 

I thought about rescuing a dragonfly from the bathroom, discovering there were snakes living under the sidewalk and then finding a mouse living in the garage.

I thought about how I treated them all like neighbors.

I thought about the actual neighbors who came and went and humored me when my garage door opener was actually opening their garage, when I tried to find the owners of a wayward cat, when I needed soundbites during the Christmas blizzard of 2022.

I thought about how I started a TV show here, how I went through a global pandemic here, how I turned a spare room into a functioning studio — broadcasting live with a feline floor director here.

I remembered going on stupid walks for my stupid mental health here until the weather turned and I decided to buy a stupid treadmill.

I remembered how I couldn’t get it up the stairs by myself, how an old friend volunteered to help me with it and how, before I knew it, I was planning a wedding here.

I thought about all those things and the million more things in between all swirling together — a whole mix of feelings and emotions and memories now packed into boxes and ready to go.

I saw the cursor blinking, asking, “where to?” 

And I hesitated.

Who wants to read something as sentimental as all that?

Sentimental Journey first appeared in the February 29th 2024 edition of the Perry Herald in Perry, NY.