Late Night Call

It wasn’t a good day. By evening he was tired and frustrated. If he’s had a garage and a box of old dishes, he’s have been out there chucking them at something just to express what he was feeling – and it wasn’t good.

He’d been at this now for over a year. After work, on weekends, almost any spare minute he could find, he’d been working at trying to find a way to make his dream a reality. Like a beacon star, he had been aiming for this for almost twenty-five years now. Always though, there had been something else that had needed him more – his work, his kids, his wife. Her most of all, with her illness. But she had passed away a year and a half ago and yes, he missed her, but there was also relief that the suffering was over for her – and him too.

The kids – well, they were all on their own and life was pretty much his now to do with as he pleased. And that’s when he had decided, several months after her death, to go after his dream.

He had been excited then. Even with the grief he was feeling, there was something hopeful and happy and exciting about finally being free to move ahead with it. And he had. Almost as if trying to make up for lost time, he had thrown himself at it – every spare minute he could find. It had been wonderful at the beginning – that heady exhilarating sense of aliveness, the excitement of exploring ideas and seeing the dream begin to flesh out with possibilities.

But lately he had been ... what? Struggling? Yeah, that was one word for it. Realizing that at his age and with his finances that getting from the grandeur of the ideas in his mind to a reality in everyday life wasn’t as easy as he had naively thought it might be.

And today. Every avenue he had explored, every phone call he had made, had come up empty.

Tonight? Well, tonight he was seriously questioning whether maybe it was too late for dreams. Maybe his turn had come and gone somewhere else in those years when he had been busy looking after everything and everybody else. Maybe it was too much to hope for. Maybe he should just settle for making the best of what he did have.

He was tired. He wasn’t a young man anymore either. Life hadn’t been easy for him in the first place and tonight he just wasn’t sure if he was prepared for more struggle and more disappointment. Maybe it was just time to sit back and take like easy – he deserved that much.

So here he was, late at night, long after he should have been in bed and asleep, sitting in his worn old green easy chair. He had at one point stirred enough to get up and switch on the table lamp by the other chair, but other than that it was dark in the house. He’d been so deep in thought, he hadn’t realized how late it had become or that he hadn’t even had supper.

It was as though he knew he had reached a crossroad and that a choice needed to be made, but right now neither seemed obvious or appealing.

That’s still where he was when the phone rang, jolting him out of his thoughts.

“Hi Dan!” It was his friend Peter. “Hope you don’t mind my calling so late, but I just felt I had to call. I’ve been thinking about your idea and I think it is a good one. I’ve got some extra investment money set aside that I’d like to lend to you to get you started, and I’ve got some ideas to chew over with you. I won’t keep you tonight, but would you have time for coffee tomorrow morning at 10:00?”

© 2000, Evelyn Grace Marinoski