My parents had been married forty years that spring. Forty years. I don’t know if you can understand what that meant without knowing what their life looked like from the inside. It wasn’t glamorous. There were no lake houses or cruises or second honeymoons in Tuscany. My father spent most of my childhood working longer than a body should. First at a machine shop in Salinas, then later as maintenance supervisor for a cannery equipment company when the old job dried up. My mother, Linda, did part-time bookkeeping for three small businesses that never paid her what they should have, plus every invisible job that keeps a household from becoming chaos. She packed lunches, hemmed pants, clipped coupons, wrapped gifts from the discount aisle so beautifully you forgot where they came from, and somehow made sure both her kids grew up feeling loved even when the checking account was one broken alternator away from panic.
My father was not the kind of man who said “I love you” easily. He fixed things. He got up at four-thirty. He made sure the heat worked. He drove to school board meetings and dentist appointments and college orientation days without ever once complaining about the gas money. He gave love shape instead of words. My mother gave it words enough for both of them.
Every year, on exactly one Sunday in late summer, they drove down the coast and parked somewhere near Pacific Grove or Carmel or whatever roadside pullout had room, and they sat looking at the water with deli sandwiches and cheap coffee and talked about how someday—someday when the mortgage was gone, someday when Claire’s latest emergency was solved, someday when my father stopped carrying everybody’s crisis like a second spine—they wanted a little place by the ocean. Nothing huge. Nothing fancy. Just a porch, a kettle, a bedroom with a window cracked open at night so they could hear the surf.
Someday is one of the most dangerous words in the English language.
It quietly convinces decent people that life is a storage problem. Work now. Save now. Sacrifice now. Rest later. Dream later. Enjoy later. But later has a habit of filling up with other people’s needs.
By the time I was thirty-eight, I had enough money to alter that equation.