I had visions of matinees.
Way back when I worked in the corporate world I was given an enormous promotion without the posted salary. I was working twice as hard, for twice as many hours, for not much than I'd been making before the new title. I hated the work but bills don't pay themselves. It was a watershed moment in my life when my boss told me I wasn't getting the big fat raise to go with the job. The scales fell from my eyes and I knew the corporate world would always be like that, broken promises and raised expectations that constantly meant putting work before family.
I vowed to get out.
The good news (and there are two parts): my boss liked to travel and I had complete independence when he was on the road. I reported to absolutely no one else. So while this often meant arriving at work by 5 am and not leaving until after 7, just so I could be available by phone wherever in the world he might be, this gave me remarkable leeway with the hours in between once my work was finished.
So I wrote. I ran ten miles during my two-hour lunch. And I went to matinees. If I wasn't going to get paid what I was worth, at least I would claw back some of that personal time.
The trick with matinees in the days before cell phones was to leave the show about halfway through, use the pay phone in the lobby to check my messages, then go back to the film if there was nothing desperate I needed to take care of. As I began to plot my dream of being my own boss and writing full-time, continuing attendance at matinees was among the ways I planned to spend afternoons.
I don't usually pay much attention to February 19. It creeps up on me in that way of minor anniversaries, tapping me on the shoulder to say "I'm special!" But it was the date I busted out.
Having said that, from this day forward, I will also remember it as the date, exactly thirty years later, when we finally got good news about Calene's cancer battle.
The path out of the cubicle reads like fiction, involving a cold call from a stranger that took me halfway around the world to Madagascar to cover a race for madmen through extreme wilderness.
I've told it before. There's not a thing I would change about taking the leap, not even the fact that I have watched exactly one matinee in the last thirty years.
Turns out that being your own boss provides plenty of drama all by itself. Looking forward to the next thirty years.