J's Coming

Eleven years too late to log this.. I must written this the Feb 2001. Seems like a past life..and in a sense it was. This is meant to be my "return gift" to J for Mother's Day. As every year, she is getting anxious about getting me the perfect gift can't imagine what would be perfect enough.

I was getting used to having the magic inside me, the daily wonder, deep emotional stirrings unlike anything I had ever felt before. In the meanwhile a more material business of looking for a new job was at hand. The interview was a little different this time. A recruiter met me for lunch at the Red Bull Steakhouse – the nearest place from my work. And then a couple of phone interviews though the company was local. I was a little surprised. I was made an offer even before I had a chance to see the premises. R and I decided to drive down to the address (which was a seedy part of town) before accepting it. We drove down Smallman Street which is lined with old unused factory sheds to get there. The bars and pubs along the way were getting ready for the evening’s business. A general sense of gloom if not spookiness overtook as darkness gathered apace at sunset. We reached our address after circling around the block a couple of times to find a place to park.

My new office was this beat up colorless building that looked very little like the corporate America I had seen thus far. The company had started out from a woman’s bedroom a few years ago and then moved to here – a residential area that was now being converted to house small businesses. R was rather skeptical about the deal and asked me to think hard if I really wanted this.

Only a few days ago I had interviewed at a swank office on Fifth Avenue – the woman seemed very distracted and confused. The interview was more like a chat about life's vagaries hers and mine and how her whole world was thrown out of gear when her car had to be sent to a garage after meeting with a major accident.

Apparently with all the snow storms many cars were damaged and they were all lined up waiting their turn at the machine that would fix them. Our friend was a late entry on the accident scene and was assigned at the tail end of the queue. She wore this big diamond ring and some other interesting jewelry and I spent my time invaluably contemplating the intricacies of the designs.

The contrast was appalling but one factor decided me. I would be working from home three days in a week. I could not ask for more with my overpowering morning sickness, I could have killed for those few extra hours in bed. My body begged for rest. It seemed a God-sent proposition and I accepted without the slightest hesitation. After five years of quitting jobs whenever I so fancied , here I was at last, wishing to stay on at this one for ever and ever. What a few hours of bonus sleep can do for worker motivation is amazing.

We had in the meanwhile started these little apartment hunting excursions that took us all over the burbs. Beautiful journeys but not very exciting destinations. We hardly ever liked what we saw. It is an old city where people come to settle down. Homes are easier to come by than apartments are. The floating population is quite minimal. We had made a conscious decision to stay on in the North Hills as we loved the place and its conveniences.

That narrowed our choice to just a few apartment communities – most of which we had seen when we first came to here. However, on Saturday afternoons we drove down to check out the possibilities and came back almost resolved to stay on at the Oaks. It was a decision that we were not too unhappy about but we still hoped to make it elsewhere by Fall when my parents would visit me and the most important person in my whole world would come into my life. I wanted to do something new and different for the homecoming of that special someone.