No Direction Home, Like a Rolling Stone (or, "Fit as Fidels")

A bunch of months ago I was aboard an empty little bus in the middle of the vein of sand, glass, and steel connecting Abu Dhabi to Dubai. Early morning, just me, my wife, our four kids, a driver way up in the front. It was early April 2020, the world was spinning, not like a globe on an axis, but like a titan with vertigo, teetering. Everyone was locked up in their dwellings, wondering if we were going down.

I’d never seen a road so empty. It felt like the desert was holding its breath, waiting for something to happen, but you had the sense as you stared out at the miles of completely bare eight lane freeway, the silent, vacant buildings, that nothing was ever going to happen again.

It was the loneliest kind of road in the world, the kind that arcs away from what you know toward what you don’t. The sky was dust, the sun weak and uncertain. Uncertain light for an uncertain world taking an uncertain trip around an uncertain star.

The driver dropped us at Dubai’s ghost town airport, we boarded a hollow airplane without anyone in it, we flew home to the United States. Not so much to protect ourselves — the United States has struggled with The Virus a lot more than the United Arab Emirates — but to be near my at-risk elderly parents just in case the unthinkable needed to be thought.

We were supposed to stay until the American diplomatic mission in the UAE met enough health-and-safety benchmarks to reach “Phase 3,” which I guess means “COVID-19 is over, yay.” Then we could fly back. Anyone could go anywhere again. Fit as fiddles, and Fidels, at least until he fell down the stairs.

I thought we’d be away from Abu Dhabi for 6-8 weeks. I thought COVID-19 would be more like SARS and fade away, and less like tree sap, the way it just sticks and stays and stays and stays. I thought my parents would be able to stop being so at-risk. I thought the world would wobble, not metamorphosize. All the things I thought have me eating crow through a surgical mask.

And now, here I am. We curtailed from my assignment in Abu Dhabi. Everything felt so precarious. Will my parents stay okay? If we went back, would we have to leave again somewhere down the line due to a Second Wave? How many more schools will my kids have to go to this school year (they’ve been to five since 2016, I might as well be a carnie)? How badly will my colleagues in Abu Dhabi hate me when I don’t return? Will they want to stab out my eyes with a potato peeler? What about with a cheese grater (I have large eye sockets)? How many licks does it take to get to the center of a Tootsie Pop? Are those Bugle Boy jeans you’re wearing? I don’t know. There is so much I don’t know. Except, no, these are not Bugle Boy jeans. I know that.

You make these monumental decisions based on analytics and also wings and prayers. You never know if you’re right, or horribly wrong, whether you’re reading the tea leaves correctly or whether they’re really poison oak leaves and you shouldn’t be stirring them in your cup of hot water because now your butt’s gonna itch in a half hour.

This monumental decision to permanently leave Abu Dhabi now has us living in an old house in Utah by the fire station, so whenever there’s a fire or someone is choking on a frozen taquito the fire truck comes screaming by my house, and if you’re paying attention you can see a guy in the back seat practicing the Heimlich on a blow up Gene Simmons doll, which actually increases my faith in public services, to be honest.

I’m on a voluntary two-year period of unpaid leave from my job — thank goodness that’s an option. Shannon, who has always kind of wanted to work full-time now has her wish granted. And I’m now a stay-at-home parent for awhile (chronicles of my tragic attempts to handle the learning curve of this new occupation will be forthcoming).

There’s definitely the sensation that I’m cutting against the grain by getting off the merry-go-round for a time. Careers are supposed to be linear, angling upward toward increased responsibility, prominence, prestige, and pay. The line of my career looks like it was drawn by a drunk guy with Parkinson’s, and his pencil is on fire. Also he is being eaten by a lioness while he draws.

I guess it’s all a bit like Bob Dylan says: How does it feel to be on your own? With no direction home? Like a complete unknown? I am updating my LinkedIn profile right now so that my current position is “Rolling Stone.”