One Life to Live
“What’s the matter?”
I’m sitting on the couch. Cubby, who is walking past on his way to the kitchen, looks at me suspiciously.
“Nothing,” I say.
He waits.
“I was just thinking how cool it would be if we had an oyster farm on an island in Maine,” I say.
Cubby sighs. “Not again.”
This is uncalled for. I have never suggested an oyster farm before. I might, however, have suggested that it would be fun to have a ramen restaurant. Or a B&B. Or an alpaca farm. I might possibly have also suggested that maybe we could learn to make artisanal cheeses, or grow mushrooms to sell at farmers markets, or become potters.
“I don’t do anything interesting!” I say.
“You write books,” he reminds me. “A lot of people would love to make a living writing books.”
I snort. “Books. Whatever. Anybody can write books.”
“No, they cannot,” he says reasonably.
“It’s just putting words together,” I continue. I am not ready to let go of the oyster farm just yet.
“What brought it on this time?” Cubby asks.
“I was watching a series about restaurants in unusual places,” I tell him. (It’s Restaurants at the End of the World, hosted by chef Kristen Kish, should you want to become obsessed too.)
“And someone had an oyster farm in Maine?”
“Not just an oyster farm. A restaurant. In a barn. And goats. And they grow their own produce. And there are chickens. During the summer they have weekly dinners in the barn and guests come on a ferry. It would be perfect.”
“Mmm hmm,” Cubby says, and heads for the kitchen.
“What’s that supposed to mean?” I shout after him.
I know what it means. It means that tomorrow I will find something else to do that sounds amazing. Raising heritage breed hogs. Buying an old lighthouse and turning it into an art gallery. Moving to Vermont and opening a store selling vintage Christmas decorations. There are endless options.
I do not dislike my life. I actually love it. And I know none of these other things would be the dream lives I envision them being. In fact, I know people who do many of these things. Including the oyster farm. I have a friend whose family owned one while she was growing up. “I still haven’t gotten the smell out of my hair,” she says when I mention how great I think that must have been. “And it’s been 30 years.”
Still, whenever I see a show or read an article about someone doing something that seems interesting, I want to do that thing too. A few weeks ago, I was obsessed with Tom Brown, a retired chemical engineer who now devotes his life to seeking out and preserving rare species of apples. Before that I wanted to buy an old movie theater in a dusty desert town (I saw an article online about one for sale) and show Close Encounters of the Third Kind (my favorite movie) every Saturday night. And don’t get me started on how many times I’ve driven through a place and thought, “This would be the perfect location for a coffee shop/bookstore.”
One of the great things about writing books is that you can create characters who do the things you yourself might want to do. And when you write about their lives, you have a legitimate excuse for learning about these things too. You can take classes. Visit places. Have the experiences you fantasize about. And as long as it all ends up in a book, you can even write a lot of it off as business expenses.
Often, this satisfies the “What would it be like to?” cravings. But not always. All I’ve ever done for work is write books. Again, I know a whole lot of people who would like to do the same thing. And I’m really not complaining. I’m just saying that sometimes I wonder what it would be like to do something else.
I’ll be 55 in a few months, and I’ve been writing full-time for more than 30 years. There are still a lot of books I want to write, more than I likely have remaining time to get done. Still, I sometimes think about the friend who decided to open a bakery at 60. And the one who left the lawyering world to raise some kind of beautiful Icelandic sheep and spin yarn from their wool.
I recently mentioned to a friend in our village with whom I’m planning an upcoming community event that I wish we had more local venues for live music. His eyes lit up. “Funny you should say that,” he said. “I’ve been thinking the same thing.” He paused dramatically. “And I might know just the place we could do it.”
Ten minutes later, standing in the junk-filled, neglected space he’d found, he was describing where the stage would go. “And the bar would go along that wall,” he said.
I didn’t need the hard sell. In my head I was already thinking about artists I’d love to have come play at our nonexistent venue. I could hear the music, see the room filled with people, smell the locally produced beers pouring from the taps. Then I had an idea.
I turned to my friend, who saw the glint of madness in my eyes and paused. “This might sound crazy,” I said. “But hear me out. What would you think about Ohio-raised oysters?” ▼
Michael Thomas Ford is a much-published Lambda Literary award-winning author. Visit Michael at michaelthomasford.com.