7. Fast Forward

The Pivot

Dear Subscribers:

If you have read the first six chapters of my little memoir, you know that...

I am 59 years old and I've jumped ship
Without a life raft.

After fifteen years of a successful corporate career, I walked away. 
I am long divorced and my children have grown and moved out, 
so I left my home as well.

Stripped of the identities of career, family and home.
Stripped to the raw soul of existence.
I am left with the driving question: What is this Man? 

My memoir has been telling the story of that journey by digging into the backstory. Yet, I think it is more interesting for this Substack to know how it’s going right now. My welcome page invites you to “Witness a slow claw out of the crumbled ruins of identities.” So, let’s get to it.

I do intend to continue working on the longer-form memoir. But for the sake of this platform, let’s hit the fast-forward button.

When the job search for my e-commerce career failed in Colorado, I needed to pay the mortgage. I turned my house into a short-term rental, which meant I became essentially homeless. That is a wild story for another time. I became a ski instructor at Breckenridge and drove for Lyft. I slept in my home when it was available, but usually, I stayed in a hostel at Breck, a hotel in Denver, or sometimes in my truck if I couldn’t afford either.

That wasn’t a particularly good long-term plan, so I ended up moving back to Washington state and moving in with Mom. That is a painful stereotype to fall into, and I will tell that story eventually, too. But I can at least assure you that I wasn’t sitting in the basement playing video games. I eventually restarted a boat detailing business I ran back around 2000, and that pays the bills now.

Singing (the part you were waiting for)

I wanted to sing now that I had the freedom to do so, but my voice was broken. I completely lost my voice in 2022. It took 18 months just to speak normally again, and I still didn’t have the singing voice that I had once built a professional stage career with. I abandoned my dream of musical theater because I thought my voice would never be the same. Instead, I decided to join a rock-n-roll band and get back to my roots—I didn’t need an opera or musical theater voice to sing rock.

Eventually, I moved out of Mom’s house and onto a boat in Shelter Bay, La Conner. It got lonely, so I started trying to get out. After a bit of “church shopping,” I joined Anacortes Lutheran Church, to meet people and become part of a community in my new home.

When I arrived at ALC, they were singing hymns. I had found my church. I love singing hymns. I was in the congregation, just singing to myself, but someone heard me and said they wanted to introduce me to the choir director. I didn’t even know they had a choir, but I said “okay.”

That Wednesday, I was at choir practice. This was perfect, I thought. This was a community I could get to know and settle in with.

And that is where the story changes. That was the pivot point. It is where the searching ended and the slow crawl out of the rubble began. It has been almost exactly one year since I joined the choir, and that is where I will pick up the story next week.

Love,

Danny