End of the Sabbatical

Even in the Quiet, You Can Still Tune to Melody

It’s the last day of my sabbatical, the second I’ve taken so far. This ritual is an attempt at tradition, one I hope to maintain annually, one that gets easier each time I do it. And today, I am trying to answer a question: “How was it?”

Photo by Mayank Dhanawade on Unsplash

I sit on the couch in my home office, staring at books on the desk in front of me, attempting to read the sun-faded titles on spines. One is about a filmmaker whose work I am still getting acquainted with. As I take my time with his films, I learn to appreciate the importance of style and perspective, but I am still learning.

Another is John Kieran’s An Introduction to Birds, which I picked up at a bookstore in St. Charles, the same place my dad took me a hundred years ago, in my Illinois youth, to get a chocolate malt I can still taste.

I look at these relics, these snapshots of a life that is still coming into view, and I wonder how anyone can answer a question—like “how was it?”—without only revealing how they are doing at that very moment.

Glenn Miller plays on the hifi, and I am all alone in our house, this big open house with so many windows and such poor insulation. The sun sets in thirty minutes, and I can feel the tiredness in my body from the morning’s run.

My wife and I decided to do a half-marathon this year, and training in the cold is already taking its toll. I was up again at four this morning, too. Something awoke me, some ghost from the past, a whisper from the future, taunting: you only have so much life to live, why are you spending it in bed?

My thirty-day break from routine took place over the holidays. Mostly, it was my wife and me, we who are almost still newlyweds, watching movies, reading books, making plans for the year, one we could barely conceive of but that was racing at us, anyway.

Most days, I did not pick up the phone, lost it a few times, forgot it even existed. I used the computer sparingly, to check account balances on occasion and reserve a hotel room here and there.

There were no ambitions about how to spend the time, only to enjoy it as best we could. Our aim was to let the days come as they would, naturally and unforced. It was surprising to see how easily one could squander not just a day, but an entire week, and joyfully. Time slips by quietly when you refuse to measure it by your output.

There was, naturally, inevitable boredom, oh blessed boredom, a little writing, and those mountains of books on our respective bedside tables, which we slowly chipped away at. “It is good to make an end of movement,” Howard Thurman wrote, “to come to a point of rest, a place of pause.”

There is, he continued, “some strange magic in activity, in keeping at it, in continuing to be involved in many things that excite the mind and keep the hours swiftly passing. But it is a deadly magic; one is not wise to trust it with too much confidence. The moment of pause, the point of rest, has its own magic.”

This was the magic that began to invade our lives, my wife’s and mine, and what we experienced was not a thing at all, but a lack, a vacuum, an absence. In those days of quiet rest, I felt some inner state within me coming back, and it took a month to let that buzzy band of neurons circulating in my body begin to settle.

Thoreau said he went to the woods to live deliberately, to see if he could suck out the marrow of life, if he could distill it to its essence. I had some sense of this, but only barely. It takes a long time to come home to yourself.

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Once, in college, I made brandy in chemistry class. It was my favorite class, I think, one where we studied various plants and their impact on society. And in one weekly lab, we learned how to take any sugary substance—in this case, apple juice—and turn it into something more potent.

Here is how it works.

First, you add yeast, just a little, something to consume the sweetness of the juice that then alchemizes those anxious molecules of sugar into alcohol. We needed to be careful, we were told, because this process can easily yield methanol instead of ethanol, which is wood alcohol and “will make you go blind.” This, our quirky professor assured, was what happened to those unfortunate chemists making moonshine in Appalachia.

Then, you let the yeast eat, let it feed on the feast you’ve provided. On the other end of the meal is a kind of death for the tiny creature consuming its body weight in free cider, the result of which is what my father indelicately called his morning “constitutional.”

That is, the yeast, like my dad did every Sunday, retreats into the bathroom with the weekly paper and doesn’t emerge for a very long time. That’s right, our professor informed, the yeast makes alcohol by eating sugar and producing an intoxicating waste product we humans use as social lubricant.

“Alcohol is, essentially, the yeast’s poop,” he told us, a little more on the nose than needed, and I have never failed to inform a friend of this illuminating fact when they partake of a glass of wine in front of me, over dinner.

There are two ways to stop the fermentation process. One is to add a chemical that halts the process, killing the yeast. Otherwise, the substance turns to vinegar. Or, you can let it happen naturally, allowing the bready organisms to poison themselves with their own waste. Like indulging a child who needs to learn their limits the hard way.

The final step is to boil the mixture, extracting the most potent parts of the liquid into a separate container. You distill it. I did this by heating up the juicy stuff in a beaker over a Bunsen burner hooked up to a system of glass pipes, a network of pieces leading to another beaker, where the final product was delivered.

Alcohol has a lower boiling point than water, approximately one hundred-seventy-three-degrees Fahrenheit, which is about thirty degrees shy of water’s. That means you can boil wine, extracting the alcohol out of it, and get yourself a much purer, more refined version of the original liquid—provided you don’t go too long and evaporate the stuff from one place and simply displace it to another.

Each time it was distilled, there was a point when I, the amateur chemist, noticed I wasn’t just carrying over the alcohol but getting some of the watery bits, too. I could see it happening: the cidery drops, tainted yellow, coming into the next glass. You have to know when to quit, I guess, when to pack your bags, and head West.

That is always the risk: to rearrange what you have elsewhere without undergoing any true transformation. That day in the lab, I distilled the spiked juice twice but could have kept going, could have kept extracting more, creating subtler flavors along the way. But enough was enough, and I was ready to be done.

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It is hard to change from one thing into another, to let what you were be transformed into something else, something potentially more powerful but maybe just another version of the same old, same old, in a new container. What transformation requires is sacrifice, a willingness to give up what got you here in hopes of going somewhere else. But there is never a guarantee of new life, and even yeast knows that.

Does the inchworm enter its cocoon confident of its future? Or does she go to die, to lay down her life for Easter morning, for all mothkind? It is so, so hard to say. And could I, a pilgrim in my own process, find a way of living that wasn’t so stressful and full of striving? I didn’t know, either. No one ever does.

But as I sit and sip my brandy, as I taste the notes still coming through on the other end, I can sense certain lessons emerging. Almost everything can wait, I realize. Only a few things are truly urgent, and these are never contained in an inbox or to-do list. They are the essence of a good day, and what I hope to carry with me.

First is a good night’s sleep.

I know no other pearl of great price than the one that gets you kicking off your covers like it’s Christmas morning, springing into day like that first drop of a rollercoaster, whooshing to an unknown destination. Even if you have to plan it first thing in the morning, this is worth whatever must be traded.

Every day needs at least one good walk, if not two.

I love lying down in our bed, listening to records in our living room, sprawling outside on the earth, enjoying the feel of not needing to be anywhere. I searched so long for this feeling, and I am grateful I got it. But I also enjoy movement, the occasional jaunt from office to dining room to breakfast nook, where I watch the robins peck the earth and take a drink of water. I love seeing sunlight hit our worn floorboards in the mid-afternoon, walking past our utility closet to the front door, slipping on my shoes without socks, and heading out the door for whatever adventure awaits me.

You never know what you’ll find in this neighborhood of wonders, this suburban jungle of birdsong and rushing creeks, of turkey vultures pecking at carrion on the road. It is an embarrassment of riches, this place called here, and I try not to miss it. When we walk together, and we often do, my wife and I wave hello to our friend Patti, who always sits outside for four to six hours a day, smoking her cigarettes and watching her shows on the porch. We pat her white fluffy terrier Bella, and continue on our way.

Children play in that wonderful invention called the cul-de-sac, while their parents clean the garage or watch the game or hack at some underbrush. We really did win the lottery here.

A good day is always finished with a good meal—and a good book.

I am learning to cook in a wok. It is new to me, and I to it, both of us far from seasoned. It is a trip to the gym each time I turn on the range, seeing those blue flames wrap around the thin layer of hammered steel. Into it I drop day-old rice, scallions, too much oil, three beaten eggs, tossing in some frozen peas and diced carrots to finish.

Then, I watch the vessel heat and smoke, its fickle nature antagonizing me. Too hot, everything burns. Not hot enough, and it’s all a mushy mess. It’s a fine line and the thing dares me to try, over and over, to attempt mastery, laughing its oily laugh each time I fail. The trial-and-error keeps me hungry; it keeps me coming back, like an addict or apprentice, reaching for that which can not be grasped.

And when all the cleaning is done and my wife marvels at how I can use every dish in the house to make something as simple as fried rice, we retire to bed, curling up together with our novels and memoirs and various works of nonfiction. We dip into this one and out of that, like a series of hot springs, all offering their own kind of comfort. I had lost my attention in a frenzy of adult activity, and I am starting to get it back.

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The colors in the office have now faded, and my wife is returned from her outing. I am already thinking about tomorrow and the day after, the inevitable catch-up of calls and emails put off for more than a month, and I am aware of how much has waited for me, how much is still here after so much neglect.

As I return to the world, I find a version of myself waiting there, too. Who is this? Do I know him? Where did that wandering chef go, the one who spent his days reading and walking, and dreaming up the next recipe?

I have no great revelation to share, no wisdom to impart. I carry with me no stone tablets, no epiphany from Zion. My face does not shine, I have no song to sing but the soft ringing in my ears, reminding me that even in the quiet you can still tune to melody. It is all so very trivial.

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