A Perfect Day, Almost

It's Saturday morning in Seattle and I'm at a coffee shop, writing. A week ago I was in New York. The week before that, Chicago. I've been on the road for most of May, and now that I'm home, sitting still, the trip is starting to settle into something I can actually see.

We flew to New York to visit our kids and spend Mother's Day together. That was the plan, at least. The reality was more complicated. I still had to work, so most of my days were spent in the hotel room with my laptop open while my wife waited. Both of our kids work too. We'd meet for dinner, spend some evenings together, and by the time we said goodnight it felt like the visit was already slipping away.

This is the math of a trip when everyone works. You fly across the country to see the people you love, and then you sit in a hotel room on a Tuesday morning, on a call, while the city and your family carry on without you. We had evenings. We had Mother's Day, which our daughter spent cooking for us on the roof terrace of her apartment. On Sunday we visited the hotel where she's getting married in November, the same venue we'd seen on our fall trip, now feeling more real with the date getting closer. But the days between those moments were mine only in the evenings, and it wasn't as much time as I wanted. It never is.

On our last day, just hours before we had to leave for the airport, my wife and I met our son and daughter for coffee at a place near my son's office. In our conversation, my son said something that stayed with me. He's 23 and living in the city, and he mentioned how he wishes he could own his time. Do what he wants, when he wants to do it. He said it casually, the way you say things when you don't realize how heavy they are. I recognized the words because they could have been mine. The same want, thirty years apart. I thought about that for a while. Whether I put that in him somehow, whether he picked it up from watching me. Probably not. I shouldn't give myself that much importance. The desire to own your time isn't inherited. It's just human.

On Saturday, my wife and I rented a small SUV and drove east to Montauk. She'd been wanting to go since she watched a TV series set there years ago, and we finally had a day with nothing on the calendar. No work. No dinner plans. No one else's schedule to navigate.

It was cloudy when we left the city. By the time we got to Montauk, we were hungry, and we found a place called Bird on the Roof. Good coffee, excellent breakfast, the kind of service where nobody rushes you. My wife sat by the window reading the menu with a painted seagull on the glass behind her and "montauk, ny" written underneath. It was one of those small, perfect moments you don't plan.

After breakfast we walked the main street, looked in a few shops. The clouds had cleared by then and it was getting warm. My wife went into a store and came out with a blanket so we could sit on the beach. We walked down a sandy path between dune fences and found the beach almost empty. Wide, open, with waves crashing hard enough that you understood why Montauk is a surfing town.

Here's where I have to admit something. I'd left my sunglasses at the hotel because the forecast said cloudy all day. But there on the beach, the sun was out and glowing and I could barely keep my eyes open. We didn't stay long. We walked back to town and my wife bought me a pair of aviator Ray-Bans. I'd never owned anything like that. It was fun, and more importantly, I could see again.

We drove to the Montauk Point Lighthouse. It was cloudy again by the time we arrived, windy, the kind of weather that makes a lighthouse feel like it belongs exactly where it is. We toured the museum, climbed the spiral stairs all the way to the top, and stood there looking at the light up close. A magnificent piece of engineering, still doing what it was built to do over two hundred years ago.

After that we walked around the point, took some selfies, held hands. I felt like we were a young couple on a date. My wife started picking through rocks and shells along the water's edge, the lighthouse behind us, the enormous boulders along the jetty breaking the waves. It was peaceful and wonderful all at once.

That whole day, nobody needed to be anywhere. We ate when we were hungry. We walked where we wanted. We stayed as long as the moment lasted. Before driving back to the city, we stopped at LUNCH, the lobster roll place on the side of the road just outside of town. We got lobster rolls. Of course we did.

This is the kind of travel I keep thinking about for the next chapter of my life. Slow. Unscheduled. New towns, independent restaurants, sitting somewhere and not checking the time.

The day was everything I want more of. And there was only one thing missing, the thing I noticed without looking for it.

Our kids.

We'd spent the whole week in the same city as two of them (our younger son was back in Seattle), squeezing dinners into the gaps between everyone's work schedule. And then on the one day that actually felt like the life I'm building toward, they weren't there. Not because of distance. Because of the same thing that keeps all of us from the lives we want. Time that belongs to someone else.

My son wants to own his time. He's 23. I'm 52. The want is the same. And it's not just him, my daughter and younger son have mentioned the same want in one way or another. The difference is I've had thirty more years of it, and I know now that the feeling doesn't fade on its own. You either build your way to something different, or you keep squeezing the people you love into the spaces your schedule allows.

I read something this morning that stuck with me. The idea that every day, when you wake up, the day is just a draft. You can revise it or let it go as-is. Most days I let the draft stand. I open the laptop, I do what's expected, I close it. But that Saturday in Montauk was a revision. A glimpse of what a final draft could look like.

I'm back in Seattle now, writing on a Saturday because my Fridays belong to someone else again. A few months ago I had a flex schedule that gave me three-day weekends, and I didn't take enough advantage of it. That's the kind of thing you only see clearly after it's gone.

But I'm here. The coffee shop is quiet. The essay is finding its shape. And somewhere between the hotel room in New York and the lighthouse in Montauk, I got a little clearer on what I'm building toward. Not a beach. Not a town. A day where the people I love and the time to enjoy them aren't scheduled around someone else's calendar.

That's the draft I want to revise.

This is essay nine of Building My Way Out, a weekly series about one engineer's attempt to build a life beyond employment.