Karl Gude

Ugh. I woke up this morning with my arms outstretched, like on a cross, flat on my back, disoriented and sore. The sun was bright and high; it was much later than normal. Shouldn’t I BE somewhere? Was this Friday? My sleepy gaze fixed on the bright white ceiling above me and I dimly recalled that I now owned an ugly fan, which was blowing my eyes dry. It was still broiling hot in the room and all of my muscles and bones ached from tossing and turning on the thin mat on the hardwood floor. My sciatic nerve was screaming pain down one leg, too, because I had picked up a three-gallon tub of cat litter the day before and poured it out at an angle this 51-year-old back hasn't twisted into since the tenth grade. As my mind cleared I smiled at the four ogling light bulb eyes staring down at me from the useless fan. All things considered, I haven’t felt this good in years.

I got up and surveyed the empty rooms of our modern, boxy new house in East Lansing as I limped around looking for a place to sit and drink my diet caffeinated soda. No coffeemaker here. My heavy footsteps echoed hollowly in the furniture void. Even Roobie the Cat sounded like two cats in this place. Hunkered down with her belly to the floor, her fur puffed up to look menacing and her neck stretched cartoon-like around every corner, Roobie had skittishly surveyed her new digs while announcing her displeasure with a primal growling. She was in danger, all right. Conditions were ideal to scare the tar out of her with a sudden, loud clap; I’d seen her do a six-foot back flip at times like this. But I empathized with her nerves and let her be. Karl the Merciful …

My new job has brought me to this place. The family will follow shortly. My older son is to arrive in four days for high school soccer tryouts and my wife and other son will arrive in a little over a week with the furniture. Until then home is Camp Gude where roughing-it inspired creativity rules. Last night I carved up a thick, gigantic watermelon with a wiggly plastic knife from MacDonald’s … alas, there was no one here to witness this great thing.

Roobie and I traveled last week from Connecticut to Michigan in my old Ford station wagon on the first leg of our move toward this new life (my wife was certain the car wouldn’t make the trip, but it was paid for, so it was going). The vehicle was loaded with precious things I wouldn’t trust to the movers: computers, cameras, video tapes, clothes and even a decade-old Ficus Benjamina that I had somehow kept alive despite my predisposition to an absentminded nature (I wasn’t going to give up on Fikey now). Contentedly riding shotgun was my New York City sidekick kid sister, Betsy, a romantic and a great lover of all road trips, who dutifully barked out map directions when she wasn’t distracted by her crocheting. In our boredom we nicknamed things Bush-style. The plant became Fikey, the vehicle, pathetically, Fordy. Bush is more inspired.

I was en-voyage to a fresh, new world filled with adventure. There were windmills to slay and horizons to be expanded. Betsy was Sancho Panza to my Don Quixote nodding her head in dubious support as I enthusiastically outlined my strategy for attacking the new job. She was Watson to my Holmes as we scrutinized the confounding clues to my curious anxiety over the demise of my old lifestyle.

I was leaving a stressful, all-consuming but secure and rewarding workaday life in the manic big city for a shot at a simpler family-oriented life in the soothing embrace of small-town America, a life that meant exciting new professional challenges, new friends and a whole new set of worries. I’m still stunned that I actually left my job in graphics at Newsweek, a position I valued and had worked hard to get. But it was time to pull over. This engine was running low on fuel.

Mine was not your run-of-the-mill job/city/house/schools/friends change, either. I was out to tackle a whole new line of work after having snagged the elusive dream that many of us who have spent years covering hard news view as the seductive calm waters outside the churning storm of our intense careers: a job teaching at a great university. Only two weeks remain before I walk into my first classroom as a faculty lecturer in the School of Journalism at Michigan State University. An army of 45,000 or so students will start invading little East Lansing next week. I won’t be enjoying my favorite table at the Espresso Royale across from campus for long.

Don’t wake me …

I’m writing this for the amusement of some of my friends in the information graphics business who have secretly suggested that they view me as Papillon, the convict who escaped from Devil’s Island prison and floated away on a raft never to be seen again. Unlike the movie, they want to know how it all turns out. “Will Gude really make a clean getaway after 27 years in the pen? Stay tuned next week for an all-new exciting episode in the continuing saga…” Well, maybe not next week ... things are starting to gel here, fast!

But I gotta say ... sleeping in for a half-day in an unfamiliar dwelling filled with empty but expectant rooms while I eat cereal out of a paper Batman party bowl with a plastic spoon on Suicide Friday, the most intense day of my life for the ten years that I worked at Newsweek, sure makes it feel like I made a clean getway.