I spent yesterday driving around Wisconsin with my father: to Baraboo and then to Easton and then to Friendship and then back to Baraboo and then back home. My parents have some land up in some of those places, some they are trying to sell and one place they are planning on building a cabin. It was so cold: my feet were almost taken off. We stopped in at the Walmart in Baraboo and I wandered around while my dad got an adapter for the trailer he had rented. There is a locked case of ammunition in the Baraboo Walmart, right across from a brand of BB guns with the slogan 'Take it outdoors'.
On one of the pieces of land my parents have, there are three small buildings overlooking a small pond. I walked through the snow and heard wind chimes, but nothing else. I tried to think that this is something I might want: to live in small cabin overlooking a small pond with wind chimes, surrounded by good Americans who just want to be left alone.
In London on Wednesday night, it will be raining as we drive home. We will come up the M1, and the kids and Yoko will have fallen asleep and I will be thinking to myself about all the choices I have made in my life. We will take the kids out of the carseats and put them into their beds. The house will be cold because we shut the heating off before we left. Yoko will start to unpack, but go to sleep before it's done. After everyone goes to bed, I will open one of the beers I have above the refrigerator and sit in the dark and drink it, wondering how I came to be sitting on that sofa in that part of the world and not another sofa in another part of the world.
I'll think this not because I want to be on another sofa in another part of the world, but because I know that my life has been full of other possibilities that never panned out and will still be full of possibilities that will never pan out. And although I feel so in control, I am not and this feeling that I am falling never seems to go away. And I'll think that on Wednesday night, early Thursday morning, when I will finally get to bed. I will think about how lucky I am to have business in Oxford in the morning and to be sleeping next to a woman who understands me. I don't need much more than that.