Cabin fever sets in

I was helping a buddy put together his resume today, reducing his life experiences to two pages. I need to update mine, too.

My career objective (on a subzero day): I want a job where I can work from my lake home in a mythical Michigan where it's always 80 degrees in summer. Guests will be welcome on weekends and evenings for bottomless barbecues and beer. I will sit on the pier with whomever would like to join me to watch the cotton candy colored sunset, our feet dangling in the calm water.

Yeah, as if you can't tell from above, it's February in Chicago, and judging by the traffic I see in the mornings there are probably a 2.75 million other people right now feeling the same way.

My fever for a summer cabin comes from 2.5 hour commutes in snowstorms and digging out the car from the train station lot to head home on treacherous pothole riddled streets. It grew out of 13 hour days, four of those spent in a Camry.

It owes its appetite to eating too many solo lunches at a sandwich shop chain where the workers are unnaturally chipper about taking your order, as if they have been brainwashed by a deli-loving cult. No one should get that happy about tuna salad and soup.

There were layoffs where veterans were escorted out of the building and union members get a phone call the night before telling them their services are no longer required. There was a boss who quit, then three hours later said she changed her mind (sort of like a James Brown concert, where he can't go on anymore, but once they put the cape on him, he gets back up to sing some more), then quit again a week later.

It's not just weather and work. That's life in Chicago.

But this winter included attending my aunt's wake where there was a snow tornado on the way home (OK, it was just a whiteout, on a day where the temperature dropped 50 degrees in less than 10 hours), then a funeral on a frozen day.

Since then I've occasionally had that middle aged feeling, like the Grim Reaper sneaking up behind you saying boo, that sends an electric shock up your spine to your brain - that zap that everyone you know one day will die including yourself. The jolt comes from missing friends you haven't seen, lost loves, the dead gone before you.

How things played out at the wake and funeral are why I want my cabin.

While folks were sad, the mood was also uplifting in the sense there was no drama, but catching up - a reunion with some tears, but laughs and stories and photos and hugs and meals and drinks, too.

And there were Knights of Columbus guarding my aunt's casket, resplendent in their tuxedoes, capes and plumed hats, upright swords resting on their burly Midwestern shoulders. It reminded me of The Flintstones or The Honeymooners, which isn't such a bad thing.

In fact though my Catholicism is more lapsed than my Blockbuster membership, I want these guys at my wake whenever it might be that I die. And I want a bagpipe player and the music in my iPod (or whatever device holds my music when fate ends me) or a disc jockey. Drinks will be served, dancing encouraged.

Bur right now, I want that home by a lake where we can gather without having to have a funeral as an excuse. Life's too short and too lonely not to have one if only in my dreams.