Contemplating Life at 3AM Whether You Want to or Not

I tried to have a little heart to heart with my brain this morning to convince it that just because I actually went to bed early for once, did not mean I wanted to get up early.  Yet here I am. My twelve year old chocolate lab Copper seemed to know I was getting up before I did.  He has an uncanny ability to know when I’m going to get up to just walk over him and hit the bathroom and go back to bed, or when I am actually going to get up and go downstairs.  This morning as early as it was he knew I was coming down stairs.

I let him outside into our fairly small back yard that’s really mostly a huge concrete patio and a completely ignored space covered in various states of green and brown organic material.  I hear him growl a pretty sinister growl for him, so I stepped out on the patio to see what his deal was.  He had his head stuck in one of our shrubberies  (never once have I been able to get a Monty Python reference into something I’ve written) and out the other side of said shrubbery strolls the largest Opossum I have ever seen.  When I say stroll I mean a leisurely stroll about two feet in front of my bare feet and he looks right up at me like “What the F is your problem it’s 3AM.”  Copper is old and we’re afraid a little deaf/blind so he’s still growling at nothing while this dude thinks about chewing my leg off as he heads to wherever.  Thanks buddy.

We live in an overly populated subdivision in an overly populated suburb.  Where the heck did this dog sized Opossum come from?  Why the heck is it Opossum and not just Possum? We (English speakers) have a lot of stupid words.  So as I am wondering what this dude is doing just swaggering across my patio, I’m wondering what am I doing.  Ever wonder, “How did I get here?”  I don’t mean how did I end up parked in my front yard or waking up strapped to a tree 20ft in the air on a training mission, because that’s happened to all of us right?  I mean in the metaphysical sense I guess.

I had imagined myself as a fighter pilot the first time I saw Top Gun.  Once I discovered there was math involved in flying airplanes, I decided I would be a writer for Rolling Stone or Time Magazine.  Laughable today considering I wouldn’t last five minutes in an interview with any known media outlet as I think I may be even too conservative for Fox News.  Anyway, I got into the University of Missouri (Mizzou) that has a very famous journalism school and I thought I was on my way.  Turns out college is expensive.  New dream, become a military and then civilian policeman.

Flash forward 20 something years and I’m in my suburban backyard with a kid married and gone to her own suburban home, a kid turning thirteen today and headed back to school as a seventh grader and our youngest baby is ten heading to his last year of elementary school.  How did all this happen?  I was just waking up drunk parked in my yard.  How have I even lived this long behaving like that, much less having all these relatively well adjusted kids and seriously where the Hell did this big ass possum come from?

There’s been a lot going on with a good friend dying out of nowhere, my mom fighting cancer, my daughter buying house eight hours away from me, the boys inexplicably being another year older, stupid hockey tryouts and politics, I’m entering my third year of retirement and being a stay at home dad, and I swear just yesterday I discovered in a training mission that I can fall blissfully asleep while perched up in a tree. You do have to ensure you secure yourself to said tree if you’re going to nap in it. (Important Safety Tip) Now because I went to bed at 10:30 I’ve got to get up at 3:00AM?  Is there a bear or mountain lion hiding under our trampoline?