UFO Patrol

When I left work, I saw a message from a television producer, asking if she could interview me about my UFO sighting as a child. I google the woman before replying because I have been nearly taken by pretenders in the past. She is exactly as she professed to be. This would be an interview that would play on a major German station.

Except I won't be at the Pine Bush UFO Fair for the first time in years. Amber is graduating from vet tech program that day. I already let the fair organizers know that I would be backing out, which they did not seem to mind as I am not necessarily a big draw.

The producer knows about this sighting, which I am sure I have mentioned somewhere, but it is not somewhere I could readily recollect; she had done some research and wasn't firing wildly in hopes of getting a hit. She specifically wanted me.

I called the woman and tried to negotiate another way to do this interview, but the logistics were impossible. A Skype interview - or really any interview but one in Pine Bush - doesn't fit with the aesthetics of the story. She assured me airily that she will find someone else, but this is no consolation to me.

This would have had the potential of boosting my career as author, putting my face before a nation of people who do not otherwise know me. I turned this potential down because Amber needs me at her graduation, because she has worked so unbelievably hard getting this degree. It feels like a dramatic cliché, the husband torn between the possibility of professional acclaim and being a caring spouse.

Of course, I chose Amber. I had already done this. I just wished this could have played out another way, that this network would have sent someone in previous years. Adding in my difficulties with my publisher and feeling at a loss for what I will do if they go out of business, what I am going to do with my finished manuscript to the next book in my series, this nauseates.

I have recently found less satisfaction with my day job, if not outright disillusionment. In my writing career, something could have worked out well and won't.

Amber pointed out, not unreasonably, that my interview would probably have been cut. This is not the first time I have given an interview or had my lectures filmed that came to nothing more than some digital cutting room floor, if that. Still, it was a better chance than I had ever been offered. When my book sales number in the single digits, when I have not gotten a royalty check from my publisher in this presidential administration, I could have had new people interest in me who will not now know I exist.

Amber didn't care much that this had happened, beyond suggesting some impossible rearrangements - I could go do the interview at 6 AM even though the news crew will not be there yet and rush back to see the end of her graduation, we can cancel her party and I can try to speed to Pine Bush in hopes they will still film me - that I wish she wouldn't. I had already said no to the reality once. I didn't want to have to shoot down hypotheticals. It wasn't helpful, but I don't think she was trying to be.

She went back to studying for finals. She would not sleep until 5am the following day.

Amber was the reason I started doing signings, then talks, then panels. She has been instrumental to my career. If she had not decided to become a vet tech two years ago, I would be preparing for an interview... and Amber would persist in not having professional satisfaction (or the potential of it). I tell myself that there will be other interviews someday, that this isn't the final one I will ever be offered, though it is the highest profile one to date.

I am proud of Amber beyond a doubt. When I met her, I could not have imagined how brilliant she is. I cannot even imagine the world where I skip Amber's graduation.

When Amber was agonizing on how she would balance her work and school schedule next semester, there was no mention of balancing her time at home or doing anything other than working and studying. I saw our relationship receding as she devoted more of herself to professional goals while my own had to take a backseat, while our relationship eroded on that altar and I let it because I couldn't stand the thought of holding her back when she has finally found momentum.

I was not despondent when it turned out that she wouldn't be both working forty hours a week and managing more than a full course load. I would have to continue doing most of the housework while Amber littered the floor with papers she would not pick up for months and would become annoyed if I dared to move. I saw the life I had with my wife disappearing.

My amazing wife
the last time she graduated

Amber has an obsessive streak where she devotes herself so totally to one subject that she forgets the world exists, particularly any responsibility beyond her interest. It is why she handily achieved a perfect 4.0 every semester, sometimes by not moving from the sofa all day beyond meals. It is why she essentially seized the community garden before it was taken from her, why she tried to start a CSA. She chooses a subject and then she is engulfed by it until it doesn't pay off for her or something stops her. If she is going to subtract hours spent together, it had better result in her quality of life improving.

But I want this only to a point. I do not want her working so much that she doesn't do anything else. I was a little surprised when she said she wished to continue on, that she aspired to get a doctorate in biochemistry and followed that up with "I don't even want to do anything with it, I just want to be in school forever."

We do not have a forever. We have a set number of hours, finite. Of course she should follow her bliss and she has a great mind, but I do not want her disappearing, not from the world and especially not from me. I, having known no greatest success but my relationship with her, have no place where I would wish to stay forever, but I appreciate the sentiment. So long as she can persist in getting scholarships and can find a way to pay her bills, she should want a better fate than unemployed artist-farmer.

Over a decade ago, my partner at the time, Emily, convinced me to get an apartment with her. Then she informed me that, owing to her job at an animal sanctuary, she had to be on-call at her parents' home a few nights a week.

Then, just as I was settling in to this part-time apartment, she informed me that she had found another gym and she was going to train there in addition to her current gym. I remember myself both livid and articulate, though this is probably a bad reconstruction of what actually happened. I felt tricked. I said something to the effect that I didn't understand why she wanted to get an apartment together if she never actually wanted to be around me.

She opted not to train at that gym. I don't know if this was ever really something she was going to do or merely something she stated as a definite when it was only ever a thought she had.

We did not keep that apartment long. I moved back in with my parents and she with hers, at least for a while. With her, I was always in second place to her taekwondo - and it was sometimes a distant second. More often than I anticipated, I felt trapped by this, because I couldn't be the one to tell her "No, you shouldn't spend so much time dedicating yourself to this thing that is so important to you when I have movies we could watch."

In the last two years, I have sacrificed for Amber, altering our relationship so she could pursue a field that finally seemed to respect her.

Amber has surely sacrificed for me in the past. She surely did the lion's share of the housework early in our relationship, so much so that she forked over for a dishwasher because she found the act of hand washing dishes intolerable.

Maybe the core of it is that I feel I am losing her and that I am so dissatisfied with how little the literary world (outside of people quoting me on their Instagrams) cares about me. I have worked hard on my writing while dealing with a full time job that now wants me to come in during the summer - my writing time each year - so I can make lesson plans for a blended learning program that is as likely as not going to happen come September. (They will pay me, but I am paid already and the additional money won't bring me proportional happiness.)

I once had so much of Amber, more access to another person than I ever had, and school has taken more of it than I had expected. Obviously, I don't want her to quit. I am beyond impressed. I just don't want to lose her, because I have lost people to their passions, because I could never be more important to them than a greater and unknown future.

Marist College has accepted her at what is sure to be a great cost. I have yet to pin down exactly what this might be, though considerably more than New Paltz would charge her. Marist has yet to allow her to sign up for classes and it does not seem that she will be able to take many come the fall. For most people, this might be fine, as they could get more full-time work experience in their field. It only makes Amber antsy because she sees a grander future before her, one where she has her doctorate and teaches at Cornell between phenomenal discoveries. She will not stay a vet tech long, if she has anything to say about it.

On her graduation day, I will hand her a bouquet of flowers, then we will have a party. It is not an end. It is hardly a speed bump.

Then, the Hudson Valley was beset by a catastrophic storm. Several tornados touched down in highly populated areas. Hundreds of trees fell on roads and cars. Tens of thousands lost power. Buildings collapsed. Two people, one a child, died.

And the Pine Bush UFO Fair was postponed until June 9th to deal with the damage. I immediately messaged the organizer, saying I would be participating again, then contacted the producer to make sure she would still interview me.

This is not the price I would like the world to pay for the possibility of my success, but it is not a direct transaction, a sacrifice of hundreds of square miles for a minute on German television. Still, I have misplaced guilt that this disaster may benefit me.

All the angst that populated the weekend after discovering I could not be interviewed feels ridiculous and self-indulgent.

Soon in Xenology: Mummies. The interview.

last watched: Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood
reading: Abduction by John E. Mack
listening: Childish Gambino