My life is the product of bad timing. I’ve said it before. Probably at the wrong time. While I was working at the bank, my job became more and more like an accountant’s job. It was subtle. Like the pot of hot water and the hapless frog. If you drop the frog into boiling water, the frog will jump out. But if, at first, the pot is just a little warm, the frog eases in and stays and thinks, no doubt, ah, what a lovely bath. When you turn the heat up, when you set the water to boiling, that frog doesn’t jump. He stays until the boiling water burns his brain, until his eyes bulge, until his bloated sides burst. I was that frog, first set in warm water.

Initially it was forms and processing. Then it was some reports. Before long I was creating databases, tracking money, ordering, issuing cheques, dealing with clients, creating accruals. I am not an accountant. The water was boiling. The pressure was insane. My boiling brain, dreamed in numbers. I got so that I could back the tax out of a grand total without trying. It was ghastly. Less than six months ago, rather unlike the frog, I jumped and I left the job. To write. To paint. To screw around. But mostly not to add things and not to subtract them and certainly not to work out accruals.

When I told my boss I needed to leave she made a funny face. I didn’t know what that face meant until today. The department has been officially dissolved. And all of my old colleagues got handsome severance packages. Most of them, my colleagues, are ecstatic. While our team was good the department always suffered and seemed a little too incomprehensible even for the bank standard. One fellow, who was altogether tolerable, is taking his package to go back to school in September. He was positively giddy when he told me. A woman who I used to join on smoke breaks had recently got engaged. She’s using the money to take a pre-honeymoon with her man. She’s tickled pink or some other happy color.

From what I can see in life nothing is rewarded so much as longevity. We celebrate those who can endure. I have never kept a job long enough to get a Christmas bonus or even to receive a regularly scheduled pay raise. And now this. I imagine it all with my poor frogs. A giant stove. A number of gleaming pots. Tiny digital clocks. A bevy of frogs. All sitting in their pots, boiling, or just below boiling. How much can you stand it? How much can you endure? Just a minute more. Just a minute more. And froggy prizes – whatever a frog should strive for – waiting for the survivor, for the last to give up. And of course that ultimate champion will be the most celebrated, the most rewarded, and the most thoroughly dead.

My severance wouldn’t have saved my life. Not nearly. But, had I stayed six months, I could have bought my new camera with that severance. I could have bought a handful of lenses. Today, I could have been equipped. Bad timing.

Still, when I think about it, I don’t know if I could have endured six more months of that life. And for the sake of my sanity, I will pretend, even without my camera, even without my severance, that it must have all been for the best. Even though I can’t really see how and I have nothing, not even a whit, on which to base that.

SS