When I was a kid in the 70’s and 80’s, vacation was centered around the school calendar. There was Spring Break, Christmas break, and the Grand Poobah of vacations; Summer Break. Once you join the workforce and start “adulting”, you take vacations when you can based on the job. If you have kids, you are now tethered to the school calendar again. The first time I heard the word “sabbatical” was when I was an undergrad at CCNY (City College of the City University of New York). Professors with tenure or grad students working on the 4th or 5th PHD were the only people that were blessed to receive this mythical unicorn of paid time off.
According to the Dictionary.com definition, a sabbatical is any extended period of leave from one’s customary work, especially for rest, to acquire new skills or training, etc.
So here I am in 2023 and the company I work for has recently added sabbaticals as part of it's benefit package. The stars aligned and my 20th work anniversary, the 50th anniversary of the birth of Hip Hop, and my milestone 50th birthday fall within the same calendar year. I want to take you all on a literary journey. Check here each day for updates on my adventures. Some days there will be pictures, other days there will be a short episode of the Multifarious Man Podcast or a video post but always there will be this blog in some form or another. Welcome to the Sabbatical Chronicles.
Today my plan was simple. Try out a new coffee shop or cafe. Turns out nothing in life is simple. Since I am of a certain age, I now have reading glasses and just like the protagonist in the classic Twilight Zone episode "Time Enough At Last" my glasses broke just when I was going to have enough time to read all of the books in my Goodreads backlog. Back to the glasses later. It was time to head out an I noticed the front tire on my daughter's car was extremely low as we were both heading out. Now I can't have my baby girl riding around like that so I called her (handsfree of course because safety first) and we pulled into a random driveway in a neighboring community so we could switch cars. We swapped keys and moved items between vehicles and went on our respective ways. Next stop is my favorite gas station (Circle K for any Bill and Ted fans) to add air to the tire. Mission accomplished I was back on the road.
My next stop was Canopy Road Cafe on Phillips Highway. The service, food and coffee were everything I heard them to be. I kept is simple and ordered something called Doc's Usual (Scrambled egg whites with spinach, chicken sausage, sliced tomatoes, and wheat toast.) opting for the sliced tomatoes in instead of fresh fruit. Now I am not sure who Doc is, but he or she have good taste. Everything was a good as the picture looks. The coffee was fresh, fragrant and plentiful. As a bonus I ran into one of my favorite Hopewell Church family members who is also a Zeta sister just as I was parking (Hey Kineta!) and she gave the restaurant her thumps up so I knew I was in for something good. Appetite sated and it was on to Pearle Vision where I hoped that they would be able to repair or replace my spectacles on site.
I walked into Pearle Vision and was please to see that there were only a few other customers so I was helped immediately by a sales associate. I removed the injured patient, along with the offending screw from it's protective case and was happy to hear that the associate was pretty certain she would be able to affect a repair. I was a bit anxious because although I did get the warranty on the lenses, I knew that I opted not add coverage for my frames which were already a few years old when I had my prescription updated last year. There was a possibility that not only would I be without my peepers for a while, but I was also going to be down a few Benjamins for some new frames. About 10 minutes later the sales associate returned and I could tell by the look on her face that the repair attempt had failed. Alas, she hadn't given up, she handed the glasses off to one of the repair technicians in the onsite lab. 15 tension-filled minutes later and a man in a lab coat (he might have just been wearing a white shirt and dark pants but my memory and artistic license sometime overlap) extended his arms to hand me my restored glasses. I would have hugged him but that would have been awkward.
Whatever happens the rest of the day, I count Day 1 of my sabbatical as a success. Until tomorrow, my friends.
J Vincent
Aka The Multifarious Man
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