Tag: Matt

Please Call

January 2020

Until the “please call,” Matt Kenny was having one of those special Oregon mornings he dearly loved. Up early, close to dawn. Quiet house. Janet sound asleep for another hour or so, to be wakened up when one or another of their daughters would probably call. His Mini-Cooper, iPod playing slow sixties folk rock, radar detector on, quietly urging him to enjoy the empty streets (hence the radar detector) with a sharp turn, a quick burst of gas. The landscape in shades of gray and dark green typical of cool and cloudy mornings in Eugene.  Layers of clouds settled into the forested hill like fingers. Ground fog clung to the flat meadow of Amazon Park two feet over the ground, five feet high, like some kind of ethereal blanket. In the distance, a small break in the clouds lightened Spencer’s Butte, speckled with off-angle sun. He stopped on the way, as always, at the coffee cart where they knew him and his daily order, and kept his signature on file, so he could skip the clipboard step. He kept quarters in the side of the door, one per day, as a tip. Life was good.

He loved his office in the early mornings, before the others arrived, before the phone calls. Just him, the keyboard, the computer, his coffee, and his “mellow morning” playlist loud, no need to plug in the damn earphones. Folk, folk rock, blues. Emmy Lou Harris singing Boulder to Birmingham. Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee singing Bring it on Home to Me. Another new day. New emails. Blog posts. His metrics too, blog subscribers, Twitter followers, the brave new world of constant scorekeeping.

But this morning it didn’t last. His phone showed a text from Maura Benson:

“Please call as soon as you can. Deal’s dead.”

Damn. He’d heard a beep from his phone while driving, then forgot it as he parked and set up in the office

There was no ducking Maura. She was totally 2020. Maura, communicator par excellence, techie, social media maven, and thorough. Matt, however, had a whole lot of the 80s and 90s still in him. And he wasn’t always quick to answer.

Still, he didn’t call immediately. He first sat back, sipped his coffee, focused on the pine tree a few feet outside his second-floor window, and watched the cars starting to show up, just one at a time, on the corner of 11th and Ferry, below his office. He closed his eyes, took a long deliberate slow breath, and exhaled. He listened to another slow country rock song. He got ready to call about bad news.

He didn’t believe the deal was really done. He expected to convince her that she was over reacting. She’d already had two fabulous sessions with the angel investors. And, more important than just the sessions, she had a real business started. There was real need, a real market, great potential. Her team seemed strong. Matt thought hers was one of the strongest deals they’d seen in years. Great product-market fit, huge potential market, scalable, defensible, and a great team.

He’d learned the pause first from of decades of “please call” messages from Janet, his wife. They’d reach him in hotels during his too-frequent business trips when the kids were young. The calls back followed a pattern. Matt, exhausted by clients, tension, taxis, airports, and hotels, would call Janet, exhausted by kids, lunches, homework, bedtimes, messes, dishes, cooking, shopping, overwhelmed, waiting for him to call, anxious to share some disaster. He’d think he was thousands of miles away, also exhausted, having nothing but work stress. She’d think he was done with his day and alone in a hotel. He’d often say one wrong thing or another, going defensive. Then he’d feel like a five-year-old kid with lunch all over his ill-fitting shirt as Janet hung up angry. That would kill the good feelings he’d get during lonely travel by dreaming of Janet naked and happy. Those were not the best times between Janet and him. Work, stress, sleep deprivation, and distance do not make couples’ hearts grow fonder.

After he settled himself, Matt called Maura.

Never Ever Weather

Matt and Janet had been together so long they’d argue about the weather, or what was normal. They had a classic mismatch of approaches. Janet always summarized towards the dramatic, like “it’s never this hot.” Matt was the king of the counter example, of when it had been. “Oh, come on, there are always two or three days in May … ”

Janet would quickly settle into an assumed expertise. “Don’t go to Spain in April. It’s still too cold.” Matt would immediately envision the counter examples, southern Spain vs. northern Spain. The weather is variable in April. They have hot days too.

And then there was data. Matt was always able to find data to counter prove Janet. But never before she had moved on to another subject and lost interest.

That Honeymoon

He was sure they were lucky, he and Janet, with the way they’d loved each other, so long. Their bodies changed, their lives changed, but there was still the touch, the magic, even if it was worn down, ground smooth, wrinkly, older magic.

Too often, at times like those, as Matt would let his mind wander off to the memory of the two of them both young, the pleasant dreaming state would run aground, suddenly, with the jarring regret of their honeymoon.

He sorely wished he could redo that honeymoon. As he got older he’d occasionally let his mind wander back, with a certain luxurious relish, to remembering Janet as she was when they were first married. She was 22, with a deer-like figure, thin, graceful, a personality led by wide eyes full of excitement. She was so young, so beautiful, that just to touch her … that memory of then would occasionally power his thoughts now. It wasn’t deep regret about getting older, exactly, but a vague longing … if he could have just a few hours, maybe just once in a while, with a time machine. He’d love that.

He hated that honeymoon memory. It wasn’t that his parents ended up in the same place he and Janet were; it was that he acknowledged them, and let them into his mind when he should have been thinking of nothing but her. What an idiot he was, he’d tell himself. And he’d shudder at how young he’d been there, immature. And hope that Janet never remembered. He was always afraid to tell her how much he regretted that, because she had a way of accepting an apology with a fresh jolt of anger over the offense. The memory made him feel coarse, brutishly childlike, a kid in an oversized shirt who’d just said the wrong thing to a class full of other kids, and teacher, laughing at him.