Reid & Robie

Father Christmas, give us some money,

We got no time for your silly toys.

We’ll beat you up if you don’t hand it over,

Give all the toys to the little rich boys.

– The Kinks

“I’m out,” was all Robie said when he poked his head inside my office.

There was no need for him to elaborate. Those two syllables were etched in my brain, the only words Robie once typed in an email before he was escorted from the building and laid off from his job. And since what happened in the months following the layoff was a bizarre sequence of events that led to our wandering around the Caribbean for more than a year, it made those five little letters impossible to forget. But now, hours after returning home from a Thanksgiving trip, history was repeating itself. 

The news of Robie’s second layoff was startling and ill-timed but not unwelcome. For too long I’d looked on as the happy, fun-loving guy I married morphed into a corporate drone working long hours at a job he vehemently disliked. Yet every Sunday evening Robie faithfully logged on to his email to get a jump on Monday morning, and every weekday he sat at his desk plodding through the constant stream of emails until long after the close of business. But when Robie’s severance package arrived at our front door the next day neatly giftwrapped in a gold box with a pretty, red bow, I placed it under the Christmas tree and told him we weren’t going to discuss it until after the holidays. Because despite wanting to reunite with my cheerful husband, I knew Robie needed time to deal with change. And if I’d had such clarity at the beginning of our marriage things would have gone a lot smoother.

Robie approaches change slowly, dipping a toe in to test the water’s temperature before carefully wading in the shallow end while never venturing far from shore. Sometimes it takes months before he goes further in and lets the water rise to his waist. But as he deliberates the waiting can feel like fingernails on a chalkboard to me, an ear piercing, spine cringing irritant that never goes away. Fortunately, that time we spent moseying around the Caribbean taught me a little something about patience since the first thing one learns about life on a sailboat is that nothing happens quickly. 

Sometimes Robie gets tongue-tied just talking about change, and in the months leading up to the pandemic I knew he was struggling when I heard the garbled, grumbling, monotone noises he made around the house. While I waited for him to put together full sentences and get out whatever he was trying to communicate, Robie began reminiscing about his first job at fourteen washing dishes at a Polynesian restaurant followed by a short stint as a fry cook at Kentucky Fried Chicken before he got a gig as a busboy and then bartender at the local, swank resort in downtown St. Petersburg. And soon, Robie was reliving the heady days of working behind the bar on ladies’ night in the hottest club on the beach.

Of course, I’d heard these stories before and knew how Robie’s mom got him a job in radio, yet I let him continue his trip down memory lane describing that first gig standing on a streetcorner in ninety-degree Florida heat wearing the 98 Rock chicken suit. But by now I knew better than to ask how a kid in a bright orange chicken costume got anyone to listen to the radio since the stunt got his four-toed chicken foot in the door where he soon ran marketing for the No. 1 rock station in Tampa, WYNF 94.9. When CBS sold the station, Robie moved to Dallas and worked at the legendary Q102.1, Texas’ best rock before climbing the corporate ladder to oversee marketing for Clear Channel’s six stations in the fifth largest market in the country. And when he left and we moved to Florida, Robie ran programming for WDAE the Sports Animal, the top sports talk station in the Sunshine State. But after a few years, he sent me that curt, two-word email telling me that he’d been axed in another round of Clear Channel’s budget cuts. And when we learned shortly thereafter that our landlady had stopped paying the mortgage on our rented boathouse and the bank was threatening to foreclose, we moved aboard our 41-foot Morgan Out Island sailboat, The Last Resort, and set out for ports unknown.

Following our eighteen-month Caribbean sabbatical, Robie’s job prospects were decidedly more mundane. Gone were the fun softball games with Bon Jovi, in studio concerts with Eric Johnson, front row seats to Plant Page and sideline access during Buccaneer home games. For the final act in his career Robie’s role was largely administrative and after much reminiscing he found the words to say that he was thinking about stepping off the hamster wheel and retiring. “But,” he assured me, that day was “sometime in the future, in the next few years, eventually but not soon.” And I knew that by pushing D-Day down the road was Robie’s way of gaining the headspace he needed to take the plunge.

Then suddenly time ran out.

A year before he thought he’d retire Robie was laid off again. And in the days leading up to Christmas we didn’t talk about his being sacked or what it would mean for the future. Instead, Robie played golf twice a week and we watched our usual lineup of annual holiday classics including Linus’ recitation of the Gospel of Luke and Bruce Willis whispering “yippee ki-yay” from an unfinished floor in Nakatomi Plaza. I mention this only because there’s apparently some confusion regarding movies like Lethal Weapon, While You Were Sleeping, Trading Places, Die Hard and Die Harder. For the record they’re as festive as Rudolph’s shiny, red nose, angels who get their wings and all the singing Whos down in Whoville, and they should be part of every holiday tradition.

As the days grew shorter, I sat in my office finishing a year-end report trying to put off making a sales plan for the new year when Robie bounded up to my desk like an eager schoolboy. Shoving his iPad in front of my computer screen, he showed me an apartment for sale a few blocks from the zocalo in Oaxaca and a two-bedroom rental villa with an ocean view in Izmir. But nothing had changed. We still hadn’t discussed the layoff or talked about what came next, yet somehow Robie already saw our future differently than before.

Then on Christmas morning, I handed Robie the neatly wrapped gift in a gold box with a pretty, red bow and watched him dig beneath the brightly colored tissue paper. And suddenly I found my happy, smiling husband again.

Robie’s layoff didn’t alter our plans. It accelerated them.