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 my husband had 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.

Now, hours after returning from a Thanksgiving trip, history repeated itself. 

News of Robie’s current 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. 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 my husband we weren’t going to discuss it until after the holidays. Because I knew Robie needed time to deal with change.

If I’d had such clarity at the beginning of our marriage things might have gone a lot smoother.

Robie approaches change slowly, dipping a toe to test the water before carefully wading in the shallow end yet never venturing far from shore. Sometimes it takes months before he goes further in and lets the water rise to his waist. Yet as he deliberates, the waiting can feel like fingernails on a chalkboard, 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, my husband 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. Soon, Robie was reliving the heady days of working behind the bar on ladies’ night in the hottest club on the west coast of Florida.

I’d heard all the stories before and knew how Robie’s mom got him the job in radio, but I still let him continue his trip down memory lane describing his first time standing on a streetcorner in ninety-degree heat wearing the 98 Rock chicken suit. 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 quickly ran marketing for the No. 1 rock station in Tampa at 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. When we left and moved to Florida, Robie ran programming for WDAE the Sports Animal, the top sports talk station in the Sunshine State. After a few years, he sent me that same, curt, two-word email telling me he’d been axed in another round of Clear Channel’s budget cuts. 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 sabbatical in the Caribbean, 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 to Buccaneer home games. For the final act of his career, Robie’s role was largely administrative. After much reminiscing, he finally 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.

Until time ran out.

A year before he thought he’d retire, Robie was laid off again. 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 seems to be some speculation 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 Whos singing in Whoville and should be part of every holiday tradition.

As the days grew darker, shorter and colder, I sat in my office trying to put off making a sales plan for the coming year when Robie bounded up to my desk like an eager schoolboy. Shoving his iPad in front of my computer, he showed me an apartment for sale a few blocks from the zocalo in Oaxaca where we’d stayed two years earlier and an affordable two-bedroom villa with an oceanview in Izmir.

Still, nothing had changed. We hadn’t yet discussed the layoff or talked about what came next, but somehow Robie was already seeing our future differently.

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.

Inside, I found my happy, smiling husband again.

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