Consider the African Call: A Supposedly Educational Thing I Did in Nairobi
I. The Custodial Calculus and the Dread of the Leisure Class It had been around three years, since the legal dissolution of my marriage, a temporal milestone at which the freshly divorced male is expected to have either achieved a state of enlightened, post-marital Zen or descended into a tragic cliché of microwave dinners and weekend sports cars. I had settled comfortably into a kind of low-grade, logistical purgatory. The custody arrangement with my ex-wife was a masterpiece of rigid geometric division: we split the summers squarely down the middle, fifteen days for her, fifteen days for me, a custodial mitosis that left me staring down the barrel of two to three weeks of absolute, unadulterated "single-guy" vacation time. Now, on paper, two weeks of unencumbered leisure sounds like a gift from the municipal gods. But the reality of the divorced, middle-aged academic summer vacation is fraught with a very specific, hyper-neurotic brand of terror. I have always harbored a ...