The Sheriff of St. Thomas (Part 6)

Although this story contains things from the world in which we live, it should be read as a work of fiction. All characters are fictional and not based on any actual living person. The events that take place in this story are entirely the product of my imagination.

It was New Year’s Eve. A strange “holiday.” Dalton had never been able to get into New Year’s Eve or New Year’s Day; he thought it an artificial, manufactured “holiday” where someone had decided to make the final and first days of consecutive years special for some reason. The dates were just another couple of days on the calendar to him, and they always had been.

He didn’t get all the partying, the watching the ball drop in Times Square, or all the nostalgia spent about the previous twelve months, most of which people were trying everything they could do to forget.

Look forward, he thought.

No, this thing was just some weird excuse to get in one last day of partying and doing nothing before the calendar flipped over. He wasn’t complaining mind you; he was a federal employee after all, and federal employees love their federal holidays. So who was Dalton to complain? He had been doing this stuff long enough to know that you never looked the proverbial gift horse in the mouth; when the powers that be gave you another day off to do what you really wanted to do, you took it. And leveraged it to the hilt.

And that was precisely what he and his wife were doing at this very moment on the afternoon of 31 December 2017. While almost everyone else they knew were back in CONUS freezing on the last day of the year, they were sitting in their rented condo up on the hill overlooking the northern shore of the island of St. Thomas. They had today and tomorrow off. The final week of the NFL season was playing out on the television, and as Dalton watched Pittsburgh (having already secured a first round bye) go through the motions against Cleveland, his wife watched an episode of The Crown on her Ipad. The sliding glass door out to their balcony was open, and a salty Caribbean breeze languidly floated into their living room. It was getting close to that time when Dalton would have to fire up the grill on the balcony and prepare a light dinner for the two of them. He delighted at the prospect.

When he actually sat back and gave it some deep thought, they were worlds different than most of the people they knew. Sure, they had tried to be like others. A few years back, they had finally succumbed to all the pressure and gotten onto social media. They had gone all those years in its infancy without ever really thinking about it. And they had been pretty happy without it. Dalton had years ago tuned out of news of any kind, seeing it change from being an objective, fact-based medium into a twisted, politically-driven narrative all clothed up as “news.” This had infected every major news outlet, NBC, ABC, CBS, Fox, PBS, and all the venerable, old print media: The New York Times, Washington Post, Chicago Tribune, and LA Times.

Dalton had initially found the notion of an online, personal website where a person posted his or her daily experiences to be, to say the least, a bit, weird. Facebook, Twitter, Instagram. As the years rolled by, here each one of them came, with different capabilities and diverse audiences. He watched it all develop with bemusement. He wasn’t so sure in his line of work that it would be a good idea for him to engage. But eventually, he gave in, to a point. But he never bought in. Not totally anyway.

No, what all these new social media platforms did could be distilled down into two basic things: (1) They gave you a very clear picture into the lives and priorities of your “friends,” and (2) they established how absolutely different your life and your priorities were in comparison. Dalton didn’t know whether this was a good thing or not, and he didn’t care. But he did gain valuable insight into the difference and how it had developed. It didn’t mean anyone was right or wrong; it just meant that Dalton and his wife were different. They valued things others did not, and the others valued things the Daltons did not.

For instance, the mere fact that the Daltons were here in St. Thomas as opposed to some city in CONUS, that was an indicator. Dalton had pursued the so-called American Dream for a while, and he found it to be a myth. Everyone defined it as owning a home in a perfect neighborhood with perfect schools and a perfect church and perfect neighbors. Dalton knew from experience it didn’t exist. No city, no neighborhood, no school, no church, no neighbors, were perfect. Every place had its own issues, and when you finally learned this fundamental precept, it freed you. It freed you to find the place where you could marginalize the negatives and maximize the positive aspects to a hilt; Dalton called it “leveraging the good.”

Why were the Daltons here? At this place and at this time? It was simple. Change was a constant part of life; Dalton had learned that through experience. You might think you had arrived and found the perfect place, the perfect job, the perfect life. And invariably, after feeding you a steady series of fastballs right done the middle of the plate, life would suddenly throw you a wicked curve ball, or even worse, an exploding slider, and you would swing and miss it, badly. Life was about constant change, and you could do one of two things in response: (1) You could stick your head in the sand in denial, acting like everything was and would always be perfect, or (2) you could learn to adjust and react. You could learn to adjust to the changes that were inevitably going to come your way. And once you learned this fundamental truth and figured out that you had to adjust, you could actually learn to thrive in this environment of change, to capitalize on it.

Sometimes, change was obviated by necessity, and sometimes change was the result of opportunity. And even still, sometimes change was hastened by a combination of both. On this occasion, Dalton was in St. Thomas due to an unforeseen opportunity that had come out of the blue. And he intended to make the absolute most of it.

So as Dalton sat in the condo with his wife on the bright and breezy 77-degree December 31st of 2017, he wished he had something more “philosophical” to offer, but he didn’t. Life was a series of events; in some of them, one had some measure of free will and control, and in in others , one had little — if any — ability to control anything. It was a pretty stoic outlook, but a practical one. The key was to exercise one’s free will consistently on all occasions; act appropriately, decisively, and ethically in those events within your control, and react similarly when you had no control. This was the essence of sanity and happiness in a world where change was as constant as the sun rising each morning in the eastern sky. It was surely easier said than done. But this was the goal one must strive to attain.

Dalton was right where he wanted to be. Adapting to something new. Looking forward, not behind. Outside his comfort zone. He wouldn’t have it any other way.

Glen Hines is the author of two books, Document and Cloudbreak, available at Amazon.com and Barnes and Noble. His writing has appeared in Sports Illustrated, Task & Purpose, and the Human Development Project.