My Million-Dollar Donkey

Copyright © 2016 by Ginny East

HEARTWOOD PRESS

17507 Waterline Road

Bradenton FL 34212

www.HeartwoodRetreatCenter.com

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the written prior permission of the author.

ISBN:
978-1-63505-138-4

To Kathy—my student, my teacher, my friend.

A portion of the proceeds from this book will be donated to the World Literacy Foundation.
http://worldliteracyfoundation.org
.

Humble thanks to my husband, David Shaddock, whose love and support has inspired me to bring this manuscript out from hidden under my bed to a place where it may find an audience. No one has, or probably ever will, read this book as many times or with as much sincere attention to both the content and the deeper themes within. His honest feedback and diligent line editing demonstrate not just his devotion to this project, but his devotion to me. I am indeed lucky, lucky, lucky.

When some people go through a midlife crisis, they buy themselves a Porsche. Me? I bought a donkey. That probably says something about my personality, but I’d be afraid to find out exactly what. In some ways, buying a donkey was the best thing I’ve ever done in my life. In other ways, not so much. I suppose a girl should expect a touch of disillusionment if she’s foolish enough to choose an ass as her life mascot.

Perhaps I should point out that I didn’t buy a donkey because I lived in a remote Mexican village where four-legged animals are the normal mode of transportation. I didn’t go the donkey route because I couldn’t afford a Porsche, either. Actually, I had just deposited a million dollars into my bank account. I didn’t win the lottery or rob a bank, and I did not pass GO 5000 times in a Monopoly game. My knee-jerk reaction to the stress and inconvenience of a busy life was to give up, cash in, and start over. Starting over isn’t all that uncommon if you believe all the articles and books published on the subject of life reinvention. Our boomer generation is famous for creating a world of disposable products. No wonder we consider our very lifestyles disposable when they aren’t working just so.

Now you’re probably thinking,
so you cashed in your life, got a million dollars, and went out and bought a donkey? Get real.

Getting real was exactly what my husband and I had in mind. For years, we worked at building a local dance school business, knowing our choice to make a living in the arts meant we’d always live a humble sort of existence, the kind of life where bouncing a check wasn’t all that unfamiliar a mortification. We were the sort of people who hemmed and hawed over whether or not we could afford a car with a sunroof, and we always ended up skipping that small luxury. We drove around with a shadow over our heads, and I mean that both literally and figuratively.

Then, one day, exhausted by how much upkeep our modest lifestyle took, we sat down and figured out just what we would have to work with if we cashed in our life and started over. Thanks to America’s real estate bubble and years of paying a mortgage on the two buildings that housed our little dance school business, our real estate net worth alone came to somewhere in the neighborhood of two million dollars.

Like most people who clip coupons, we had a lot of experience playing the “If I had a million dollars” game.

I’d see an expensive designer gown hanging in a boutique with a thousand dollar price tag and I’d comment, “If I had a million dollars, I’d sure buy that dress.”

My kids would whine, “All my friends have a [
fill in the blank
].” And I’d quip, “Well, if I had a million dollars, you’d have one, too.”

Standing in line once at AAA for discount tickets to Disney, my husband Mark once stared at a brochure for a trip to Paris and said, “If I had a million dollars, I’d take you there.” And an hour later, sitting at a red light, we both looked at a Porsche pulled up alongside our sensible Dodge Caravan. “If we had a million dollars, I’d buy one of those in blue.” I said.

“Red would be better,” Mark corrected.

Buying a donkey just never made an appearance in our “if I had a million” fantasies—unless you count a very brief encounter I had once on the way to our annual family vacation. Every fall we tried to slip away to the Georgia Mountains to observe the colorful foliage and feel the crisp air of autumn. One year, we stopped at a quaint roadside stand to purchase boiled peanuts from a place oozing country charm. A donkey stood at the fence.

My kids couldn’t resist pausing to look at the beast. I had no clue whether or not donkeys are biters. Luckily, the animal stood docilely by.

“Isn’t he the cutest thing?” Neva, my youngest daughter, said.

The donkey’s soulful brown eyes looked at me through long lashes fringing eyes that welled with understanding and compassion. I know a donkey is an ass, a synonym for foolish and stubborn behavior, but ‘cute’ was not the word I’d use to describe him. As far as I was concerned, the answers to all the world’s problems rested in his calm gaze.

I urged the kids to go back to the car, reminding them that boiled peanuts and a bag of homemade peanut brittle were all we had stopped for, but first, I reached out to scratch the animal behind his ears. “We have to go,” I said, fighting some unexplained instinct telling me to stay awhile.

The kids ran back to the car, but I stood a moment longer staring at the beast with a nagging sense of longing.

“See ya later,” I said.

The animal winked. I
swear
he did. And as I turned away, he brayed. The echo of that thunderous call resonated inside me long after we drove on. The vibration from his call is with me still.

In retrospect, coming face to face with that gentle, unassuming animal was probably the catalytic moment that sparked the paradigm shift in my worldview.

At nightfall, we checked in to a rustic little cabin in the woods for the weekend. I unpacked my laptop and a pile of dance industry catalogues, thinking that while the kids played in the creek by the cabin, I might catch up on some costume ordering. My husband unpacked his briefcase and set up an impromptu office on the kitchen table to call in payroll the next morning. This, you see, was our version of taking a few days off. We never stopped working, really; just made a stab at changing the scenery now and again so we could
pretend
we were taking time off.

As dancers and artists, we loved our work, but that didn’t mean we didn’t wrestle with secret wishes to simply walk off into the shadows, leaving the glittering, sequined world behind. We longed for a life with less stress, less financial struggle, and mostly, a life with less foolish drama, the sort of ridiculous behavior revealed on the hit show “Dance Moms,” which was reality TV that proved a little too real for us.

A vacation, no matter how small, seemed to stoke our quiet desperation, awakening that small measure of dissatisfaction that is universal and yet so many of us feel is uniquely ours. The crunch of fall leaves under our feet and the numbness of our chilled noses made us feel a longing for more of the same, but just as the feeling of peace settled around the corners of our hearts and minds, we had to return home. We left the quaint cabin craving more. More mountains. More time for the family. More freedom. More.

A few years later when we received our first noteworthy tax return check ever, we visited the mountains again and put a down payment on a dilapidated old cabin in the woods, hoping the sacrifice we made each month to make the payment might ‘guilt’ us into taking time off for family. The tumbledown shack was quaint and had a two story bunkhouse off to the side that we imagined, if we added plumbing, would give us room for hobbies or more expansive living.

Not many city suckers (oops, I mean slickers) would see potential in a cabin with no insulation. The plumbing in the cabin itself was shot and the roof was caving in, but the little fixer-upper had a lovely mountain view. We adored the place for the potential we saw—not just for the home, but for us.

On the day we closed that cabin purchase, we took a walk through the town’s historic village. Feelings of an impending adventure made us giddy with good humor. In the same way a catchy song gets stuck in your head, we couldn’t stop the chorus and verse of imagining what an alternate life might be like, now that we owned property plopped right in the middle of a world we associated to peace and right living.

That conversation urged us to consider options. With little trust that our frustrating, hard working life would be worth anything other than a kick in the pants to someone else, we visited a business broker just to verify what we believed would be the case: that no one would want to embrace our misery, and they certainly wouldn’t pay for our life of drudgery. Shockingly, the broker informed us that our little family dance school business was worth more to a potential buyer than the sum of all we’d earned in the past eight years.

We could barely imagine an identity unconnected to dance, but how could we not be curious about what lay beneath our leotards if we really did have a shot at reinventing our world?

Bravely, we threw the gauntlet at fate’s feet and put our specialized business up for sale at the price recommended by the broker (
a million dollars!),
and proceeded with what could only be described as tongue-in-cheek optimism. Five days later we were called into the broker’s office to meet a nice couple I’ll call the Smiths.

“Do you believe good business people without a dance background can run your school successfully?” Mr. Smith asked.

Mark glanced at the floor thoughtfully. We had discussed this very thing and both agreed that the school might prosper best with experienced management at the helm. “My wife and I spend far too much time and energy on the creative end, and don’t always attend to the business side as carefully as a school that has grown to this size requires,” Mark said. “The school might even do better without us putting artistic considerations above practical business decisions. But if a buyer really didn’t know anything about dance, they would have to allow us to stay involved for a while.”

“We were thinking the same thing.” Mr. Smith exchanged a knowing look with his wife, turned to face us, and then said the three little words that dropped freedom at our feet like a pigeon shot from the sky.

“We’ll take it.”

Mark and I both sat forward in our seats.

“Pardon me?” I said.

“We’ll take it.”

No offer/counter offer bargaining period to heighten the drama of the moment? No demand of time served on our part to help in the transition?

Mark swallowed and forced his eyebrows down from the top of his forehead, and gravely shook Mr. Smith’s hand. “You’ve got yourself a deal.”

Naturally, everyone’s eyes turned to me, and of course, I reacted as any sophisticated CEO and founder of a small business would. After all, I had 20 years of entrepreneurial experience and a BA in business management backing up my professional demeanor. My chin quivered, my nose started to run, and I burst into tears. I folded over like a soft-shelled taco, buried my wet face in my hands, and bawled.

“You do want to sell the school, don’t you?” the broker whispered.

I sat up, trying to recover some small semblance of dignity. “Of course, but for the record, I love my school.”

A truer statement couldn’t be made, but for some reason that donkey’s lovely bray was still resounding through my spirit long after he called out to me. I was ready to heed that call, so an hour later we were drawing up contracts and I was trying to wrap my brain about a new reality—the business that demanded almost all of our waking thought and effort for the past eighteen years would now belong to someone else.

We were going to have to drop the news to the kids. I made a big Sunday breakfast, careful to include everyone’s favorites: pigs in blankets, breakfast casserole, pancakes, homemade cinnamon rolls, and fruit salad. I set the table on our cedar porch, decorated to look like a cabin in Georgia (a testament to our long-time longing for a cabin of our own), and summoned the troops.

My kids had no clue this day would be different from any other. I was always trying to squeeze as much togetherness into the corners of our life as possible, and sitting down to break bread together seemed to me a path to deeper connections. My family often woke on a Sunday to grandiose meals made by a mother who dragged herself out of bed hours before anyone else to create a picture perfect family morning.

After eating, laughing, and sharing news of friends and school, we sat down for the proposed family meeting. Only two of our children were still living at home and I felt the weight of the empty seat where my oldest daughter would have been sitting had she not left for college a few months prior. Mark and I began with small talk, slowly merging into the subject of how tired we were and how guilty we felt about working so much. We talked about our goals as a family and how we wished we had time and energy to devote to life beyond dance.

“We put the studio up for sale, thinking a semi-retirement would provide a chance for us to spend more time with family. We never dreamed someone would come along wanting to buy it so soon, but they did.”

The kids stared blankly, as if they couldn’t quite process what we were saying.

“The people who want the studio are willing to pay us a million bucks. Do you know how much money that is? We won’t ever have to work again unless we want to. So . . . we are moving to Georgia. We have a chance to do whatever we want with our lives. It’s gonna be amazing!”

We expected the kids to be surprised, awestruck at the thought of our having money, maybe a bit disappointed at the thought of leaving friends behind, but at the same time, delighted to embrace a life with full-time parents. But rather than voicing a question, our thirteen year old son’s face screwed up and his eyes turned bloodshot red.

“You’ve destroyed my life!” he shouted. “I hate you.” Then he ran to his room, sobbing.

Our daughter, Neva, reacted with her typical eight year old wisdom. “I hate the dance school anyway. But why do we have to move?”

“If we move to Georgia, you can have your own horse.”

“I’d rather have a bunny,” she said, hopping off the couch and coming over to curl into my lap. She was wearing one of my nighties, the straps tied up around her neck to keep her tiny frame primly covered. She held the sides up delicately and the satin trailed to the ground, floating behind her like a bride’s train. I noticed a dash of flour on the hem, remnants of the mess she made helping me cut out the biscuits an hour prior. We could cook together every day if we did indeed make this life shift.