random thoughts late at night with a laptop in bed...

I overheard Arthur, a student, say today, "She makes the color look more beautiful." I don’t know of whom he was speaking, but I love that he is a good, kind young man. It gives me great hope that they are out there -- though they all seem to be taken by the time they're an age I'd be interested in now. Did I miss the boat b/c I was busy gallivanting and getting graduate degrees? Goodness, I hope not! Check out this great photo of him and me on our travel to the Deep South.

I've been reading Frances Mayes’ A Year in the World. It feels like she wrote it in Natalie Goldberg-style ten-minute timed writings; all disjointed, out of sorts, short, choppy sections that don’t hang together. Sean Murphy once told me, years ago, in that workshop in Taos, that he’d written most of one of his books that way, but his doesn’t feel like it. I’ve sort-of wondered why I continued on with this one by Mayes, but then I got to the last chapter and now I know… I was meant to read this last chapter. I wish I could put it online without violating copyright law. It is beautiful, and soooo what I have been grappling with on my blog… it’s about traveling Europe and then when she’s done, going home to the South.

It’s called, “The Riddle of Home.” The book, all 417 pages of it, ends:

Bees navigate by a magnet in their heads. I have one, too, just under the pineal gland that looks so much like broccolo romano. Instead of true north, the magnitudes of attraction are multidirectional. During any airport delay, I study all the departures. What if I just chose one? Cairo, Mozambique, Catania, Dublin – but I’m in Frankfurt with a ticket to Florence. Someday I will drop that ticket in the wastebasket, step up to the desk, and say, “One way to Zagreb, please.”
The lyrics of a torch song, a line in a book, a friend’s postcard, a glimpse out the window on the overnight train to Paris, a just-shucked oyster that recalls the briny air at Tomales Bay – even an overheard word can trigger the magnet’s force, sending me to check my airline mileage account, propelling me to the computer to scout ticket prices, into the garage to see which suitcase has wheels ready to roll.
When I finish my travels, I will solve the riddle of home. When I finish my travels, I will know the answer. Then I will open the Yellow Café.

I've been dealing with this whole idea of home and travel for a long time... and this is what I meant to say on my blog! No, not really. I have my own version. And, of course, if you know my Mother you know that she too has this homing beacon. How many late nights is she sitting at her computer or my father's looking at airline prices just because she may go somewhere soon?! It is so funny to recognize that impulse in someone else's writing when you grew up with someone like that. Did you know she has an old file of magazine and newspaper clippings in the garage -- molding in the Florida humidity... travel destinations seen and dreamed of? She who (used to, anyway) organize(s) only in a pinch has it all labelled and ready to pull out when needed and should you ask, she will! Travel is to life like air or food or water in my Mother's world. Maybe my roaming is an advanced manifestation of that. I think the two of us should go into business leading tours and trips to our favorite places.

One neat thing about Frances Mayes' chapter is that I can use her structure. You might want to try this, too:

When I finish my travels, I will…Sit idly for long stretches and watch the water. I will raise a family. I will plant flowers. Maybe (I’ve always liked that better in theory than practice.) I will write more for longer periods. I will make a plan then. For now, I will travel. You know, I can't even imagine the end of my travels right now. I will travel with kids; I will travel when I have a more permanent home; I don't know that I'll ever be finished. I'll be finished when people have strewn my ashes at my favorite destinations in one grand, final journey across the globe.

For now, I’m enthralled by…
The idea of new, uncharted territory. Seeing the sunset over rooflines I’ve not even imagined – Santorini, Istanbul, Madrid, the Portugese countryside, maybe even Fez. The idea of being willing to meet new people -- it scares me to death, making friends, finding love. It hasn't gone well here and I find I am closed off and just want the people who knew me when and who I know love me. I want to go to Colorado and have tea with Wendy and laugh with Lori and sit and talk late at night with Beth.

When I’m driving or ironing, slide shows flash through my brain…First off, I never iron. I don't even own one. It's my own little feminist statement, to myself, in my head, which is funny when you think about it. Still, I have these images that flash by in down time: Sea kayaking into a cave in Mexico, singing a concert on the Ponte Vecchio, sitting alone on the edge of the Grand Canyon at sunset, rollerblading at Ocean Beach and rolled tacos in Encinitas, hiking with friends in the Colordao Rockies, the rolling hills of the Palouse, sitting in the Book End Café watching the beautiful people on the Pearl Street Mall, Grandaddy’s ranch in rural Alabama, the sounds of Mufasa’a soft snores next to me in a hotel bed, music and dancing in post-Katrina New Orleans, sledding down a long road at Christmastime with my eight-year-old nephew screaming all the way, early morning church bells on Italian piazzas, gray January days in Budapest. South Seas Plantation, where we went when I was a little girl. I will always love long, white, sandy beaches.

And what else...?
I’ve been thinking of going on a scuba dive/waterski vacation to this place in Tunisia. There’s an all-inclusive resort there that’s pretty cheap and why not?! How does one get to Tunisia, I wonder? I don’t even really know where it is, but I think I may go…

It hardly seems possible that it was two years ago this month that I interviewed in Idaho and Zach and his team were getting ready for the Odyssey of the Mind. I had a whole different life. Frances Mayes writes of that a little in her book. Just snippets here and there. Her husband loved to sail; she hated sailing with him. She and Ed spend a long time on a boat in this book and she so enjoys it she finds herself thinking, “Wouldn’t my first husband be surprised?” I guess that they will always pop up like that from time to time. In old stories and the scenes from what-used-to-be. I have so many happy memories without them and so few with. I miss my big house, though. Not the bigness of it, or having to clean it, or that it was never all put together right, but I felt at home there. I haven’t been anywhere for that long a stretch in many, many years. It was nice and had the potential to be home for a long, long time. I liked the idea of that.

Maybe the story I'm telling here and elsewhere was and still is (never having changed despite all the change in cicumstances) that I am all these things: wife (not literally right now, but once something like this is a part of your identity, experience... a part of you, aren't you always in some ways that?), mother, lover, idea generator, teacher, inspirer, writer, explorer… and the trick is to make a life with other people that honors and has room for all of it.