Finishing What I Never Finished and Starting Something New . . .

7.24.08

Somehow the end of my time in Paris slipped through my fingers but my fingers were not on this keyboard typing out the stories that made up that bit of time in my life.  It’s hard to put words to it really, which is why I suppose I never bothered forcing myself to sit down to work it out on paper.  I did everything that I wanted to do before leaving.  I walked and walked and walked through the city, and spent time with the usual suspects and some who were not so usual as well.  I reconnected with Ikram finally only to find that my fear and apprehension that she would hate me for having been so out of touch with her was simply misplaced guilt.  My good friend Katie C. came to visit, which I have perhaps already mentioned.  I know I brought up the fact that I went skydiving.  I spent a good amount of time with Lise.  On the day before I left I had a very poorly organized goodbye picnic by the Eiffel Tower and a good number of people actually showed up despite my very vague invitation – come have a picnic with me on the Champ de Mars next to the Eiffel Tower between 4PM and 7PM.  The Champ de Mars is HUGE and on a beautiful day incredibly crowded, making it a challenge to connect with friends unless the meeting point is very specific.  I also had the misfortune of running out of credit on my cell phone and since my bankcard had been turned in on Friday, I had no way to recharge it.  In the end the people who I really anted to see somehow found me and it was a nice afternoon.  Sarah had a party at her apartment on Saturday night and that was lots of fun.  I ended up staying the night and as I walked to the train station to go home at around 8AM on Sunday, I thought sadly about how that was the last time I’d be walking home to catch a morning train after a night out in Paris (not that I did that all that frequently, but it happened and there was always something really special and particular about being up that early).

Anyway, these last minute Parisian moments come flooding back to me now as I sit on the couch on my new front porch in Santa Fe, New Mexico.  After about three weeks at home my sister flew in from Santa Fe to help get me packed up and then to drive back here with me.  The time I spent at home was hard.  It was hard in that I was jetlagged and tired at first.  Going from a huge bustling city like Paris to a little suburban town like Longmeadow was a huge culture shock.  It felt lonely and quiet and boring.  I missed walking everywhere to do everything and found that getting physical activity required a lot more motivation and was much less appealing than it had been.  I did not unpack my bags really, though one kind of exploded because I needed the cloths in it, and never really felt like I was settled in.  I guess that’s because I was not settling in as much as I was passing through.  

Of course my brother, sister-in-law and parents were there and it was really nice to spend time with them.  Luckily for me they were able to put up with my sometimes-strange mood swings and to ignore me when I needed to be left alone.  By the time my sister flew in I had gotten into a fairly acceptable routine and was starting to almost feel settled and content there.  I finally saw some of the kids I normally babysit for in the summer and it just about broke my heart because this summer I am not home babysitting for them.  I guess that is perhaps the strangest thing for me right now.  Instead of packing up at the end of August and heading out to begin another academic school year, it is the end of July and I have just packed up basically everything I could ever want from my parents’ house and moved out to New Mexico.  I have no job lined up, even if I have plans to find one soon, and I have no idea what my life holds beyond this year that lays in front of me.  Up to this point I’ve always had at least some vague thought, but for the first time in my life, I just don’t know.  And what makes me think that maybe I’ve grown up a little bit is that I’m feeling fine with that.

The drive out was fun.  We left at 5:47AM Monday morning Eastern standard time and rolled in here about 10:15PM Eastern standard time yesterday (Wednesday).  We drove about 12-15 hours a day and spent two nights in random motels.  The air conditioning in my car broke right before leaving, which only really became a problem yesterday as we drove through Oklahoma and Texas, where temperatures ranged from 94-104 degrees.  My entire left arm is very sunburned from hours of driving with the sun beating down on it and though we guzzled bottle after bottle of water, we both felt dehydrated last night upon arriving.  I know that Katie was anxious to get back to Santa Fe because already has various things with which she’s involved here and she wanted to get back to life here.  I would have been happy to drive forever.  For the entire first part of the trip I kept waiting for the landscape to change, but even through Illinois and Missouri it was not drastically different from home.  I haven’t driven out west since . . . wow, I want to say I haven’t driven out west since my brother’s junior year in college when I was still in high school.  I drove from Santa Fe back to Massachusetts right after my freshman year of college and I drove from Massachusetts to Chicago the summer after I lived in Dijon France, but I have not driven from Massachusetts out west in a long time.  

When the scenery did finally start to change, the land looked expansive and it felt like we were in the middle of nowhere.   I kept wondering if people really did live in those little towns we’d speed past and I wanted to know if they were happy there.  We passed many run down, dilapidated buildings and houses that could not possibly have been in use.  I wondered about the people who had first built those and whether or not they thought these structures would be somewhere that people would call home for years to come.  I want to know why they were abandoned and who is responsible for them now.  At some point in the worst of the heat in Texas yesterday we decided to stop so that we could stretch and sit somewhere air conditioned for a while.  We ended up pulling into McLean, Texas, population 830.  Right off of the highway there was a kitschy looking steak house and we went in to get some food.  For a place that seems to be in no man’s land, business did not seem bad.  Our waitress was not the friendliest person I had ever met in my life, but I kept thinking, “Well, she is a waitress in a steak house in McLean Texas, maybe she just isn’t very happy.”  Then I would think, “Who am I to pass judgment just because I would never want to live in McLean?  Maybe she really is happy here.  Maybe this is exactly where she wants to be and what she wants to be doing . . .”

I sometimes think that I was born with the need to be on the move in my blood.  It seems as though a migratory life is, in a way, a part of my heritage.  If I look back to my grandparents’ generation I find one grandmother who moved from England to California and a grandfather who settled in California after having grown up in Kansas and served in WWII.  My other grandfather also served in WWII and though he stayed in New York where he grew up, he still did a fair amount of travel with the Navy.  Pushing back one generation I have great-grandparents who came through Ellis Island from Europe, presumably in search of a better life.  Keeping closer to my life, even my parents did their fair share of moving around before settling in Massachusetts.  They lived everywhere from Pennsylvania to Alaska to California.  Sure when they finally arrived in Massachusetts and were ready to raise a family, they really settled in and have not moved in twenty-four or twenty-five years, but before they got there they tried out a lot of different places.

It was easier for my parents to try out different homes in different parts of the country than it had been for my great-grandparents to leave their homelands to cross the ocean in hopes of something new and better.  Perhaps it has been easier for me to pick up and move to France for ten months here and there than it would have been for my parents to do so.  Mobility is something that I take for granted too much I think.  Because of those great-grandparents and grandparents and parents who wanted a better life for their families, I grew up with endless choice and freedom.  I can chose whatever career I wanted and live wherever I find a place that really feels like home.  It’s exciting and I am grateful to have a life that is so open and full of possibilities.  Sometimes it gets a little overwhelming though and I wonder what it would be like to come from a small town in the middle of nowhere where the expectation is that you get a decent job when grow up and settle down to raise a good family.  I’m sure that’s a horrible oversimplification of what small town expectations are, but I guess I mean I wonder if everyone dreams of going somewhere else to seek . . . I don’t even know what.  Maybe part of what I get out of moving around and traveling is simply the opportunity to see what I can find somewhere new.

Well, here I am somewhere new and when I awoke in my new bedroom this morning, I thought to myself, “This is my room.”  I liked it.  I did not feel disoriented, anxious or stressed out about what comes next.  The sun was shining but not so much that it awoke me.  I could see trees through my window from the futon mattress on the floor that is currently serving as my bed.  I was neither hot nor cold.  I was able to fall back to sleep for a bit but did not feel exhausted.  Now that I am outside writing this, the air is almost cool with a slight breeze and the sky is clear and blue.  Who knows what this year will hold for me, but so far I’m feeling good about it.  I think that I will do my best to keep writing when I feel inspired or maybe even not when I feel inspired.  It is no longer Michael en France and I should mention that I do miss Paris a lot.  But now it is Michael out west and new adventures await . . .