WANDERLUST
We Were Always Lost
Word Count 1,738
When I was 19, I dropped out of college to travel. It was one thing (in my mind) to travel the world in between things; it was quite another to get your college degree and then bum around. Of course, this thinking is absurd. I know that now. But when I was young, I was beholden to the ideas of adults. Also, to be honest, I was $900 short on the tuition I needed for my senior year. I could have asked my grandparents for the money but it would have been frowned upon. As family legend has it, when my grandfather needed money for college, “He plowed the back forty.” A horse may or may not have been involved.
While my friends labored over their senior theses, I went to work. In the 1980’s, there was no internet, so companies were mindlessly pouring their money into dozens of different women’s magazines. I worked for a particularly dopey one called “New Woman” which was owned by Rupert Murdoch when he was still married to the Australian novelist Anna Murdoch. Once, we ran a writing contest asking readers to send in the story of how they met their spouse. Guess who won?
Visa Trouble
Word Count 3,378
On a bright December morning , I’m up early. I have to go get my visa to India. It’s a freezing cold morning and I bundle up. I have a reservation and, surprisingly for me, I arrive on time, only to find a line out the door. I thought the fact that I had a 10:40 a.m. reservation would be relevant, but apparently it is not. The guy before me had a 9:40 a.m. reservation. It’s going to be a long morning and I have to get to work. It is the last few days of the semester.
I’m perhaps fifteenth in line so I think I should go up and tell the Hispanic guard with the walkie talkie and wire in his ear that I have an appointment. I’m not certain that everyone ahead of me does. A woman in a fur coat with a red-dyed fur hat is putting on her mascara behind me and I ask her if she'll hold my place. "I'm not in line," she tells me in a thick Russian accent.
Out There
Word Count 1,134
When I was seven years old, I was given the children’s novel Harriet, the Spy. After reading only a few pages, I instantly knew I was meant to be her! Throwing down the book, I dashed into my mother’s office where she kept a stash of long , narrow reporter’s notebooks which could easily be held and had thick pages which flipped quickly so an ace reporter would never miss a quote. But I wasn’t planning on being a reporter. I was a spy. An occupation I was born to do since I was keenly observant and prided myself on reading the emotional temperature of my family. Not hard actually, either my parents were warring, or drinking and having a high old time.
Off I went into the street. It didn’t take long to spot someone who looked suspicious. A woman wearing electric stockings. I realise now that they were probably compression hose. But to me, they looked like they sparked and hummed. The hunt was on. Who was she? Why was she lurking around my neighbourhood? This was Quebec in the late sixties, revolution was in the air, bombs were a common occurrence, strangers were noted in my quiet Anglo nook of the city. Were her electric stockings somehow a threat? How could they not be?
More Lust than Wander
Word Count 953
Although I’ve done my share of wandering, notably in St. Barts, Santa Fe, Santa Cruz, St. Croix, the entire BVD, Oslo, London, Paris, San Francisco, Los Angeles, and basically every street in New York City, most of my wandering has been driven by my lustful eye. For what seems now like an incredibly short period of my life, I let physical desire guide me. I had sexual encounters with literally dozens of men. I did engage in a few actual relationships, but it’s more accurate to say I had conquests. One afternoon, very bored, I tried counting them. It was a very high number. I didn’t remember all the names, if I ever even knew names.
Four Tee Shirts
Word Count 805
This is just a test. This is not something awful, like a bucket list. And I'm not going to a desert island so I don't have to answer and then heed my answers to all those revealing questions about what to bring. I don't have to decide which song which flavor which bird which painting which delightful smell which memory which color which composer which person. I don't have to answer any questions about which animal. I'm not Noah's Ark. And anyway, I'm taking Mario, my dog. This isn't the end of the world. Things could be a lot worse.
In fact, things are a lot worse. Covid is spiking again and people are dying and the world is on fire and the icecap is melting and soon the bits of the world that aren't on fire will underwater, and there is no end in sight.
Oh. Hello, cold dark clinging despair.
Will My Wanders Never Cease?
Word Count 751
In 1991, as a fledgling newspaper reporter in the South, I investigated a newly launched, state-facility treatment program for “middle”-stage Alzheimer’s patients. Patients’ symptoms ranged from trouble remembering something as simple as their own names to losing track of time and place and experiencing hallucinations.
Perhaps the most well-known symptom is the progressed Alzheimer patient’s compulsion to wander.
Tattoo You
Word Count 908
Sixty! It sounded so substantial, so respectably old A milestone, and I wanted to mark the place. Get a tattoo popped into my head out of nowhere. Perfect. I would get my first tattoo. It would be a salamander, because I love the way they look, and how they feel like a little puddle of mercury in the palm of your hand, and plus they are magic. A young friend, Rachel, asked to come along and maybe get one for herself, so before we could chicken out, we dropped everything and hot-footed over to St. Mark’s Place right into a tattoo parlor. While we waited our turn, we stared at a young man who was having extravagant wings tattooed all across his back. It seemed a shame. So beautiful! Who would see it.
The Rain in Oaxaca
Word Count 2,520
It is pitch dark and pouring rain when I step out of the Oaxaca airport to look for Laura, the woman my landlord suggested I hire to pick me up and bring me to my new home in a country I’ve never been to.
“Laura will meet you by the sculpture of the guitar,” she said, but I don’t see a guitar. I see a giant bug. I speak very beginner Spanish and Laura speaks no English, but we WhatsApp each other and somehow her son finds me and brings me to a car so small, I expect 20 clowns to jump out. I don’t think my suitcase will fit. I’m sure I won’t fit. Laura’s son drops my suitcase easily into the vertical trunk and I squeeze into the back and search stealthily for a seatbelt, but find none.
Anatolian Days
Word Count 1,285
Because I was new to Turkey, I had many questions.
When do I switch to informal tense?
Was that a dancing bear I saw chained to a tree across from the Dolmabahçe?
How do you say, “Stop following me?”
Now, I had another question. One I had never posed. I was in a café with Maria and the man I would ask. His name was Cengiz. I had spent time kissing him. He wanted to sleep with me. Cengiz was 19 years old. Too young, really.
Maria and I were in our mid-20s. We’d lived abroad. We were veteran language learners. And over the next three months, we would be learning a new language on its home turf. All the parts of speech. Including the invisible, unspoken parts. The rules that have nothing to do with verbs or nouns. We were learning these rules daily, over tea. Mostly, by making mistakes.
Top of the World
Word Count 887
My first night in Tibet, a waiter brought soup and dumplings to our wooden table. I brought a spoonful to my lips, pretending the room wasn’t spinning. Suddenly, I puked directly into my bowl. “You didn’t make a sound,” my cousin’s wife noted, sympathetically. Fifteen years ago, getting into Tibet was as difficult as going to North Korea today. The Chinese government was taking over the autonomous region and discouraging Western visits, but my Nobel-prize-winning economist cousin and his wife had scored an official invitation and I was tagging along.
A Pilgrim’s Walk
Word Count 555
The days will all be the same—wake up, pack up, slip out the door before sunrise, walk, and walk some more. Stop to eat. Keep walking. Stop to rest. Keep walking. Find a place for the night. Take a shower, wash your socks and underwear, eat, sleep.
The days will all be different—literally EVERYTHING will be new.
The choices will be simple. Left, right or straight? The consequences will be immediate. Assume I will get lost.
The most basic task will make me a child: I don’t even know where the grocery store is, business hours remain a mystery, toothpaste and sunscreen are packaged identically and labelled deceptively, and I may need help counting out the change.
Normally, when a someone I don’t know shouts at me from across the street, I am scared. It’s a whole different deal when people—random strangers, old ladies, teenagers, the lot—wish me a buen camino or rush up to tell me that I’ve missed a turn.
Bed, Bath & Beyond
Word Count 102
Needing a break from house and husband, I
go shopping on a Sunday morning by
myself. I reach my destination in
about five minutes, then take maybe ten
to find the items on my list—a set
of towels and two lampshades. Next I get
in line to make my purchases.
Rick Steves And The Human Condition
Word Count 548
When I travel again, one thing won’t have changed. Sure, I’d be delighted to stay at the kind of plush, chocolate- or Xanax-on-your-pillow chateau that Conde Nast Traveler admires, if someone would be kind enough to pay my way. Yet otherwise, I’m a sucker for a Rick Steves travel guidebook. It’s not just that his recommended spare clean rooms and communal-table restaurants with white bean specials and German tourists are better fits for my budget, although they are.
What I love is the chance to follow Steves’ meticulous blow-by-blow instructions. With cheerful certainty, he is willing to micromanage a visit to Paris, Tallinn or wherever. He can chart your day in over one hundred guidebooks on European venues from Cork to Crete.