I turned 55 on Tuesday, and to celebrate Eiren baked me a lemon cake. We ate it sitting in the kingsize bed in her bedroom, where she has been essentially living since shattering her kneecap in October. Robin joined us, as she has many times before, for this early evening cake party on what we months ago dubbed “the raft.”
The cake itself was fantastic. Two dense layers of moist crumb infused with the juice of five lemons – an improbable, tropical amount of citrus for January in Chicago. But the point was really to take a ride together on the raft. All three of us have been shipwrecked on dry land these past months, our chances at adventure clipped by injury and illness. We ate our cake and compared our scars and drifted down rivers of memory, the raft the vessel carrying us safely from past experience to the shores of future possibilities.
Five Januarys ago, the week of my 50th birthday, I traveled to Norway with Sheila to witness the miracle that was Soup & Bread: Oslo – an event spun off by a local musician from our Soup & Bread events in Chicago. Jet lagged that first night we marveled at the strapping Norwegians fresh from their evening ski who had schussed up to the club, leaned their skis against the wall, and in their beautiful sweaters joined us to sup on soup. How did we get here, we wondered, bleary eyed? It seemed, like the best travel, both improbable and inevitable.
The rest of the six-day trip we wandered the snowy city, seeing the sights: the Viking museum, the Vigeland Park, the Museum of the Norwegian Resistance. On my birthday itself we took a sauna inside a shipping container on the edge of the Oslo fjord. And then, after a shot of aquavit and following the sauna guy’s gentle suggestion, I jumped into the fjord itself.
In the shaky video that exists of this moment I emerge from the water whooping and exhilarated. The icy water hit my sauna-steamed skin like a blast of good medicine, cleansing and fortifying. Out with the old! In with the new! And that Norwegian baptism did in truth inaugurate a year of adventure. On the way home we stopped to meet Andrea in Reykjavik, and for the remainder of 2018 I was on a plane every month. I traveled to New Orleans, New York, and New Hampshire; Jacksonville, Charleston, Los Angeles, Cleveland, and Detroit. I went to to see my family in Seattle twice and I traveled to Puerto Rico five times, for work and for play.
I did not travel with a companion on any of these excursions, save for the time I met my mother at O’Hare and we flew on to Vermont together. On the other side of each journey I met friends, colleagues, or family, but psychologically I was on my own. At some point about halfway through this peripatetic year it occurred to me that I might be running away. I for sure felt restless in Chicago. I was wrestling with a book project perpetually on the verge of implosion; I was (despite all this running around) deeply broke. And while I was rich in friends my intimate life was lonely. Travel – even a road trip to Cleveland – soothed these aches, and reminded me of my right to my own life. Each time the plane breathed into the soft pulse of liftoff, it reminded me that I was writing a new chapter in a biography to be read only by myself.
That year on the road I made peace with loneliness and at least some of my now-fossilized bad decisions. I no longer longed for love and I no longer wrote speculative fantasies of roads not taken. I also in that year packed a steamer trunk full of memories, many of which came in handy a short time later when covid grounded the world. In the early months of the pandemic I had the distinct feeling that I would forevermore be sitting around a campfire with my friends, pulling memories out of the trunk one by one, telling stories to remind ourselves who we were before the apocalypse.
The other day around the campfire on the raft, Eiren pulled out a story from her trip to Italy this past spring. It was such a good story! We laughed and gasped and were fortified, and I realized in that moment that my own storehouse of stories has not been adequately replenished these past five years. The trunk is so light right now I fear I might float away. My adventures have been domestic, in the most narrow sense of the term: I did fall in love. I got married even, and I set up a new home. And of course I got cancer. Rich experiences all, but wry tales of your trip to IKEA – or your adventures in the chemo chair – will only go so far. I mean, the last time I tried to get on a plane I wound up instead in the ER.
But that’s going to change soon. Weather and Delta Airlines permitting I’m heading back to Puerto Rico in two weeks to write and swim and see old friends. In March I’ll be in Seattle, for work, and then again in May, for family. I just signed up to go to rowing camp this summer. And Paul and I are making plans for that long-delayed honeymoon – to Montreal? Greece? Stockholm?
Confronted with a cake full of candles on the raft, I was asked what I was going to wish for.
“Everything,” I said – and then Robin, from the pit of her solar plexus, channelling her inner Howard Dean, said YES! And we laughed and laughed, gasping and gulping and bent over, no words, laughing until we nearly peed our pants and I blew out the flames. It was like cannonballing into a fjord, bracing and true.
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How wonderful!!! Happy double nickel, martha!!! And may your wish come true! Breathing a deep breath of welcome all the new things! for you. cheers!
Once again—as always—amazing.