Transitions

The transition home has been rough. Rough in the sort of way that only comes after living a year experiencing things most of the world doesn't in a lifetime. Luxurious rough.

We flew into New York with our traveler's minds. We had a general direction, ideas about a timeline, a few things we knew we wanted to do. Just like our arrival in any of the twenty countries we visited this past year. Eat steak at my dad's. Pick up my car. Call the car insurance company so that I can legally drive it again. Road trip South, visiting family and friends along the way. We lingered in Brooklyn longer than initially planned. Same in D.C. Perhaps it was to savor the final bites of our year-long international feast. Perhaps it was the children—Charlotte and Arabelle in Brooklyn, Amos and Amina in D.C.. They seem to emit a gravitational pull far beyond their small mass. Or perhaps, after a year when best friends are simply somebody we had met before—spent an evening or two with on one or two continents—it was just nice to spend time with people I have known for decades. Yes, people we have known for decades and somehow get to meet newly again after our travels, as each of us has grown slightly.

It was glorious to reconnect with family and friends and discover how funny years are measured—the length of our hair, the emerging mobility and language of a child, and that great American identity marker: new jobs. I would be lying to say we came home simply to see our family and friends. We came home because we needed to make some money. If we didn't, we would probably still be traveling on through Southern Asia, New Zealand, Australia and Tierra del Fuego north through South and Central America. Instead, we put those places on the future travel list. But even as we approach two months since we were greeted to America by George W. Bush's airport legacy greeters (TSA security), it seems that might be more of a bucket list than a continuation of our travels.

Our efforts at ellipses seem to have ended in an exclamation point. We drove south with all the same questions we have asked ourselves in a year. Could we live here? Time and again, the answer seemed to be yes. Ultimately, we have learned we could live anywhere. And, for now, New Orleans is our anywhere. And that is where it started to get rough.

Two large dresser drawers full of mail—far more bills than checks and more junk than anything. Termite infestation. A house that seemed to require active reclamation from our house-sitter and the unchecked sprawl of a year's worth of stuff. Last year's taxes to be filed. An empty apartment to be rented. Cleaned, repaired, advertised, then rented. Tenants that seemed like they missed me. Hugs upon my return soon became calls about things that were broken, not the least of which was the charred stove hood and charcoal dusted walls of a minor kitchen grease fire. It must have happened when I was in Malawi and took the tenant a few weeks of my being home to get up the courage to tell me amidst promises of repairing it herself that I quickly dismissed. The bamboo grove that had taken over my backyard and starting growing inside the house. Its a far cry from the bamboo I admired in southeast Asia. Bamboo that you could make into anything with little more than a machete: houses, food, glasses, toys. Nope, here bamboo and its sprawling root systems are a pest. An itchy infectious pest to be removed from the urban landscape, except for in a few lush decorative patches on somebody else's property.

And then there's all of our stuff. After a year of living with what we carried on our backs, 1,500 square feet of stuff seemed absurd, especially the stuff that has been tucked away in closets and attics for years. So we spent our first days cleaning and throwing things away, while we had fresh eyes and unattached bodies. Three days and a dozen contractor bags later, it was time to turn our focus to the inevitable: this whole business of finding a way for our bank account to increase rather than decrease before the comma disappears from the current balance.

In this, there were some pleasant surprises. An escrow overage check from the mortgage company tucked in amongst credit card offers and brightly-colored mailings from collection agencies about bills I never knew existed. Never mind that the check was no good any more. It had expired more than 100 days ago while we were on a boat in the backwaters of Kerala, India. We had bought cell phones as our first stop in New Orleans—before we even laid eyes on our house. I could call and get them to issue another one. And call the collection agencies and explain, negotiate, and pay with a credit card at the beginning of its billing cycle to buy a bit more time. And there were other ways to get money in the mail to us. Phone rebate. Traveler's insurance reimbursements. Tax returns, hopefully, some day when I can get past the mental hurdle of this tiny word. Perhaps it is the x at the end that evokes the repulsion. One letter (x) that contains the sounds of three (cks) and seems to evoke more discomfort. Maybe that is why hammocks aren't spelled with an x. Too comfortable.

Our plan was simple: work together as consultants for local non-profit organizations. We even had potential work here in New Orleans that we had begun to line up while we were still in South Africa. But what it would actually look like and how much work there would be was uncertain. And uncertainty at home feels far more uncomfortable than uncertainty abroad. Perhaps it is America, where we make it our business to predict and be certain about everything. Perhaps it is the certainty of the mortgage bill, our new phone bill, the car payment, insurance bills—our predictable monthly payments to protect us from an uncertainty that most likely will never happen. So, amidst our cleaning and unpacking and showing the downstairs apartment, we started to line up meetings. Meetings to say we are back, share a story or two from the road, eat a meal at somebody else's expense, introduce our new business, and look for opportunities that will lead to income. And, while we aren't in a place to be picky, ideally that income would be generated from exciting and meaningful work that supports our hopes for a new, healthier, more balanced lifestyle than the one we remembered.

“How was your trip?” “Where did you go?” “What was your favorite place?” were soon replaced by harder, more unfamiliar questions. “What services do you provide?” “How are you marketing yourselves?” After a year of only buying, here we are trying to figure out how to sell again. How to sell ourselves, even as we are sorting out who we are now and what exactly we want to sell. As consultants, we soon discover, what we sell are relationships, experience and expertise. After a year of emptying our heads, coming closer to the acceptance, wonder and peace of knowing nothing, we would have to know something. Not just know something, know it well enough to want to tell other people how they should do it.

But, I guess it is like riding a bike. Muscle memory kicks in. The suit comes out of the closet. And clients emerge. And so, we try to savor the last moments of unemployment. We pay a weekly visit to the local farmer's market that we always wanted to try but were too busy. We try new recipes and cook in our own kitchen. We discover a great Johnny Winters album that my mom bought almost fifty years ago in our newly acquired record collection from my dad. We leave on Thursday for Annette's parents in Mississippi and don't come back until Monday or Tuesday. We go blueberry picking. We do yard-work at two o'clock on Thursday. We aspire to make a living without sacrificing the peace, presence of mind and focus on the important things we found this past year.

Coming (Home) to America

I wasn't sure if we were going to make it around the world. After four hours of sleeping in Saigon airport and another eight hours on a plane, I found out. A Jewish guy from New York interrupted his ramblings about his suicidal children to answer my question. “Are we flying east or west?”

“North,”he answered. “North and east. Over Alaska.” And so the success of our year-long trip around the world rested on the flight path of a China Eastern Airlines 737. And the parent who didn't seem to feel any responsibility for both of his teenage children attempting suicide confirmed it.

Despite spending nights and days on buses this past year, I found myself quickly growing restless on the plane. Even the buses stop every few hours for bathrooms and food. On those buses, we are buoyed by the excitement of a new place at the end of the ride. This plane was taking us back to where we started. Back to JFK airport, where the international leg of our trip started on a July 6 Iceland Air flight to Paris via Reykjavik. But also back to the comforts of family, reunions with friends, and all the things we learned to love and miss about our lives in the United States. Things like my dad's steaks, baked potatoes, North Mississippi blues, Miss Annie's barbecue pulled pork sandwiches, Tuesday night Kermit Ruffins performances at Bullet's in New Orleans. The list goes on.

We are greeted by the impatience and complaints of New Yorkers in the customs line. It doesn't seem to matter to them that, as U.S. Passport holders, we get our own line. Our taxi driver is from Delhi. He owns multiple properties in India and manages to spend at least two months a year there. I understand how he has the means as I watch the meter creep up incrementally to $57. And we barely crossed one borough. The two of us rode across three states of India in a sleeper train for half that price. Welcome to America.

We sleep intermittently in the comfort of my sister's family. I wake at 4 a.m to walk the empty streets of Bay Ridge. Robins hop around slowly under their fat rusty winter coats. Water beads on the tips of maple buds. Dryers vent into driveways with the scent of fabric softener and a puff of steam in the cool air. Trees paint the sidewalks with white and yellow and pink blossoms. Tulips neatly garnish front walkways. I walk past the monstrosity of Fort Hamilton High School, where I can smell the moisture of the pool. I look over its shoulder into the chilly wind that blows steadily from the river as it descends past the Verrazano Bridge, Staten Island, and the edge of New Jersey before it meets the Atlantic Ocean. I wander on in no particular direction. I notice the house next to the school. It reminds me of Gaudi's Hansel and Gretel house in Parc Guiell in Barcelona. I half-expect a hobbit to wander out of it. But it is 5 o'clock Saturday morning. New York and its hobbits are still asleep. I walk on where I recognize the park where I went sledding with my brother-in-law and nieces after a huge New Year's snow storm. The park came to life as children rejoiced in the snow and New York parents relished the opportunity to introduce their children to the wonders of the winter outdoors. I realize now the memory will stay with Uncle Ham long after my cute little nieces grow up to become worried adults.

As I walk, I reflect on our last stops in Cambodia and Vietnam. Mostly, I think about the atrocities. Atrocities that merit far more than a blog entry and end up being far less. Pol Pot killing one fourth of his nation's population in four years with crude farming instruments in the name of claiming power for the peasants. And the atrocity of the international community recognizing Pol Pot's Khmer Rouge as the official government of Cambodia long after they had been thrown from power and retreated to the hills. I think of the stately tree in the Killing Fields against which babies' heads were smashed. And how peaceful the place feels today, despite the bone shards, teeth and pieces of clothing the ground secretes like tears struggling to express a pain that is beyond words.

I think of the school in Phnom Penh. The school that looked so much like so many schools whose exterior halls I have walked in New Orleans. As I walked those hallways in New Orleans, I was struck by the atrocities of a failed education system built as ramparts against the crumbling of Southern legal segregation before it gave way to a newer, more modern era of school segregation. There in Phnom Penh, the school became a torture center. It's classrooms are empty except thousands of photos. Photos of emaciated bodies strapped to iron bed frames. Thousands of faces, some as young as four years old, as they were checked into the S-21 torture camp. Some were smiling. I wondered if they smiled because they didn't know what was going to happen to them. Or did those smiles signify rebellion, or resolute faith? Or was it simply years of training that you smile for photos, almost unconsciously, in their last days of consciousness?

I think about the War Remnants Museum in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam. What I grew up calling “The Vietnam War” there is known as “The American War.” I quickly recognized familiar names like Dow and Monsanto beside horrifying images of the impacts of napalm, and a rainbow of chemical agents, of which orange is only the most famous. Most striking were the images of children born in the last decade with major birth defects, four generations after Vietnam was sprayed with chemicals to remove the very jungles that appeared to be defeating the Americans. I cried at a well-crafted letter to President Obama from a young crippled woman referencing his letter to his own children. She was appealing for compensation from the American chemical companies for these persistent health problems, an appeal the U.S. Supreme Court denied the Vietnamese people as they wrestled with the results of these untested chemicals half a century later. I remembered my former life, wondering what non-profit communications person helped her craft her appeal.

After two hours of walking, the combination of the damp cold and reflections on humanity's transgressions have chilled me. I hasten back to my sister's for much anticipated New York bagels and lox.

My sister and brother-in-law made a year-long around-the-world trip of their own more than fifteen years ago. We welcome their advice about what to expect upon our return. We welcome their cooking, their two beautiful girls. My brother-in-law, Rob, even helps me identify a song I heard at the end of a rainy night in Amsterdam at a warm pub with a cat in the window. There we ate old cheese and sausage while drinking Belgian beer and welcomed the wind down from a long night. It's Eddie Harris and Les McCann, “Compared to What.” The song's rhythm had been meandering along just below my consciousness for the better part of the past year. I had come to feel like that song was a stately entrance way to some place special within me. Rob identified it with a few mumbles hinting at the rhythm of the lyrics and my belief that it was a live recording.

We soon discover that not much changes in adults in a year. A year is better measured in the lives of children, who are noticeably taller. Little girls that loved Justin Beiber now hate him. My nieces who never wore anything but dresses now only wear pants. My nephews who were boys when we left are now clearly young men. Apparently, puberty happens in a year. And swaddled babies now walk. Babies who uttered a few words are now toddlers who speak in full sentences. But mostly, my American friends and families are as busy as ever, bound up in their own lives. Surely, it won't be long before we join them in a tightly scheduled world of our own.