Things have not been this out of control in a long time.
I exaggerate. Things aren’t really that bad, but here’s how it is.
When I told my teaching friend that I couldn’t get off the couch, she replied with the most comforting words ever.
“That makes perfect sense. You’re not getting off the couch because you won’t have a couch to be on for a long while.”
She’s right.
Who cares if I’m binge-watching good and bad television and avoiding the list of endless tasks prior to my departure on a very long trip?
I’m protesting the situation I’ve put myself in.
It all started with an invitation to join one of my dearest friends on a trip to the South of France and the Basque Country in celebration of her eightieth birthday. Wouldn’t miss that for the world, even if it is in summer.
Then there was the goal of crossing the Atlantic on a sailboat, which is a June thing. Finding a boat to crew on took a lot of effort.
Then there was the matter of the timing of it all. I’d arrive in the Azores only to fly home for a week, then turnaround and return to Europe. Didn’t make any sense. Just stay in Europe.
That’s where the third piece of the puzzle came in— killing a week in Paris with my Madrid-based friends. I know. Poor me.
But I really don’t want to be away from home for seven weeks: I have two garden plots that need attention; I don’t want to miss yoga; I want to keep up with my library books; I don’t want to sail across the Atlantic with people I don’t know. Plus, I don’t do well in the heat, and summer in Europe is hot and alarmingly un-air-conditioned.
So here’s how the feelings manifest. The used dishes do not make it to the sink. I smell the aroma of rotting apples and realize it’s probably the wrapper from yesterday’s popsicle. I keep flip-flopping about my plans. Skip the transatlantic?
In the end it’s easier to just keep things as they are and follow through.
Meanwhile it’s difficult to remember an absence from home of this duration. It might be forty-five years, in nineteen-eighty when I signed up for a twenty-eight-day Outward Bound course on Hurricane Island in Maine which was then followed by a six-week language immersion course at Middlebury College School of Italian in Vermont.
The Outward Bound portion of the summer went swimmingly. Waking up in a tent in May in Maine at five-thirty in the morning, running three miles around the island, and jumping into the icy waters of Penobscot Bay invigorated me. The Vermont experience? Not so much. If you ever want to know one of the hottest ways to spend a summer in New England, it’s living in a dorm with no air-conditioning in a valley in Vermont. But I did learn to speak Italian. Plus, I made wonderful friends, and I loved my Italian professor whose name I no longer remember. He was a kind Mormon with a good sense of humor who taught me well, despite my constant marveling about the absence of caffeine and alcohol in his life. Why learn Italian if you can’t order un caffè at the corner bar in Piazza San Marco?
My professor tolerated my incredulity better than my vegetarian Outward Bound instructor whom my twenty-year-old self asked, “What do you do about dinner parties?”
Dinner parties. I was twenty years old, but somehow I knew they would be what I would enjoy in life, even though I don’t always host as many as I’d like and still lack a proper dining room.
And the vegetarian thing? As much as I’d like to be one, the inconvenience and difficulty still dogs me.
That summer at Middlebury I was hot and miserable despite new friends and the joy of acquiring a new language. After morning classes, I’d walk the considerable distance from my dorm to the town grocery store in the heat of the day to buy a box of Freihofer’s chocolate chip cookies in an attempt to comfort myself.
God knows how much weight I put on.
When my parents picked me up from Middlebury, we drove to Newport, where they had lived in nineteen forty-four, the year they were married. My father, who had suffered from amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) since I was born, had really started to fail physically, and I had a front row seat to the beginning of his demise. He didn’t die until fourteen years later, but you could see the disease robbing him at a slow and steady pace.
My adolescent depression persisted for decades, although I managed to graduate from competitive schools and secure jobs at which I excelled. Maybe my people-pleasing masked the precariousness of my mental health to all but a few.
Things are very different now, and despite how much I’m digging in my heels about being away, this summer’s experience will no doubt be excellent.
If it’s not, you’ll hear about it.
Stand by.
More to come.
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Hi Sheila. Good luck. I love reading your posts. Wow your friend an 80 year old going on that kind of trip. I’m 80 (hard for me to believe sometimes) but that would be more than I could handle and I’m still working til end of July. Wooowho! . Can’t wait to read post trip. Take care of yourself and have fun. Susan Frey.
I love this post! And I sympathize re sitting on the couch. I've been on the road for much of June, and now that I'm home, it takes a crowbar to pry me off the porch. :-)