From Russia With Love - Travel Memories

Little Prince lived alone on a tiny planet no larger than a house. . 

The suitcase is empty, but it is not. At the bottom, there is a small piece of paper with some writing on it.  I read it, and I smile.

The bag is opened, and some toiletries are spread around the hotel bathroom.  Another day on the road. The wandering spirit runs in my blood; passed on from my Air Force father to me. It seems like ever since I got a control yoke in my hand, I've been wandering across miles of land, across rivers and towns in whatever way I can, be it a dromedary-like transport plane, raggedly land rover, or sway-back mule.

I have an anchor, over time it's been a large house, a small house, it's been simply a suitcase and someone I love.  But when I'm there, I am thoroughly happy, for that anchor, instead of being a confinement, is simply the base from which I move, a fulcrum that amplifies the effects of my motion, the beat of my heart.

St. Expurey said, "He who would travel happily must travel light". And so I did, the earliest memories little more than the remembered feel of the starched uniform shirt I wore, the dense, oily smell of jet fuel lingering on the tongue like smoke. It seems as if all my early years were reflected in those moving airplanes' windows. I see my reflection, my past, through bug splayed glass that tinted the world bright.

The airplane, the destination, and the years changed, as did the landscape of my career, but something things never changed. Days in an aircraft traveling far. Miles and hours spent watching the landscape, silver grain elevators, red-winged birds, mountains formed of ice and fluid need, and rivers without borders, blending into a bright diorama of life racing past. The world looks different from above, clouds massive and dark, looming up like a target in a gun sight, looking twice the size of an ordinary man.

I have spent half of my life, it seems, on the way to somewhere. I have watched a hundred cumulus clouds erupt, the mass assassination of mayflies, and the disappearance of a slice of cherry pie at a tiny airport diner, and the journey was only beginning.

In each day comes another opportunity for adventure. The ride to the hotel was something to remember in and of itself. A shuttle service, stopping at several hotels on the way. The driver was sullen and demonstrated why driving was his second language. You know how when most people drive, certainly professional drivers, they brake using an increase in pressure on the brake pedal to come to a smooth stop. Not Mr. Shuttle. The only brake technique he used was to stomp on the brake, let up, let the car roll, and stomp again. It would take four or five of these stomps to equal one normal braking action. No traffic, heavy traffic, it made no difference.

I started to feel like a bobblehead doll, and the 25 dollars I saved over a taxi was starting to look like one of those small decisions with great, oversized repercussions. But I should have been more patient. Concentrating on braking while texting while driving in heavy traffic was hard.

I simply made sure my seatbelt was fastened and then bent down as if into a stiff wind, horns of the impatient exploding into the rain-split asphalt that opened and closed with opportunity. Like all traffic in big cities, we carried on, sharp with speed, then trickling to a standstill, the road dipping into the fog like a hand cleaving water, the headlights showing the gray bulk of streams of cars coming down the hill like rain.

When the last guest got off, and it was just me, he quit texting and had a series of increasingly heated exchanges in his mother tongue with his dispatcher about how he only got  the equivalent of 47 US dollars in fares for this trip, and he wanted to get a number one spot when he got back to the airport. (Actually, sir, you got 68 dollars in fares, one you did not log and pocketed. I notice things like that.)

The arguing got more heated. I am not fluent in languages. I can listen and relate small things in several languages that come in handy, Russian, Chinese, and Farsi, just enough to know when it's a good time to get out of Dodge or when happy hour is almost over. It comes in handy, the knowing, the looking, as I catch quick glimpses of other drivers in the failing sunlight, faces fixed and grim as they fight to get upstream.

The van driver, still yelling into the phone while almost whacking several people on bicycles,  finally stopped in front of my hotel. I paid him the fare plus a 15 percent tip. He did NOT look happy, expecting much more from the American Redhead in nice clothes.

He muttered something under his breath about what he had to do to get a big tip, and I replied -

"Вам надо научиться использовать торможения." (you need to learn how to use braking)

He was still standing there, mouth agape, when I went to my suite.

But I had arrived. The hotel bulked long and dark against the city sky, but inside was golden warmth, a bite of a fresh apple, and a much-needed bottle of water. Sitting still for a minute, taking care of the aching neck, and soon it was time to meet my partner for this assignment while we went over notes for tomorrow's business over a light meal.

After a short walk back to the hotel, my partner ensured I got to my room safely. I made a couple of phone calls to loved ones to let them know I was in and safe. EJ always worries when I travel, even when I can't tell him where I'm going.  So do friends, and I try and keep in touch. Then I took a long bath in a tub so deep you could hide a Mastodon in it and slept until 6:30 in the morning. Unfortunately, it was 6:30 in the morning where I wanted to be, not where I was at.

So I got up, made coffee, and watched a stain of light snare itself between steel and rain, spreading until the stain grew light and the light became morning.

By choice or not, travel is part of my life.  But travel brings something to you that people who live in the insular world of their hometown their whole lives may miss. It pushes your boundaries. When you travel, you can become invisible if that is what you choose. I like that. I like to be a quiet observer. Walking alone along the edge of another ocean, as it stretches away into space with its illusion of freedom. Strolling through the celestial hush of a square that has seen generation after generation, the sun glinting off marble where the monotonous rain has washed it bright. What stories would that old building tell? What makes these people who they are?

You don't have to understand the language spoken, only the language of the streets, the scents, the stone. Without understanding a word around you, the language becomes a musical background for watching the water flow onto the shore or a leaf blowing in the wind, calling nothing from you.

You may have work that takes much of your time, yet still, in this strange place, there are hours open to you.  You don't have a lawn to mow or bills to pay.  There is only life, simple and inescapable as an empty hallway, where you can leave behind for a moment the burdens that you freely assume and carry as bright and ambitiously as brass. For this moment, you are simply a creature of choice, free to visit stately buildings, savor a cup of coffee, or merely go watch the trains.  If only for this moment, you're open as a child to receive all of the world, not just your own.

It is all there for the taking, multicolored flowers in bright density, the smell of fresh bread baking, laid out like fabric on the ground, which you pick up and wrap around you, drawing in a breath through the scented cloth. This fabric, this essence of a place, contains both the dead and the living, the blooms of lush flowers, the decay of a building, and the smells that are both the death and the birth of a city. You are a historian, you are a hunter free to explore and seek and find and then return home bringing memories to lay on your doorstep.

From the memories come words.  They may be only in your head; they may be on paper.  But they tell a story composed of past journeys on ancient rails washed clean by wind and rain and tempered by time, written to the mournful sound of a train whistle echoing through ancient memories and newfound dreams.  The words strung out like cars, beyond which wait the world and life, hope unrestrained and incontrovertible.  They recall the memory of it all, moving fast now, wind rushing past like flood, leaving you breathless.

The suitcase is open on a simple wooden stand. It is empty, but in it, there is so much, the smell of crushed sage as I bounced across the desert in a jeep, the wood-smoked burnt woods of autumn, the smell of untouched ground after a rain, the rich earthy scent of something being lit that had for so long been cold.

Belated Blessings

Whenever I went back West, my brother would always welcome me with a couple of balloons tied to one of my stuffed animals on the bed. That room was unchanged from my teens, with the rainbows painted when I was 14 out of the horrid colored 70's leftover paint (I really DON’T want to remember the bathroom painted in that aqua).  If it was my birthday, I’d get a really BIG balloon. ALWAYS, a few days late, for my brother had made a habit of finding the silliest “belated b-day” card he could find.  I still have those cards and the last two balloons he left me, emptied of air and spirit, carefully folded into a box of letters, cards, and Barkley’s collar.

After his death, there were no more balloons. My last trip there was to an empty house that had been sold. Nothing at all was left but the walls that held so much within them.

The span of that empty space is as wide as our grief.

On that day, I took one last look into the garage to ensure all the boxes were gone. It was hard to see inside, my eyes misty. I breathed in the bracing density of cold air laced with pine and motor oil, a smell I loved even after all those years. It was the smell of morning’s breath, full of wood and silence.

Before I closed the garage door, I stood for just a moment, looking deep into this familiar space and out onto the driveway shaded by Mom’s favorite tree. For just a moment, the emptiness was filled again, replaced by a memory of hands and tools and laughter. I could almost see my big brother there; the shifting green shimmer of persistent leaves created an illusion of shadow, of form within, working away until Mom called us in for supper.

It was in that driveway he finally collapsed, tending to Dad as we both had always done. We later asked ourselves if he’d tended more to himself and less to the family, had he shared the pain he was hiding, would he have lived a few months longer? But that’s just who he was, always a submariner, always on quiet watch; the risk and the fear of death second to those things which men store within the depths of a human heart.

That he left me just weeks after we lost Barkley made it that much more difficult.

The tragedy was not that my brother was gone so soon, but that he was no longer here to see what remained—the hearts he repaired, the things he built that can’t be contained in one’s hands, the memories he left.  He went full speed up to the end, not wanting to extinguish his thirsting heart but only to slake it.

As I left Dad’s house that last time, I looked up to the heavens and told my brother that loved him. As I backed out of the drive, I looked at the house one final time - all of those memories of him and I seemed to condense in it, as if the house alone were the source of them, shining from it from that big picture window, glimpsed just for a second as my car pulled away, like that 10 point whitetail you see the split second after he sees you, when he's already gone, even as you yearn for him to return.

10 years have come and gone, and another birthday, this one spent alone as my husband was on the road. Then, on Saturday, a few days after my birthday, with only sunshine in the forecast, a sudden storm came up, blowing wind and rain for a few brief minutes.  Partner in Grime walked in from the garage, Sunny, our new Rescue Lab, barking at something he had in his hand. “Is that for me?” I asked. “I think so", he said, "but I didn’t get it for you.” I could only stare at what he held  - a huge birthday balloon.

He shook his head as he tried to explain. “That storm must have blown it in;  it was outside of the back door in the driveway. There was enough water on it that it didn’t float away again.”

He probably didn’t understand why that made me cry, but I knew then that someone up above had sent me a belated birthday message with a little wind from an angel's wings.

-Brigid

Birthday Musings

I turn 66 in a few days.  Hard to believe. I started this blog 17 years ago, I looked 35, felt like 20, and sometimes acted like I was 4. People have come and gone, some by choice, some not. I've lost my stepmom, my dad, my brother, my step-brother, and my nephew. I've met my biological sisters (one is an oncology professional who drives a race car for fun, and the other is an engineer; imagine that). I've said goodbye to Barkley, Abby Lab, and Lorelei Lab. I've adopted a rescue Lab puppy -Sunny (alter ego BITEY DOG!). But I still have PA State Cop, Og, Mr. B., Dot, and Tam in my saved numbers and some recent text messages - just in case I need help "hiding the body".  And for 11 years, I've been Mrs. Engineering Johnson, which requires very little patience but a LOT of sandwiches.

All I can offer by way of wisdom in this, the passing of another year, is this. I’ve heard so many people say: “I’ll do that when I’m older," "When I lose twenty pounds," or "When I’m retired.” We go through life saying, “I would, but it probably wouldn’t work out,” or, “ I’d like to, but . . .” We too often base our actions on an artificial future, painting a life picture based on an expectancy that time is more than sweat, tears, heat, and mirage.

You can’t count on anything. For out of the blue, fate can come calling. When Partner in Grime and I lost Barkley, it was after a brief but valiant battle against bone cancer and a weekend of pain we couldn’t keep at bay for him. In a flash, life robbed me even of the power to grieve for what was ending. 

I think back to when my brother and I were kids: going down a turbulent little river with little more than an inner tube and youth, risking rocks and rapids and earth just to see what was around the bend of that forest we’d already mapped out like Lewis and Clark. The water was black and silver, fading swirls of deep current rising to the surface like a slap, fleeting and gravely significant as if something stirred beneath, unhappy to be disturbed from its slumber, making its presence known. A fish, perhaps, or simply fate.

I think of the true story of the woman whose parachute didn’t open on her first jump, and she fell more than a mile and lived—to change her whole life to pursue her dreams. Did she sense something as she boarded that plane, looking into the sky at a danger that she could not articulate, that she could not see? Or was she unaware until that moment when she pulled the cord, and nothing happened, as her life rushed up to her with a deep groaning sound? What was it like in that moment, that perception of her final minutes, what taste, what color, what sound defined her soul as it prepared to leave? 

In the paint section of a hardware store the other weekend, looking for a brick-colored paint to spruce up a storage caddy in the kitchen, I noticed the colors.  The yellows were the color I had painted my room as a teen. I noticed the greens, so many of them some resembling the green of my parents’ house in the ’60s and ’70s, yet not being exactly the same color. The original was one that you’d not see in a landscape, only in a kitchen with avocado appliances while my Mom sang as she made cookies.

I remember my brother and I racing through the house, one of us a soldier, the other a spy, friends forever, stopping only long enough for some of those cookies, still warm. Holding that funky green paint sample, I can see it as if it were yesterday - memories only hinted at and held there in small squares of color.

What is it about things from the past that evoke such responses? For some, it’s a favorite photo, a piece of clothing worn to a special event, or a particular meal. Things that carry with them the sheer impossible quality of perfection that has not been achieved since. Things that somehow trigger in us a response of wanting to go back to that time and place when you were safe and all was well. But even as you try to recapture the memory, it eludes you, caught in a point in your mind between immobility and motion, the taste of empty air, the color of the wind. 

One morning, while out in a hangar checking out a pilot friend’s home-built project, I had one of those moments. It was an old turboprop lumbering down the taxiway with all the grace of a water buffalo. It wasn’t the aircraft that caught my eye; it was one of those planes that carried neither speed nor sleek beauty but rather served as the embodiment of inertia overcome by sufficient horsepower. No, it was the smell of jet fuel that took me back to years of pushing the limits, not really caring if I came home, only that the work was done without my breaking beyond re-use, something I was trusted with. Until one day, while my heart was beating despite being broken unseen beneath starched white cotton, my aircraft made a decided effort to kill me. 

It was not the “Well, I’ll make a weird sound and flash some red lights at you and see what you do, an aircraft’s equivalent of the Wicked Witch of the North cackling: “Care for a little fire Scarecrow?” No, it was a severe vibration that shook the yoke right out of my hand as we accelerated through 180 knots on the initial climb when, unbeknownst to me, a small piece of metal on the aircraft’s tail had come loose and was flapping in the breeze.

At that moment, as I heard the silent groaning of the earth below, I thought, I do not wish to die—and I fought back. In that moment of slow and quiet amazement that can come at the edge of sound, I found in myself a renewed desire to live, recognizing the extent and depth of that desire to draw another breath and share that soft, warm breath with another. Today is a memory that months from now could be one of those memories, not of fear, but of triumph. 

You may look back and see this day, the friends you were with, the smile on your face, the simple tasks you were doing together. Things so basic in their form to at this time simply be another chore: cleaning, fixing, an ordinary day, while children played with a paper plane fueled by laughter and the hangar cat drowsed in the sunlight. It might be a day you didn’t even capture on film, no small squares of color left to retain what you felt as you worked and laughed together, there in those small strokes of color, those small brushes of hope as you wait for your best friend to join you.

Seventeen years from now, you too may look at yourself in the mirror, at the fine wrinkles formed from dust, time, and tears around your eyes, at a few grays in your hair, and you will think back to this day, the trivial things that contain the sublime. On that day, so far beyond here and now, you may look around you; that loved one you were waiting for is no longer present, and you’ll want it all back. Want it as bad as the yearning for a color that is not found in nature, in the taste of something for which you search and ache, acting on the delusion that you can recreate it, those things that haunt the borders of almost-knowing. You touch the mirror, touch your face, and wish you’d laughed more, cared less of what others thought, dove into those feelings that lapped at the safe little edges of your life and leaped into the astonishing uncertainty. 

My brother spent years running silent and deep under the ocean, visiting places I can only guess at as he will not speak of it, a code about certain things I share with him. But I knew the name "Operation Ivy Bells". He understood testing the boundaries of might and the cold depths to which we travel in search of ourselves. On his last nights, he and I talked, but not of those days under the ocean. We both were aware of grave matters of honor but do not speak of them, not even with each other. I’d sit as he talked about Dad and how he hoped Dad would live to be a hundred (he made it to 101), how he hoped he would be there to take care of him, even as I watched 120 pounds leave his frame as he went through another round of chemo and radiation. 

He talked until his eyes closed, only his labored breath letting me know he was still with me. I could hear the rise and fall of his chest as he tried to push up from the waters of the sea, his unfathomed flesh still so buoyant, if only in spirit, as the cold water lapped against him.

I, too, have had more than one day where I stood outside on a pale crescent of beaten earth and breathed deeply of that cold. On those days, I felt every ache in my muscles; my skin was hot under the sun, the savage, fecund smell of loss in the air, lying heavily in the loud silence. Somewhere in the distance would come a soft clap of thunder; overhead clouds strayed deliberately across the earth, disconnected from mechanical time. I’d rather be elsewhere; the smell was simply that of kitchen and comfort, the sounds only that of laughter.

But I knew how lucky I was to simply be, in that moment, and alive. I’d go home on such nights and pour a drink, which now is simply a cup of strong Scottish tea, and prepare a small meal. I’d eat it slowly, letting the sweetness and salt stay on my tongue. For me, there would be no quick microwaved meal eaten with all the detachment of someone at a bar tossing back a handful of stale nuts with his beer. No, I wished to taste and savor the day, the warm layers of it, this day that had been someone’s last. - Brigid

You'll Always Have Yourself - Views From a Garage

It's been three years since I've been out West. I missed Dad's funeral, I was in ICU trying to stay alive that week and it was a year before I felt strong enough just to walk around the block, let alone make a day-long plane trek.

They weren’t frequent, but I loved those times in years past when I could fly out West to visit my family, even if only for a long weekend. Those weekends were rest, they were restoration. My brother and I would end up in Dad’s garage, working side-by-side on some project. The garage was shadowed by trees, and it was old and had little in the way of modern conveniences. But I liked it that way. It was a place where tools were old, wood was honed, metal was bent, and burnt offerings to British cars were offered to Lucas, Prince of Darkness (or Dimness, depending on your religious persuasion). It was easy to spend hours there without realizing it, the space between tasks still composing time; consisting of minutes that no longer ran straight ahead in diminishing allotment, but rather parallel between, like looping bands of wiring without apparent ending.

It was only when the light faded and our stomachs growled that we looked up and noted the time, setting down the tools, rendering the machinery mute as we returned to the house, a faint shadow against the steps in the fading sky. Most of the neighbors were parked in the driveway, their garages full of stuff; boxes, bikes, lawn and exercise equipment, you name it. When I was a kid, it seemed most of our cars were actually in the garage. We had a dark green ranch house with a dark green Chevy Malibu in the garage. Outside at the front edge of the lawn was a huge tree that Mom loved, draping its branches over the driveway like a canopy, filling up the gutters with leaves every year. 

Whenever I spent my vacation days visiting Dad in those years before he left us, I seemingly always found a reason to visit the garage. There was always an extra freezer out there, full of an assortment of bundled cow and mysterious Tupperware containers stioll labeled “Brussels sprouts” or “creamed peas”—which we found out too late were actually made for cookies that Mom had squirreled away for church luncheons and baby showers knowing we wouldn’t raid the “creamed peas.” There was lefse from the Sons of Norway Bake Sale. There was always Tillamook Marionberry Pie ice cream.

In the corner were Dad’s and my brother's golf clubs; in front of them space where we used to park our bikes. My last one was that Huffy ten-speed that Dad so lovingly obtained and fixed up. I wasn’t what I’d wanted, but it was much more because it was offered with quiet and undiluted love, the faithful care and attention that most people don’t put into anything anymore. That was a lesson I may not have recognized then, but I do today.

The biggest decorative item in the garage was the tacky framed Mexican bullfighting picture Dad bought for his and Mom’s first home, which was immediately banished to the garage. Most of you here remember me telling you about that old picture when talking about various visits home. The pagentry, the ballet-like moves, the spurting blood. . . . oh yes, Mom couldn't banish that to the garage fast enough as a newlywed.  Yet, even she would have admitted the garage just wouldn't have been the same without it.  It joined a well-used dartboard and other works of fine art that found a home in Dad’s “man cave.”

Off to one side of the garage was a big workbench with cupboards built above for storage. Dad didn’t use it much anymore but it had not changed, except for the calendar: always the smiling, buxom girl in shorts and a T-shirt or a swimsuit, selling tools or beer. In the shadows of the other side of the garage were deep storage cabinets where Dad stored all his fishing and outdoor gear. Everything was meticulously kept in place, even as the fabric of his old fishing net rotted; lying in wait with that spent but alert quality that aging things have—as if they doubted the absoluteness of their eventual discard, as if they would be necessary and needed tomorrow. 

There’s just a single garage door. There’s probably a small dent in the bottom of it. When I was about eight years old, I tried to ride my bike at warp speed into the garage when the car was out and the door was partway up, planning on ducking, only not ducking enough. It knocked me clean off my bike, but no permanent damage was done, really (twitch-twitch). But the neighborhood no longer being the safe haven that it was, the windows that once brought in light are now covered with contact paper so as not to let potential burglars peer in to see if anyone is home.

In the driveway there used to be a little VW Beetle, Mom’s official bug-out vehicle which later became my car. But the Chevy was always stored in the garage, except for those rainy weekends when we set up the Lionel trains there on large pieces of sheet plywood, spray-painted green, sitting on trestles. Old Pringles containers were fastened underneath to hold the tracks, and we’d run the trains along frantic loops of tracks until our stomachs growled and the fading evening light illuminated them like silvered spider webs running off into the distance. Only then, on Sunday nights, were the trains put away amidst the other supplies.

When the weather was good Dad would work at his bench, while we’d get a bat and send a ball down the drive towards the road, into that conundrum of physics and aerodynamics that never failed to fascinate me. More than one go-cart was assembled out in the driveway with Dad’s advice and more than a few of his tools.

As we got older the trains we played with were replaced by my brother's first car. He and his friends were forever tinkering with something they bought cheap to fix up. One day while I was hanging around just to be close to him, as he was changing the oil he handed me a wrench and said, “Let me show you how to do this.” I asked, “Why?” His voice stopped for a moment, though his tone remained in the air like when the needle is lifted off an old record album by the hand of someone wondering if someone else hears the same music. I was listening. He paused to wipe the sweat from his brow and said, with a steadiness that told me I needed to listen, “You need to learn how to do some of this yourself. I won’t always be here, but you will always have yourself.”

So as a young woman, my brother taught me how to change my oil and a tire, do a basic tune-up, and keep my car in running order. While my friends were frosting each other’s hair more blond, he and I were putting Purple Horny Headers on my VW Bug (it was still a Bug, but you could hear me coming five blocks away) while we listened to an old transistor radio. I learned the safe handling of tools and what was used for what purpose, working together out in the garage as if our forms were joined by some mechanical arm. We’d work until my arms ached, fading light drowsing on the floor like a drop cloth, slowed down by fatigue but still in motion, still inevitable. Only when Mom, or later Dad, called us into supper would we quit.

“You will always have yourself.” Those words were salt and truth. My brother knew me better than I knew myself. To my dad, I would always be his little girl to protect and care for. But my brother recognized that I was not the type to be happy totally dependent on someone, fated to settle for flesh and bone durable enough to do battle for both of us while I stood in the shadows, inviolate bride of silence, doomed to fail. He saw it, though it was a while and some tears before I learned it for myself. When I did, I knew he'd helped me be ready for it, for which I will forever be grateful to him. - Brigid