It doesn’t have the same ring, does it?
I’ve picked up a couple new hobbies since returning from my
trip. The first is not blogging. The
second is traveling vicariously through one of the better inventions of the
nineties: screen-savers. My roommate has
a chrome-cast, which projects internet TV onto the physical TV, and instead of
turning it off after we use it, we tend to let it cycle through its apparently
endless photos of stormy Irish seascapes and gothic cathedrals at dusk: gray
and backlit-bright at the same time.
I watch them as if expecting them to come together in a
narrative and I miss traveling viscerally.
It reminds me of homesickness, though logically it is the direct
opposite of that feeling. But the act and sights of traveling itself aren’t all that
I miss.
My best friend’s online dating profile used to claim “I’m
writing a novel. Isn’t that
embarrassing?” (She had the obligatory
self-deprecation down much better than me: I went for the admission that I regularly
buy fresh organic vegetables only to let them rot in the fridge while I order
buffalo chicken pizza.)
It’s true: writing is embarrassing. It’s like speaking for a really long time
without letting anyone else get a word in edge-wise. Traveling wasn’t so much
an excuse to write as an excuse to make an arrogant assumption – that people
might actually want to read what I have to write.
My failed attempt to get an Albanian pharmacist to
understand that I had a sea urchin spine in my foot is interesting, but every
failed attempt to get a Massachusetts tenth grader to understand that a book
can have more than one theme feels unforgivably quotidian.
Maybe it’s for partly this reason that when I think about
writing, I mostly wonder how to finally write about Auschwitz. About this bewildering confrontation with
human fragility that I traveled to the home country of my forebears just to
have.
And every day I travel the same few miles through Medford
and Saugus, unremarkably, until last week when the car in front of me hit a
man.
His whole body seemed to fold at the knees, like a
marionette dropped suddenly.
My phone had just enough charge to call 911.
As he spoke in Portuguese and clutched his back, I thought
improbably of the British rom com Love
Actually because it’s the last time I’ve heard Portuguese spoken aloud. You know the scene. When the guy learns Portuguese to propose to
that maid from the summer house, but the whole time she’s been learning English
to propose to him! Gets me every time. Makes it easy to buy Hugh Grant’s trite
closing revelation that “love actually is all around us.” It was
strange how much he sounded like Colin Firth proposing, when in fact he was
talking about the pain in his lower back, about when the ambulance would be
there.
Duh. Human fragility is quotidian, and close to home. The distinction between what is and isn’t worth writing about has no more to do with geography than the distinction between what is and isn’t worth thinking about. If any such dichotomy even exists, it’s imposed by the writer, and in my case, it’s been a cop out. Yes, writing is embarrassing, but I’ve always been one to embarrass myself.
