The best laid schemes o’ mice an’ men / Gang aft a-gley
A line in “To a Mouse”, by Robert Burns
Intention is my middle name, though my birth certificate reads Faith Elizabeth Smith. I rarely consider the name Elizabeth other than as the first name of a dear friend. I would say that my friend Elizabeth is like family but most of us know that family can be a rough crowd. She is better than family, but back to Intention, which never likes to be ignored. Some days, I manage only to put one foot in front of the other, though Intention would have me build a village in some third world disaster ridden country between dawn and dusk. There was a time I could have done this, the act of building accomplished by a crew of pre-enrolled enthusiasts and do-gooders working before the sun and after the sun if need be to get it done for no other reason than I said it would get done, all the planning and acquisition of supplies culminating under the hammer . There are mornings, these days, when the simple act of moving ahead instead of in circles takes hours. Intention hangs over my shoulder, most often the right one, and rants, spitting in my ear the whole time and hardly taking a breath.
Friday is my last day of full time employment for a while. Not that I will miss it, mind you, when I will no longer spend an average of two and half hours every day commuting. When I put in a 9 or 10 hour day, add commuting, add breakfast and a shower in the morning, well, you get the idea. But I will miss the money, though I put in less hours than I could have most weeks. I never could bring myself to drag out the work, have a routine, up at 5, out at 6, 8 hours a day of work, out at 3, back home by 4, I am nauseous just thinking about it, a routine that is. They are happy with the work, I am happy with the flexibility they give me. With Peter out of work, my choice to put in only enough hours to get the work done annoys him. We get by. When one of the kids need a few bucks, tongue firmly planted in cheek, we let a bill slide here or there, or when we want to purchase something that we cannot afford and we can’t really afford much of anything these days, we squeeze by until we are back at level ground. Our cars are paid for and, at our age, we have just about everything we need, more than we need really, and a lot of that is getting discarded or sold or given away before I leave for Key West. Fortunately, Peter is too passive to force me into doing something I don’t want to do, like work more than I absolutely have to. But I digress.
Come Friday, I will be out of steady work, teaching writing here and there being the unsteady work. Seems appropriate somehow to call teaching writing the unsteady work, writing being like acting in some circles, something a rational conservative steady-eddie adult would not do, or at least not do and expect to make a living off of it. Again, I digress. I will have two months before we leave for Key West to begin our bike ride up the East Coast. So there’s Intention becoming more vocal as this window of time approaches.
I intend to clean my house from top to bottom, the attic, the garage, get in shape for three months on the road cycling, attack my drastic weight gain of the past six months – I am at my highest weight ever as an adult, 35 pounds in 9 months, most of it since I started the meds. Dr. D. said I would want to eat, that weight gain is common. “Just don’t eat.”, was her learned advice. She has a great sense of humor. I intend to work on the book, not the one I had planned but this one, complete several publishing projects that are years behind schedule, and go through every box of paper, books, and old mail, of which there are about fifty scattered throughout this small raised ranch. I tell myself two months is plenty of time to get my life in order even though I have been working at it for fifty-one and one half years and haven’t gotten my life in order yet.
On the morning of April 25th, 2005, it won’t matter. Peter and I will drive across the Connecticut state line and make our way to Key West, Florida, the beginning of our three month bike trip, towards the beginning of my life as I know it today having been born in Key West on October 17th, 1953. In fifty-one years, I have never encountered anyone else born in Key West except my sister. Our family moved when I was 18 months old and my sister was 6 weeks old. On the morning of April 25th, 2005, I will begin to write the story of the journey north, my own journey of fifty-one years, and the 2800 mile bike trip Peter and I will be taking over the course of one summer. This trip will also be the beginning of something I cannot define, not even loosely, but I know it is waiting there for me. I know, also, that this will be the beginning of my life, not this life but that life, the life I am missing as though I were there once and this is a mission to get back to that, what ever that is. I have spent my whole life traveling, first as a Navy brat, then as an adult, have lived more places than I can remember, though I will remember them all at some point in the coming months either intuitively or by methodical reconstruction. I have spent the bulk of my life as a visitor, never knowing any one place as home though I told myself this one or that one felt like home at the time. Next Tuesday, March 1st, my sister’s fiftieth birthday, I will spend the evening with a small group of writers discussing personal writing projects and Mindi, the group facilitator, will note, a tad to my surprise and little surprises me anymore, that I have decided to travel for three months in order to find my way to some plot of ground I can call my own, that I have chosen to do the one thing that has defined my life as disjointed, peripheral, and somewhat untethered, that I have chosen to travel in order to move from the exterior to the interior, from the nomad to the settled. Perhaps I will decide that I am meant to be nomadic. I love consulting for that reason, I can move from one company to another as a technologies professional, stay out of the corporate politics, just do the job I was hired to do, never call one company home. I did once, call one company home that is, saw my future there, a gold watch, corporate accolades, but I’ll save that story for later. Needless to say, I am not in that job. Leaving has served me well professionally and personally. Leaving home at 17, leaving Connecticut at twenty, leaving Florida at 18 months, leaving Florida again at 16, leaving Florida at 21, leaving my first husband, leaving a job I held for 13 years, leaving a myriad of other jobs over the years, some years I held 6 or 7 jobs in one year, leaving the house in Alaska that my brother built, shutting the doors, wanting to torch it after he died there rather than let someone else buy it, leaving behind the unbearable need to strike a match to it, leaving behind the last place he lived, the one place he called his own.
This time, I am not leaving. This time, it is about coming home. I just don’t know where home is yet. I cannot say whether I am moving towards the beginning of something because of Intention, or in spite of it. I can say that this trip to date hasn’t once felt like an Intention, not mine or someone else’s. It has, from the beginning, felt like I have already completed it, like it simply is, like I have no choice in the matter, like it chose me rather than me choosing it, like I am revisiting a journey I have already taken only I forgot the transformation I experienced along the way and I am going back to find myself again. There are few things in my life that have felt so right, felt so like coming home. Intention will do what it will do in the coming months, it will use me, it will assuredly abuse me, but it will not stop me from putting my bike in a rented van, packing as best as I can, and going somewhere out there.
