The Utter Folly Tour (or Faith and Peter on the Run)

Letting Go!

Lucky me, I keep getting to practice letting go, and letting go, and letting go, even to the point that I went yesterday to a major medical exam alone to have several cat scans knowing I would have to have dye, knowing that my sensitive body has reacted badly to dye in the past, and knowing I would not have anyone with me to quell my anxiety.  In the end, it wasn’t all that big of a deal.  Peter had gone to visit his daughter and grandson in New Jersey.  He had not seen them in weeks and really wanted to take the opportunity to visit.

Today, again, more letting go.  We are in the car, Peter and I, heading for a four day stay on Block Island where I will be co-leading a writing workshop for poets for the weekend and as we pass over the Stevenson Dam on Route 34 East, making our way to New Haven to pick up Route 95 towards Rhode Island, they, the mysterious they, are letting water go, tons of it rushing through the dam spillway and into the Housatonic.  Letting go keeps showing up every where I look.  An old friend came to stay with us last night while he is spending two weeks in New England and the Northeastern states on a mini poetry tour.  Peter and I both forgot we had offered him a bed, forgot, even, that he was going to be in the neighborhood.  We are doing a lot of forgetting of late, our minds so packed with last minute details and there are so very many last minute details, and it isn’t even the last minute yet.  So our friend, Jack McCarthy, is reading at a local poetry venue, mine, dah, and staying with us and we have yet to pack and we need to leave the house by 7:30 a.m. to catch the 11 a.m. ferry out of Point Judith.  I am stressed from the moment I am suddenly reminded, at 7:15 p.m. last night as I pull up to the poetry venue and see Jack’s beautiful profile through the window, that Jack is here, and I love him dearly, so does Peter, and we want to have a wonderful catching up type of visit, and we haven’t packed, and Robin is meeting us at the diner at 7:40 a.m. so she can follow us to the ferry for two and a half hours.  And I just have to keep letting go. 

I came home last Sunday, after ten days away, to a house in disarray and more obligations for three days I would be at home than are practical for even your above-average superhero.  To complicate matters, I see one doctor Monday morning after having some problems while I was vacationing on the Cape last week, he sends me to another doctor who sees me that afternoon and takes up three hours of my day.  The second doctor schedules me for multiple cat scans for Tuesday which will take up another three hours of another day and Tuesday is the day we have chosen to clean out the garage, one of the cleaning efforts I am insisting on before we leave for Key West in less than a month, though I finally did agree to let the attic go until we get back in early August.  It has been that way for years.  What’s a few more months?  I suppose.

I like the idea of letting go of all the useless, antiquated, and/or broken junk we have accumulated.  Most of what is in the attic is mine.  Most of what is in the garage is Peter’s and includes stuff from his parents who died years ago and we just piled their stuff in the garage with all the other stuff in the garage.  Towards the end of the day Tuesday, there is nearly as much stuff in the driveway for the dump as there is in the garage.  The garage has never looked this good in all the 14 years we have lived here.  It was made possible, and, no, this is not a commercial, by engaging a professional organizer for four hours on Tuesday.  Of course we should have done it ourselves, we should have done it years ago and done it ourselves, and we should have kept it up all this time.  And we should not have spend the money Tuesday on cleaning the garage that we need for other things.  What happened in that four hours was amazing, however.  Peter was upset about my hiring a professional organizer, she did not come cheap, neither of us are working, money is an issue, we took funds out of one of Peter’s retirement accounts, cleaned the account out actually, and have already gone through a third of it handling things that need to be handled so we can be on the road for three months, including some things I insist need to be handled, though the need for them is quite debatable.  But this morning, early in our drive, Peter agreed it was a good investment, the professional organizer that is.  Whew. 

Today, we are 3 weeks and 4 days from leaving for the biggest trip either of us have embarked on in our combined 116.5 years.   There goes that counting thing again.  And I have to keep letting go, letting go of Jack who we have not seen in months and months and we adore him and we miss not being able to spend time with him today, though we happily gave over the house to him to enjoy for the day before he heads over to New York for other feature programs in the next few days;  letting go of all that is still chaos in the house and we are going to be away, again, so there is no dealing with anything in the house until we get back and are going to be down to three weeks, just three weeks; letting go of magazines, or at least starting to, Peter took about 320 magazines to the recycle center Tuesday.  Do you have the sense that I am hyperventilating while all this is happening?  Monday night, my daughter and my good friend Dasha helped me to go through magazines.  The two of them were relentless.  I was browsing each one looking for photos of interest for my writing workshops, and looking for articles of interest that I know will make me a better person or a better writer, or a better environmentalist, or a better social activist, or a better political activist, or more savvy about new technology, or simply better read, if I would just read them.  I would then tear those items out.  But when Dasha found the first of many magazines dated 1996, and it is now 2005, well, she laid down the law, the first one of the evening anyway.  The first law was that anything older than 1998 goes out immediately.  This mutated over the course of a few hours to anything older than 2000.  But what about my old issues of Poets and Writers?  What about National Geographic, Writer’s Digest, Teaching Tolerance, The Sun?  What about Living (the Martha Stewart magazine for better quality living)?  What about …?  So I finally left the room and left Chris to go through the remaining magazines and make the decisions without me there.  Let go, I have to keep telling myself.

Tuesday, while working in the garage, with our professional organizer knee deep in our 14 years of accumulated shit, I kept having to face those questions she was so good at asking, and always so calmly, so compassionately, so matter of fact.  Do you use it?  Will you use it?  Does it have sentimental value?  And things went on shelves in appropriate places, or they went in one corner for giving away or putting on eBay, or they went in the pile for the dump.  A lot went into that pile, broken furniture that we never fixed, we just relegated to the wasteland of our garage.  Paint cans so old you could not open them, boxes of paper that were is various stages of decomposition, and on, and on, and on.  Let go, I kept telling myself.  Susan said we did a great job when she finished her four hour stay with us.  We were not done when she had to leave, but we were close, damn close. 
So, we left the house this morning and I am unprepared to teach this weekend, me Ms. Anal, and I will have to make it work as I go, not that I haven’t done this 100 times, but I like to have everything under control.  It would be hard to assess that about me from the state of my house.  But I love exactness, I love orderliness, simplicity, and for three months, everything I need will be on me, or my bike, in my day pack or Peter’s day pack, or on his bike, or we will get it when we need it along the way.  And we will leave behind our families, our friends, we will leave behind the house and what ever contents still remain three weeks and four days from now.  I feel like a hot air balloon, too full, pulling at the cords that tether me to this earth, pulling and afraid to let go, wanting to be free and hesitating at moments to fully accept this life changing experience for what it is, and I have to keep telling myself it will be okay, and I know it will, but I was never good at letting go, though I have often told myself I am, and often enough I have moved through something difficult and out the other side with aplomb, but this letting go this time is not going to happen with aplomb.

I have been teary eyed on an off for a week, maybe more.  I keep putting it off to stress, and part of it is undoubtedly stress, but it is more.  It is much more and it is simple.  It is simply letting go.  Letting go of my daughter watching the house for three months, letting go of my plants, they will or they won’t survive without me, letting go of my cats, I am sure they will survive without me, letting go of my crushes on this poet or that, letting go of other people’s expectations of me before I leave and during the ride.  Peter argues  that I am not, however, letting go of my expectations of others.  I disagree.  My daughter is a prime example, but Peter has expectations around Chris that far exceed mine and make it difficult for him to see my acceptance, he is too busy focusing on his lack of acceptance.  He will promptly shoot back that my second hand psychology is bullshit if he had a chance to add his opinion to these pages.  Of course he would say that my opinion in this matter is second hand psychology and that my second hand psychology is bullshit, it always is when it means he has to look at something about himself that he doesn’t want to acknowledge (I say this with my tongue firmly planted in my cheek, it’s not as if I don’t have my own blind spots). He proceeds to whine that I have the advantage of getting in the last word here, it is my post.  He is right.  But, I digress. 

I have also been letting go of the money issues with doing this trip.  Karen, the director of the East Coast Greenway, during a meeting with her and Bill, and Lisa in New Haven this past Monday during which Peter and I were finalizing our partnership with Greenway regarding our volunteer efforts in their name during this trip and their moral and physical support of our trip, which is more than we expected, mused how we robbed one of our retirement accounts to make this trip possible, and we do still hold out hope for some funding here and there to make it less painful in the end, but back to Karen who saw the humor in our depleting our retirement funds to do something that will add years to our lives.  We will very likely live longer as a result of this trip if we survive it, and we will have one-third the retirement monies we had a month ago. 

I let go of the house early on, which makes it a bit easier to live with the financial choices we are making to do this trip.  Of all the things I am struggling to let go of, the house came easy.  If we have to sell it, we have to sell it.  How can a house matter more than a trip like this.  I came from a background of poor white trash, not Angela’s Ashes poverty, and reading that book made me feel a whole lot better about my own childhood, but poor white trash nonetheless, and poor southern white trash.  Having a house is wonderful, and I can live without it.  At least that is what I am telling myself.

So there I was, Monday, at the second doctor’s appointment of the day, and doctor number two gives me a what-for about not delaying the trip if need be for medical reasons.  I won’t bore you with the details, but I have let go of that, too.  I am leaving as planned, April 25th, even if they tell me news that is devastating, not that devastating news is expected.  If I die on the road, and yes, I am being a bit melodramatic, well, maybe more than a bit, but so be it, it will be like a cowboy dying with her boots on. 

And I should have been prepping for the weekend on this drive, instead of making this entry in the book, but I let that go, too. 

Yesterday, while Peter was visiting with his daughter and grandson Maxx, Peter and Melissa had Chinese for lunch and the fortune cookie’s fortune read You are soon to embark on an enjoyable journey.

Today is the second loveliest day so far this year.  Spring, at last. 

At the Cape

Posted by Peter

How the time flies! Only a month to go and so much left to do.  One more day at the Cape, we head home tomorrow.  Only got to ride our bikes once, what with the wind, rain, snow and cold weather.  On that ride, one of my pedals came off, stripping the thread on the crank.  At least I got eleven miles in on the beautiful Cape Cod Rail Trail, the parts that weren’t snow covered that is.  Well I’m glad that the problem showed up now and not on the trip.  There’s also a little glitch with the panniers that we have to fix, nothing insurmountable.  They came with a metal ring attached to a spring to loop onto the bike frame at the bottom to hold them in place.  It’s much too tight, so Rick (our bike dealer) put s hooks on the ends. They extend things just enough, but they fall off. We just need to attach new ones and crimp the end attached to the rings to hold them in place.

We’re behind on a bunch of things because our cash wasn’t flowing properly for a bit.  Lots of things need to be ordered quickly now. Plus we need to learn to use them!  So many things to do before we leave that our “to do” lists are works of art.  In fact, Faith has written a database program to house them. Complete with personalized reports.  Speaking of computers, it looks like we will be taking faith’s personal laptop instead of the lightweight one that her son was going to set up for us. Seems that one doesn’t have enough horsepower for some of the apps we run. Hers is a bit of a brick, but we’ll have to manage.  I’ll be loading some of my software on it too.  Just managing our finances for the time we’ll be away is a bit of a challenge, but it’s coming together finally. (I think I was avoiding tackling that problem for a while.)

Hmmmmm

I thought it had been two weeks since I last chronicled this journey, this journey before the journey, but it has been three. How could I let so much time slip by and so many thoughts about the pending trip vanish into the ether?

Today would have been no exception except for this hour on the ferry. It took moving a mountain to get me to this ferry, then a second, then a third, then I stopped counting. The moving of mountains begun days ago and today I have spent the morning in overdrive, obsessed with counting hours, then half hours, then minutes, all the while moving heaps of rock, clumps of weed, and lots of paper. Finally, there are no more minutes to count as I have a date with a ferryboat and it doesn’t matter what mountains I have moved or what mountains remain to be moved, I walk out of the front door with bags in tow. When I return in ten days, I will be one month less two days from leaving for Key West. I know this from counting. The next three nights on Block Island at a peer writers’ weekend will be followed by seven nights on Cape Cod with my son, his partner, Diana, and their two sons, Justin who turns nine in July, and Tyler who is just six months old. The boys are the oldest and youngest grandchildren of seven grandchildren in total.

It would have been easy to cancel out of the writers’ weekend, to save the money I can’t really afford to spend, to give myself four more days at home. By early afternoon, I have not even packed. In the last two days, I have poured through as many scattered to do lists, as many piles of paper, receipts, unopened mail, as many small projects as I could, as many bike trip preparatory tasks as time would allow. I cancelled my plans for last night, stayed home to get more work done, and changed from the one o’clock ferry today to the five o’clock ferry. Nothing like a hard and fast deadline to morph me into Wonder Woman. Well, somewhat hard and fast, I did cancel my plans last night and take a later ferry today, I did get help on some items from Peter and Christina. And oh the paper we crumpled, the receipts we tore up or organized for tax time, oh the boxes we emptied, the canvas bags, the piles we sorted through, oh the paper I packed to take with me on this ten day respite so I could work while I was away respiting, oh the clean dining room table.

I count the days, every day, ten times a day, count the days left till we leave for Key West. I count them again today and there it is, the one month threshold two days before we leave the Cape to return home. There it is, the one month less two days when we return home, the one month less two days to get it all done the day we return home from spending money we don’t exactly have, or more appropriately cannot afford to spend, or more precisely, we simply should not spend because we need it for the trip, but we will have spent it already by that point knowing our finances are gasping, knowing we risk monetary affixation if we don’t do something drastic soon. At least there is our sense of humor to fall back on, and if you are going to tell me that a sense of humor won’t pay the bills, please wait, allow me the next few months of ignorance before I have to face that harsh reality.

That day, the day we return from a long planned family vacation, that day that is one month less two days from the beginning, or the end, depending on how you look at it, that day we will spend packing to head for home, driving four and a half hours to my son’s house, and orchestrate a small gathering to wish my mother a happy 72nd birthday. We will not celebrate one month less two days. We will return to our own home late from the party, exhausted, the car stuffed to overflowing, to our house with major changes afoot. Like getting myself out of the house today wasn’t enough of a challenge, I set into motion that my daughter will undertake a massive relocation effort emptying and prepping the room I currently use as a temporary office to turn it into Peter’s new permanent office (two weeks from now that plan will morph into Chris taking over the room I now use as my office – lions and tigers and bears, oh my).

So while I am away for four days, before Peter will join me at the Cape, Chris and Peter will prepare to bring all of Peter’s stuff upstairs and into the last farthest room on the main floor, moving towards ultimately taking two offices that co-exist today in a shared finished basement and moving them upstairs into two small bedrooms finally giving Peter and I our own individual home offices and giving Chris and the baby enough room downstairs to live comfortably in our house until she finishes school in five months (only she will decide she doesn’t want to move downstairs, sigh). A day ago, I did not expect that we would make this drastic change, but Chris’s boyfriend will very likely spend time at the house when we are away, and why wouldn’t he, they get to play house in our house for three months, and Chris and the baby barely fit into the one small bedroom they are in currently. About a third of my office has been moved upstairs over the last two months, but into, as I have now decided, the wrong room.

So, there we will be ten days from now, exhausted, needing to reenter the environment of our home, reassimilate ourselves with our surroundings, only our surroundings will be askew, the dining room and living room filled with boxes and furniture and suddenly I know, I know for the first time the weight of my bike in my hands even though it hasn’t yet shipped from the manufacturer. I know the weight of it with its panniers, saddle bag, custom seat, with its handlebar bag and bicycle computer. I know the weight of it as I lift it, finally, into the rented van. I know for the first time the feel of this pending pilgrimage beyond the idea of it, beyond the supposition of it, and I know myself as leaving, turning to the house a last time to stare before I get into the car to depart. I know the feel of goodbye. It’s real, this leaving. It’s tangible. I hear it breathing in, breathing out, feel the heat of it around the bend up ahead where it waits for me chanting my name and I am answering, my hand already on the left gear shift, my foot slipping into the right cage. I look behind me. I look ahead. I press my weight into the pedal and I am moving.

On the ferry, I am reading a book of poetry I picked up at a weekend retreat for writers a week earlier. I stuffed it into my bag this afternoon as one of those things I was sure would be easy to handle, get out of the way, be done with. It’s such a small compilation. Only, I edit the first four poems in the book, mark up the heavyweight, tan, mottled paper chosen by this poet as vessel, as canvas, as frame, before I take a moment to consider my behavior. This reading of this collection was meant to be a passive pursuit. Well, okay, maybe not so passive as to not measure the poetry by some arbitrary standard that I have grown into and which continues to change as I change, but to mark up someone else’s published poems, someone I don’t know? And I don’t know this poet. The author biography says she lives in Connecticut, my Connecticut, and for a time, I assert I do know her, and I know she is a better poet than this. She just needs an editor. Arrogant of me, perhaps, or honorable, maybe, to care enough about these poems to hold them this close, give them some parental advice, show them another way to proceed, knowing that the neither poet nor this not-so-innocent observer can do anything more than say Look, over here. Isn’t this a direction you might like to take?, then back away, watch the poem articulate itself of its own accord. Arrogant or honorable, no matter, the author of these poems will never see my comments and the point isn’t that I edited her published poems, it is that I stepped over some agreed upon line or rather through it, though I don’t recall negotiating the matter, and here I am excavating the overgrown backyard of this text, offering up some architectural drawings for possibilities in reconstruction, here where the publication of these poems as a book makes them somehow sacred, but that doesn’t stop me. I am telling myself what I tell myself about most things, that I am transient, a bystander, one who has no right to trespass. Except it’s too late for that, I am already here in this place where I have edited her poems without being requested to do so, without her permission, this place where I have lifted the bike, my bike, with all its peripherals into the cargo area of the van, this place where I have already said goodbye, this place where I have made these poems and the whole of the world in which they are tangible, mine.

Another voice

(posted by Peter)

It’s time to hear from the quiet one.  I’ve been avoiding doing this for a while.  How honest shall I be? How many of my fears can I reveal and not be ridiculed or criticized?  Two of the driving fears of my life. I am a lifelong procrastinator.  I never think that this is something that’s obvious to everyone in my life, I think it’s my little secret. I suppose that my other fears are the same, and probably shared by many.  So it’s pointless to avoid them. I’m not perfect (how about that Faith, surprised?).

We are seven weeks from leaving for Key West and I haven’t gotten into action regarding a number of important items.  However, I have bought Microsoft’s Streets and Trips software and have been learning to use it.  I did actually sell our racing bikes, much to Faith’s dismay.  They were lovely bikes and we’ll miss them.  It was unavoidable though.  We don’t need to use the space to store them, we don’t need both types of bikes (I hope), and we definitely can use the money we got for them.  The new bikes are on order, and in fact, mine arrived at the dealer and he is setting it up.  Very nice. Now on to the ugly stuff.  I haven’t started to train or diet in any serious manner.  My weight is the same now (228) as it was at the beginning of the year.  I’ve been hiding out, not facing the reality of this adventure.  I haven’t moved money out of my retirement account that will fund us. I also need to get our finances in shape so we can manage them from the road as much as possible while we’re gone. I haven’t purchased a digital camera, although I’ve decided on the make and model.  In fact, we haven’t bought any of the gear that we’ll need for the trip.  In addition to the trip preparations, we also need to handle our taxes and medical insurance.  Those are of immediate concern. I always forget that corporation taxes are due on March 15, not April 15. 

I’m writing this while we are at a writers retreat. How about that? I’m writing. I wrote another chapter in the book that I’ve been working on for several years.  One more chapter and I will have kept this month’s promise to my writing group. I’ve got until Thursday to do that.