While the impetus for this batch of musings occurred in San Francisco in February, it only tangentially relates to the City itself. Instead this “travel” narrative has mostly to do with home, the life lived there, which is of course left behind while traveling, and most importantly, it is about the wonderful man that I will refer to as the Accidental Tourist.
To be fair, and I would have to believe that at least some of you know this anyway, the name Accidental Tourist, while perfect for my purposes isn’t my invention, being instead the title of a 1985 novel by Anne Tyler which was later made into a movie. The novel was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, I have read it, as I have all of Anne Tyler’s works, but really once you read one your will have a grip on most all of them which almost invariably focus on failed marriages and troubled families, which sounds singularly uninteresting, if not depressing, but truly, in Tyler’s hands the subject becomes captivating. However, this version isn’t about any failures, in fact it is rather about the opposite, the success of family as we define it, the tenacity of relationships faced with crisis, and ultimately, I suppose as sappy as it sounds, the overarching power of love.
Every year, typically in late winter, Tim and I make what I call a pilgrimage to San Francisco to feast on wonderful foods, to re-witness the most consistently joyous hour of my life (Steve Silver’s Beach Blanket Babylon), and to allow me to indulge in nostalgia for a life long ago lost but never regretted, meaning the years in which I called San Francisco home. How nostalgic am I for what will always be home to me, the state of California, notwithstanding its manifest faults, geological and otherwise? Put it this way: Whenever I fly into Los Angeles, but especially if I fly into San Francisco, I can name every major road and city that we overfly from the Nevada border until we land and I have to fight the urge to cry for a home I can’t seem to find my way back to. When I fly away again, as I inevitably must do, I feel a blackness on my soul that usually lasts for several days once I am “home” again. It almost seems that one would have to ask why I end up on that plane headed east when it seems that I really want to just stay west!
And in fact, that question was more or less posed to me during dinner with my oldest and dearest of friends one night in San Francisco. The observation was made that of all the places that my friend could imagine me living at the age of 41, San Francisco would have been the number one choice while Georgia wouldn’t have even made the list. And had you asked me prior to 2004, I honestly would have told you the same exact thing! So what changed? The Accidental Tourist was created and that made all the difference.
My response was along the lines of something hackneyed resembling “home is where the heart is,” which while a true statement, didn’t really begin to cover the whole of it. If I take a simple look at comparative values and opportunities, I am immediately confronted by the reality the for what the monthly mortgage costs in Georgia in San Francisco I MIGHT be able to afford a studio apartment in a neighborhood where I usually wouldn’t find someone else’s urine on the steps in the morning. A garage to park a vehicle would easily double monthly costs, so any automobile would be subject to hideous and unavailable parking and the attendant risks of leaving a car parked on city streets (no need to wash the windows since they will be routinely busted out and you just replace them instead). And let’s not forget that I would once again be beholden to Laundromats in one form or another along with the omnipresence of other people above, below, and to both sides in all likelihood. And if that doesn’t sound so bad, let’s take a quick look at my current surroundings for purposes of comparison.
My current abode had more than adequate parking, as it should since it sits on an acre lot. It would be pretty depressingly difficult to feed as many birds and other wildlife from an apartment window. And oh yeah, I have my own washer and dryer! Far from a studio of maybe 200 square feet, I have 2,500 square feet to stretch out in here, and that matters because I take up a lot of room! And in case you wonder what I mean by that, let’s just go upstairs and take a look. There is a bedroom euphemistically called the “guest room” although it has served that purpose all of three times total since we moved in here in 2006. Realistically, the room serves as a staging area for gifts in the process of being wrapped and stored for shipping or other means of giving. The closet is the repository of wrapping supplies, which for me is a major collection of gear, as well as protecting our collection of formal wear for the cruises we sometimes take, although never more than one in any year. Put it this way, it is a cold room, not getting much traffic. But if I had to move to a studio, what would I do with all that wired ribbon?
Moving on, there is another bedroom that has never been slept in because you can’t really find the bed under the collection of Giant Microbes (really cool! Check them out at: http://www.giantmicrobes.com/). The room also houses the evidence of my obsession with jigsaw puzzles, both assembled and waiting in boxes, Lego sets, especially those of famous world monuments and Star Wars, US and Canadian stamps, cuff links, and travel mementos that won’t fit in the living room. Now, I ask how I would manage my OCD if I had to give all that up to a storage locker to fit into my new studio apartment.
And yes, there is another bedroom that has been turned into a library that houses my current collection of over 600 titles (and yes, there is an Excel file catalog just in case you doubted it), and that doesn’t count the 215 and counting volumes of the Library of America (Kurt C Vonnegut comes out in June to make it 216). And, oh yeah, CDs and just a little bit of Fiesta ware, no more than 100 pieces I am sure (multiple shelves of that finally had to move to the attic when I ran out of space in the living area of the house) that really won’t fit in the kitchen. Again, I ask what would become of these monuments to my obsessions in such restricted space as what I could afford in San Francisco?
Yes, there is yet another bedroom, but we actually sleep in that one and because we seem to keep buying clothes to put in the closet, today in fact I actually retired 24 shirts and 12 pants, so that was progress I think. And yes, I realize that some people manage to live a happy and productive life with no more clothes in their entire wardrobe than what I disposed of, and considering that I don’t have to leave the house most days, one would think I could really do with less. But I just CAN’T limit my obsession to just a few things. Nope, I am obsessive about my obsessions! Really, there must be a drug for me somewhere that could compact me into 200 square feet.
It doesn’t end downstairs either, so don’t despair. The living room alone is easily the size of San Francisco studio apartment and if we acquire many more travel memorabilia, I think we may have to stop watching TV in there at night. The kitchen is quite lovely, especially with all that shiny and bright Fiesta ware watching down on you from atop the cabinets. I mean, you REALLY couldn’t expect me to live without a pie baker in EVERY color Fiesta makes could you? COULD YOU??
Finally, what to do if we consider the basement where I house my approximately one ton of wood for lathe turning projects? What about my belt sander, sharpening tool, drill press, and wood lathe? The lathe alone is 6 feet long and weighs 750 pounds, so I really hope the floor in my new apartment is well reinforced! And Dad just built me a whole new suite of really awesome oak cabinets for down there, which he somehow managed to break down flat after construction, for cross-country shipping and reassembly. Now, I really can’t leave those behind, so perhaps I can just gut the existing cabinet or two in my new San Francisco place and replace them. Surely the landlord won’t mind!
I think we have established that my life is simply too large to cram into a typical San Francisco apartment, but an actual house never retails for less than 1 million, and good luck finding a FLAT for that, much less an entire building. And if you doubt me on this, you can do a simple real estate search and verify it. Trust me, I have. So, perhaps I can curb some of my more ridiculous obsessions and we could spring for more monthly cash and maybe have two rooms instead of one.
Well, maybe we could have more room, but if we did that we would surely have to stop traveling as much as we do now, perhaps we wouldn’t be able to travel at all beyond a once or twice yearly visit to family because cost of living really would sky rocket just that much, to say nothing of the fact that successfully running the business from San Francisco in limited space would be physically impossible, meaning we would live on my income alone, and yeah, that won’t be glamorous! And that is what really kills the whole moving thing for me; the inability to travel.
All my life I have burned with a passion to see the world, and thankfully it is a pretty big place and I can continue to explore with very little risk that I will run out of places to fly off to, and some of them I am likely to go to more than once. The passion for this was really raised on a dark day in 2006 when some brain scans indicated some pretty serious missing pieces, eaten away by an infection that rolled fast and furious. By that point I couldn’t talk or feed myself reliably, so being able to travel was a pretty big deal to me since I went through some dark periods where even walking became problematic and not a single medical care provider would talk about the “future” because we weren’t sure there was one. And that focused priorities like nothing else ever could which led to the birth of the Accidental Tourist.
I am hoping that you have all realized by now that the Accidental Tourist is Tim and not me! I am more like the Very Intentional Tourist! But of all the things Tim would never have thought he would end up doing, and occasionally even enjoying, was travel. Once upon a time, Tim was on the road for work on average of 5 days a week. He might have passed through Atlanta daily to change planes, but never to sleep. If you wonder how much time he spent on Delta planes consider that he has banked over 1 million flown miles with the airline and that wasn’t for pleasure. That is a LOT of butt-in-seat hours and when travel is what you do for a living, when hotels are your home for 5/7ths of the week, why in the world would you sign up to do it recreationally?
I can tell you the answer to that question. You do it because it is the lifelong dream of the person you have chosen to share your life with, for better or for worse, in sickness or in health, for richer or for poorer. No matter what any church, court, or Congress may say or proclaim, nothing that can be denied to Tim in terms of formal recognition can override or replace all that he has given me in these years of sometimes dire times coupled with lots of good times as the pressures have lessened, although not disappeared. While Tim never set out to become a tourist, he became one by virtue of traveling in this life at my side whether the travel is at home or in far-flung places many might never have heard of or considered as a place that someone would voluntarily go to. That was the accident by which he became a tourist.
The best thing of all I think is that while the transition was accidental, Tim has become quite an accomplished tourist, bringing the best of his knowledge from the corporate travel world to bear on leisure travel, and to top it off, he has even started to enjoy himself and is suggesting destinations of his own desiring and conception. Regardless of the whys and wherefores, no one has ever had a better companion, whether by accident or intention. Bon Voyage! And the, in the end, relatively small price I have to pay to continue to have the Accidental Tourist in my life, is to live in a place that allows us to live as we most want to, even if not where we most want to, because that is where the business can function, where we can thrive, and where we can return to plot the next potentially accidental adventure.