---

How’s my tree doing? The one I planted in the back yard when I got back? Not so hot, if you want to know the truth. Was happened was, after I planted it, I had to get back to Puerto Rico for awhile. The whole time I was gone, it didn’t rain, and when I did get back, all of its leaves had fallen off, like, way prematurely. I felt like such a heel, like I had killed it. But where the leaves had detached, there were these little bud-like things, and I could see some green of life glimmering inside. So there is hope. We’ll see, in the spring. I didn’t plan on testing the perseverance of the mighty bur oak at such a tender age, but we’ll see.

Anyway it was good to get back to old Puerto Rico and all. It really was. When I am there, I start to get tired of it, and then when I go away, I miss it. It is the place where I have lived the longest in my adult life, so it is home, sort of, and it makes sense to miss it and all.

Yes, and it was great to make our annual camping trip back up to the Toro Negro Forest, in the center of the island. It is just too lovely for words.

If you ever contemplate taking this type of a world trip, here are some of the thoughts I have to give you:




A long, independent journey is not for everyone.

But if you have the desire to do this, even just a very tentative desire...do your best and make it happen! Figure it out, and just go! You won't regret it. You simply won't.




Travel is educational and eye-opening for a child, sure. But consider, too, the massive benefits to an accompanying adult! There you are, on an inside track to experience The World through a child’s fresh perspective. It is an uncommon, and uncommonly rich, opportunity.

I am certain that I learned at least as much as Baraka. Probably more, thanks to his influence. Children see things you don’t see, things you completely missed, and point them out to you. Children ask questions, and more questions...the kind of questions you long ago stopped thinking to ask for yourself. And usually you still won’t know the answers, the real answers I mean, even after all this time...and then you’ll want to go out and, finally, get those answers!

Baraka’s presence gave me energy and curiosity to constantly seek out everything that that was fun and interesting in the world. And if something is interesting for a ten-year-old, chances are it will be for you too! This made for a much more active travel experience than what I would have gotten on my own. Thanks to Baraka, I was always motivated to take initiative, to search, dig deeper, and put extra effort into finding amazing things. And I never had to look far. But without Baraka, often I might never have looked at all.

Hundreds of the things we did, I probably would not have done them had Baraka not been with me. I know I would never have gone hang-gliding in Rio de Janeiro, for example. I probably would have also passed on sandboarding in the Atacama Desert, on entering the silver mine in Bolivia, on climbing up inside the Great Pyramid of Khufu, on taking a Chinese cooking class in Yángshuò, and on river rafting in the Himalayas. I still would have hiked up Mt. Sinai in the middle of the night, but it wouldn’t have been nearly as much fun without Baraka along.

If you are making a long trip with a child, do not even worry about being able to do the school. It really isn’t a problem. Actually, it is a huge plus.

We weren’t experienced homeschoolers, but we quickly got the hang of it, and confirmed that it takes only a few hours a day and fits perfectly well with traveling. You need to have downtime when you travel. School work gives you a bit of structure for this downtime... something to do that is gentle, varied, and good. And if you don’t give yourself this kind of downtime, you might travel too hard too fast, and burn out early.

Regularly, we’d come to a place we liked, and park it there for a week or so (or more). We’d construct a mini-life in a place, and it would be very, very fun. We’d have our room, our neighbors, our restaurants and hangouts, our grocery store, our park, our exercise and activities, our books to read for fun...and our schoolwork. The schoolwork was always integral to our mini-life.

Other times, when we were traveling fast or had a lot of field trips, we had little downtime. No worries there either -- we did half-days of school. You can always find an hour or two. You can do math on a bus.

Schoolwork can also bring interesting cases of serendipity, things you could never plan. There was that time our history course had us studying the “Age of Discovery” while we were staying in the old port of Fort Cochin, in southwest India. We read one morning that the Portuguese were the first Europeans to reach India by sea, in 1498. “Oh yeah, Baraka,” I said, “As a matter of fact, Vasco da Gama died here in Cochin, and was buried at that old church that’s around the corner, at the end of the street. That’s the Church of St. Francis, the first European church in India. Da Gama’s tombstone is still there, we can go look at it.” So after lunch, we walked over there and had a look at Vasco da Gama’s tombstone.

There were plenty of other times, like when Baraka was finishing up an adapted Robinson Crusoe in reading class while we were staying at my friend’s flat in London, a stone’s throw from Dafoe Street and from where Daniel Dafoe wrote the bleeding thing. Later that same day, after studying in history class how a very pissed-off Queen Boudicca had led her Icineans to torch the ancient Roman settlement at London in AD 61, we happened to walk along that very spot along the Thames...and feel her spirit.

I’ll never forget when we finally got to the end of World War II in history class, and we were discussing the atomic bombs. We were kind of getting into it, talking loudly and making explosion noises. Then I remembered where we were, we were sitting on a bench in Tokyo Station, and the backs of other people were pressing into us. We quieted down. Our visit to Hiroshima a few days later, in this context, was all the more powerful.

Often, the geography and history books asked us to imagine what it is like in, say, Africa, South America, or the "far-away country of China". When this would happen, we’d go “hmmm”, and look out the window. One time in Darjeeling, we were sitting in our study about eight floors up, and were asked to imagine what it was like in India. We looked out the window to a foggy, rainy, socked-in day...it was so misty that we couldn’t even see down to the street below. So we really did have to imagine.

As we traveled and studied, we had fun picking out inaccuracies, oversimplifications...even outright errors in the school books. One time, we were studying geography while riding a bus through Tamil Nadu, India. The book had this big population distribution map, and the whole subcontinent of India was colored in bright red, the highest on the map scale, to indicate that it was all “very crowded”.

We looked up from the book and out the bus window...out to the vast expanse of gorgeous, empty Tamil Nadu mountainside, rolling by.

It costs money to travel, but remember, it costs money to stay home too!

There are a few countries that are more expensive than the USA, such as Japan. But there are many, many countries where very comfortable, very fun travel can actually be cheaper than staying at home. This is particularly true if you are planning to not work for awhile anyway...for example, if you are a stay-at-home parent, or are taking a sabbatical or something.

I have the data to prove this, and I posted it all on the “Cost Data” page of this website if you want to see for yourself. Most of the time our costs were about the same, or cheaper, or maybe just a little bit more, than they would have been if we had just stayed home.

Sure, we were budget-conscious travelers. But we did not scrimp -- I know how to do rock-bottom shoestring travel too, did it for years, it was nice to always have it as an option if we ever went over-budget, but -- shoestring travel is NOT what we did on this trip. We traveled comfortably, stayed in perfectly decent mid-range accommodation, usually for about 23 bucks a night, ate well, and had loads and loads of fun.



Do not leave home without your laptop. You can connect it to the internet just about anywhere.

I don’t see the need for anything fancy or tiny. A cheap, standard-sized laptop works fine. I also don’t understand why you’d want one of those little ones with a tiny screen. An ordinary, lightweight laptop fits easily into a shoulder bag...it’s about the same size as a lot of other stuff you carry around...and it is nice to have its big screen, since this is your window to the world.

I sincerely recommend blogging for travelers, especially extended-time travelers. I think you should do it, not so much for other people who might read it and get something out of it (that is icing on the cake!)...rather: do it for yourself...for a few reasons.

The main reason is for what blogging can do a for you during the trip itself, while the trip is happening. The ongoing project of making this photo-text blog was a HUGE help to me during the trip, continuously, to help me get as much as out of it as I could, while it was happening. It was a wonderful tool that would always inject energy and purpose into the proceedings.

More often than not, I’d set the alarm for three or four AM. I’d wake up instantly, happy, energized, needing, needing do research or to write, my head buzzing with the excitement of leads to follow up on, notes to transcribe, ideas to get down. I’d find a non-obtrusive place in the quiet and darkness of the very early morning, and I’d get to work, as Baraka slept. These were some of the calmest, most joyous moments of the year.

And what a blast, then! You’re in a strange place, after an early-morning explore on the computer, and you have something you need to go out and see for yourself, find out for yourself! During the day, you become a detective, an investigator, a sneak, a subversive, an anthropologist, an explorer. Your purpose -- to get, say, one particular photo of something like a certain house or a tombstone with a story, or a Geisha -- becomes the goal for the day, around which the whole amazing day, with 100 other unusual experiences, is constructed.



The fact that we wrote it down is important now too, of course, now that the trip is over. Yes, we are certainly glad that we have this digital scrapbook.

It is now about eight months since we finished the trip. The memories are already hazy, dusty. All that we did...it usually all feels like it was only a dream, a long, sweet, extended dream. Did it really happen? Where all did we go, what all did we do, exactly? What does it mean, if anything, to life now...as we pour milk on our cereal...as we stand there and press the handle of the gasoline nozzle, and watch the numbers increase on the screen? Sometimes it starts to feel kind of sad.

But not to worry. The journey, and its meaning, comes alive for Baraka and me, when we sit up at night and go through our photos and stories. These trigger in us a thousand more memories, more stories and images...and more discussion and laughter. And Baraka remembers it all, and when I realize that he remembers more than I do, I feel such a calm wave of joy...and relief.

Maybe we’ll be able to hold onto this, some, after all. Maybe we’ll be able to hold on to it, just a little bit.

J. D. Salinger passed away this past month, on January 27, 2010. He had just turned 91. He was still living on his acreage in Cornish, New Hampshire, where he had been pretty much out of sight for the past fifty six years. His last published work was in 1965; he stopped giving interviews in the 1980s. He wasn’t exactly chatty, publicly, in the decades prior to that. Yeah, J. D. Salinger liked his privacy. He is a guy who is famous not only for writing, but also for not writing, or, rather, not publishing.

For many, J. D.’s The Catcher in the Rye, the groundbreaking 1951 novel of teenage angst, disillusionment, and loneliness, is one of the past century’s perfect novels. I don’t know about that, but I do know that I read it more than twenty years ago and I never forgot about it. I laid there on my couch one weekend in 1989, in Navrongo, Ghana, and I read it straight through, mesmerized, and I never forgot about it. So many things about it. I even remembered things, like, the name of the school that Holden Caulfield gets kicked out of: Pencey.

This happens to people a lot. The Catcher in the Rye stills sells several hundred thousand copies a year, and the total number to-date is closing in on 70 million sold. This year, I’m one of them. There was a nine-person waiting list at the Longmont Public Library when I went there to get it the other day, so I trekked over to Borders and I shelled out $13.99. But I didn’t mind, I am happy to once again own it. It is such a joy to delve into again, and to experience, once again, its voice, emotion, and tenderness. And its humor -- damn, is it ever funny!!

The book looks a little different this time. Gone is the plain red book jacket, adorned solely with the title and author's name in yellow letters. Replacing this is a reprint of the original cover, containing the New-Yorkerish drawing of Phoebe’s carousel horse in red, above a black-and-white sketch of a Central Park skyline. Other things have not changed in the past 50+ years -- you certainly won’t find a picture of the author anywhere on the book jacket, or any information about him or about the book, or anything else at all.

Waiting lists at libraries for Catcher are not unusual, thanks in part to the fact that, over the decades, it is one of those books that a lot of people have wanted to get off library shelves and especially out of classrooms. So there is still considerable intrigue. According to the American Library Association, The Catcher in the Rye was the 10th most challenged book from 1990 to 1999. It finally came off the list in 2006. I guess it looked pretty lame sitting there next to the Gossip Girl series.

A lot of people hated Catcher; others didn’t know what to make of it...its voice, style, and subject matter are not for everyone. Many are bothered by the main character/narrator, 16-year-old Holden Caulfield, and see him as an immoral being. Others bristle at perceived religious slurs, talk of casual sex, and depiction of prostitution. The complaints against the book often begin with its vulgar language, and move on to charges that it is blasphemous, undermines family values and moral codes, has a protagonist who is a poor role model, encourages rebellion, and promotes drinking, smoking, lying, and promiscuity. The vulgar language part always seems to touch off this cascade of criticism. Indeed, there are several hundred appearances of “goddam” in the book, it is Holden's favorite word, nearly 60 “bastards”, half as many “chrissakes”, and six cases of “fuck you” (never mind that all six have to do with Holden’s efforts to wipe these words off the wall at his little sister’s school, and at a museum).

The book was an immediate success. It had to be reprinted eight times in its first two months. Then, after a brief lull in popularity during the 1950s, the cult of Catcher really caught on. By the end of that decade, the book was already getting banned in quite a few schools and countries. The first USA high school teacher to get fired for teaching Catcher was in the 1960’s; quite a few others had to clean out their desks for teaching it in the 1970s.

By then, J. D. had long decamped to the Cornish and stopped publishing. But he was quite a different guy in the 1930s and 40s, reportedly strutting around in a black Chesterfield overcoat with a high red collar, bragging to associates about how he was going to write a great novel. Back then, J. D. aggressively worked to get published and even have his work turned into film. His first rejection from The New Yorker came in 1941, for “I Went to School With Adolph Hitler”, followed by rejections for “Lunch For Three” and “Monologue for a Watery Highball”. By then he was dating Oona O’Neill (daughter of the playwright Eugene and future wife of Charlie Chaplin), was trying to write for the screen, and had long wanted to be an actor himself. In 1941, The New Yorker did accept a story called “A Slight Rebellion Off Madison”, about a teenager with pre-war anxieties named Holden Caulfield. Then Japan attacked Pearl Harbor a few days later, and the magazine decided not to print the story, figuring the tone was too desolate for its readers. Then J. D. got drafted. His traumatic experiences in World War II seemed to improve his writing, and then he started to get published a lot more. “A Perfect Day for Bananafish” came out in The New Yorker in 1948, and after that the magazine signed him to a right-of-first-refusal contract. My favorite of his stories, “For Esmé -- With Love and Squalor” appeared in the magazine in 1950.

By now, J. D. was a Zen Buddhist. He moved on to Hinduism in 1952, and became an adherent of Sri Ramakrishna’s Advaita Vendata Hinduism. He and his wife got into Kriya yoga, and got a mantra and breathing exercises at a DC storefront temple in the mid-50s. Then he reportedly went on to try Dianetics and hung out a little bit with L. Ron Hubbard, followed by Christian Science, homeopathy, acupuncture, macrobiotics, and the teachings of Christian psychic Edgar Chayce. Rumor mills state that, at different points in time, J. D. was into one or more of the following: fasting, vomiting, megadosing Vitamin C, eating frozen peas for breakfast, sitting in a Reichian orgone box to bathe, practicing glossolalia (speaking in tongues), and urinology.

Every time that I read on the internet about a famous person drinking their own piss, I get skeptical. Especially in J. D.’s case. I mean, how exactly would we happen to know this?! Unfortunately for J. D., the fact that he shut down the information flow early on only fueled passionate speculation and the mythology building up around him, for decades.

Like many people, though, I cannot resist wondering about J. D.’s further writing. Over these past fifty years...what did he write, how much did he write...will we ever see any of it? J. D. did admit that he wrote, in a rare interview in the 1970s, when he told the New York Times, “There is a marvelous peace in not publishing...I love to write. I love to write. But I write just for myself and my own pleasure.” An old girlfriend of J. D.’s, who lived with him for about a year in the early 70s, said that he wrote for a few hours every morning, and that she believed there were two novels locked away by that time (she never saw them). Some years later, a neighbor of J. D.’s claimed that J.D. had told him that he had written 15 more novels.

Now that J. D. is gone, I wonder if anything wild is going to happen. Since I am one of the tens of millions of lovers of his sole novel, and of his slender collection of stories and novellas, this is a topic of irresistible intrigue to me. J. D. is now truly gone, even though he made himself gone long ago. And it’s possible that he kept right on writing novels during that whole time, like, lots and lots of novels. Imagine if this is true. Imagine if those manuscripts were ever to fall into the wrong hands. Like lost Picassos or something.

Thumbing through my new copy of Catcher, I find the part I am looking for. It is Chapter 22. Truant Holden Caulfield has snuck into his family’s New York apartment in the middle of the night, for the sole purpose of seeing his ten-year-old sister, Phoebe, before he runs away out West. Phoebe adores Holden; Holden loves Phoebe more than anything else in the world. Holden sits there and watches her sleep for awhile, reads her notes in her school notebook. Then he wakes her up. She sits up in her blue pajamas, with red elephants on the collars, and is overjoyed to see him. Phoebe quickly figures out that Holden got kicked out of school again, since he is not supposed to be home yet, and she starts to berate him. Holden tries to explain himself, and Phoebe listens patiently to his rambling monologues. Finally, Holden tells her, “I just didn’t like anything that was happening at Pencey. I can’t explain it.” And Phoebe replies: “You don’t like anything that’s happening.”

“I do! That’s where you’re wrong – that’s exactly where you’re wrong! Why the hell do you have to say that?” I said. Boy, was she depressing me.

“Because you don’t,” she said. “Name one thing.”

“One thing? One thing I like?” I said. “Okay.”

The trouble was, I couldn’t concentrate too hot. Sometimes it’s hard to concentrate.

“One thing I like a lot, you mean?” I asked her.

She didn’t answer me, though. She was in a cockeyed position way the hell over the other side of the bed. She was about a thousand miles away. “C’mon, answer me,” I said. “One thing I like a lot, or one thing I just like?”

“You like a lot.”

In his inability to concentrate, Holden’s mind drifts first to the two nuns he met that morning at a breakfast counter. The nuns had cheap suitcases, and were only having toast and coffee...they were on their way to go teach high school in the City somewhere. Holden remembers the one he mainly talked to, the one with iron-rimmed glasses and the kind, plain face. She had this beat up old straw basket, the kind that you take collections with. She said it wouldn’t fit in her suitcase.

Then Holden thinks of this boy he knew at a different school, a thin and “weak-looking” guy who, while being bullied in his room by some other boys for something he had said about one of them, refused to take it back and instead jumped out of the window and killed himself. James Castle. Holden was in the shower when it happened, heard him land, and went downstairs with everyone else. Holden hadn’t known the boy that well, but the boy came right before Holden in alphabetical order. When he died, the boy was wearing a turtleneck that Holden had loaned him.

Phoebe brings Holden out of his reverie: “You can’t even think of one thing.”

"Yes, I can. Yes, I can," says Holden.

"Well, do it, then,” says Phoebe.

“…I like it now,” I said. “I mean right now. Sitting with you and just chewing the fat and horsing --"

"That isn't anything, really!"

"It is something really! Certainly it is! Why the hell isn't it? People never think anything is anything really. I'm getting goddam sick of it."

"Stop swearing. All right, name something else. Name something you'd like to be. Like a scientist. Or a lawyer or something."

Holden rambles on about why he can’t be a scientist or a lawyer, and Phoebe loses interest. Meanwhile, he thinks of something else – “something crazy”:

"You know what I'd like to be?" I said. "You know what I'd like to be? I mean if I had my goddam choice?"

"What? Stop swearing."

"You know that song "'If a body catch a body comin' through the rye'? I'd like--"

"It's 'If a body meet a body coming through the rye!'" old Phoebe said. "It's a poem. By Robert Burns.”

Phoebe is right. Holden is referring to a work by the Scottish poet, who lived in the later 1700s, who is often regarded as the national poet of Scotland. In “Comin’ Through the Rye”, Burns writes of some lassie who is walking through tall grass, getting her underwear all wet. It is well-known as an old children’s song, sung to a variant of “Auld Lang Syne”. The poem is basically about whether it’s all right to greet some girl out in the field, when you don’t know her all that well nor are committed to her in any way. Many versions of the song have propagated through the centuries, but all versions ask the question if it is wrong to “kiss”, or greet, someone you like, if you meet them out in a field like that: "Can a body kiss a body / Need a body cry? / Comin' through the rye, poor body, comin thro' the rye / She draight a' her petticoatie, comin’ thro the rye!”

Holden had thought it was “If a body catch body”. He realizes his error, but he goes on:

"I thought it was 'If a body catch a body," I said. "Anyway, I keep picturing all these little kids playing some game in this big field of rye and all. Thousands of little kids, and nobody's around -- nobody big, I mean -- except me. And I'm standing on the edge of some crazy cliff. What I have to do, I have to catch everybody if they start to go over the cliff -- I mean if they're running and they don't look where they're going I have to come out from somewhere and catch them. That's all I'd do all day. I'd just be the catcher in the rye and all. I know it's crazy, but it's the only thing I'd really like to be. I know it's crazy."

At this, Phoebe doesn’t have anything to say right away. Holden has earlier told us that Phoebe has this (astonishing) quality: if she can’t think of anything to say, “she doesn’t say a goddam word.”

But eventually Phoebe comes through. This is when Holden turns to go and do something else.

“Holden!”...

She was sitting way up on the bed. She looked so pretty. "I'm taking belching lessons from this girl, Phyllis Margulies," she said. “Listen.”

I listened, and I heard something, but it wasn't much. "Good," I said.

If you read up on J. D., you might read about this weird, grouchy recluse who disdained the world and all its phoniness. But the only people who really knew what he was like and what he thought were J. D. himself, his family, and the friends he chose to hang out with. How the heck do we even know that J. D. was a recluse? That’s the beauty of being one – no one knows what you’re up to. For all we know, he was that old guy climbing up into the Great Pyramid of Khufu with us, or that geezer standing next to us on the Alaska cruise ship, gazing at Margerie Glacier.

I adore the freedom of anonymous life. And I’d sure hate to miss out on the simple joys. Like going to the grocery store with my children... standing there in the freezer aisle with them, discussing if the bag of $1.69 popsicles is any better than the $1.39 popsicles (because I care about paying the extra thirty cents). Those are the times when I feel the most alive.

And J. D. lived to be 91, you know, which is not too shabby, so maybe there is something to orgone boxes and frozen peas. And here’s one thing that is probably, maybe definitely, true: J. D. lived out much of his long life in the way he chose to live it, the way he wanted to live it. How many of us can say that about ourselves, really?


As I walk around these days, I don’t have nearly as many ideas as I thought I’d have about what this trip meant, or where to go from here. I just get snippets, flashes, slight disconnected clues from time to time. Maybe all that it meant was that it just was...it was just a thing that I needed to do. But sometimes it feels like a lot more than that, like it was this tool that somehow helped me dodge some kind of bullet. Or not. Walking away from professional life, in the middle of it, to raise kids and drag a blue Samsonite around the world doesn’t often feel like it has a lot of up-front or concrete benefits. I sense that the benefits will maybe be more internal...maybe they won’t play out for years.


Reading through other people’s remembrances of J. D. Salinger recently, I was struck by something one of his friends said. This was Lillian Ross, an old friend and age-mate (she’s in her 90s) who is also a writer. In a piece in The New Yorker’s “The Talk of the Town”, in the February 8, 2010 issue, she writes, “His writing was his alone, and his way of life was only what he chose to follow.”

She continues: “The older and crankier he got, the more convinced he was that...the trouble with all of us...is that when we were young we never knew anybody who could or would tell us any of the penalties of making it in the world on the usual terms. ‘I don’t mean just the pretty obvious penalties, I mean the ones that are just about unnoticeable and that do really lasting damage, the kind the world doesn’t even think of as damage.’” J. D. and Lillian were talking about the lives of writers, specifically...but I couldn’t help but feel the sting of a general truth.

The Catcher in the Rye may be about teenage angst, loss of innocence, and the inevitable fall over the cliff into the abyss of adulthood. But let me ask you something: since when did angst and falling off ever end as a teenager? I don’t know about you, but as for me, that was just a prelude to adult angst, bout after bout of it...and boy were those the times when the party really got going!

One time, some years back, my wife asked me if I was having a mid-life crisis. I thought, hmmm, if that’s what it’s called, then what do then we call all the other times...my late-20s crisis? My early-30s crisis? Later-30s and early-40s crises?! Sheesh! That’s too much crisis! Maybe we need a different word for it...for the angst, questioning, not-so-great behavior, and near-desperate search to keep it all meaning something. In retrospect, even though these times were often hell, they were also sometimes pretty fun and they definitely made things interesting. I kind of like these crises.

I wonder if J. D.’s perception of his metaphor evolved as he aged. I don’t see adulthood as this abyss. I believe that the older you get, the more experience and self-knowledge you get about what really turns you on, what really floods your bus...that’s when you can have the serious fun. Yet it is so, so easy to not have fun, to not keep it light. It's easy to lose track and get sucked in. You might have to start spending lots of time in toxic environments. It's a compromise, but the reasons why you do it can corrupt and morph and start to take on a life all their own! The slippery slope beckons...say things you don't mean, do things you don't feel, stop realizing you are even doing it. Lose yourself. Without knowing it, you can walk right off some edge, though all indications are that you are doing everything right, you are even being congratulated. You might not notice, if the landing is soft. You think you are in control, but it's in control of you. And a few decades go by.



So I don’t know exactly what this trip has meant to me, except that maybe it caught me somehow, like I put it there in my plan, long ago, so that it would catch me...I knew things back then that I didn’t know now, that I would need this thing, this trip, to grab me, when the amnesia set in, when the Novocain was not wearing off, when I was striding serenely and competently off the edge of the cliff at the playground that is adult life. This trip would catch me.

At the very least, at least I was able to look at the road right around us for awhile. You know that metaphor, about how when you drive in a car through some farmland, and you can see all the fence posts up ahead quite clearly, and you can look back and see the ones behind you quite clearly. But the ones right there with you, right there in the present, they just rush by in a blur. It is so hard to see them, unless you really focus, really move your head quickly. Well, that’s not how it has been, at least for awhile. The present hasn’t rushed by. It wasn’t a blur. And children didn’t grow up fast...they grew up at the same speed as everyone else.

I called up Florence in Ghana some weeks back. It was Boxing Day. She was at choir practice, at church near her house outside of Accra. “I can’t hear you well,” she said, with commotion and choir warming up in the background.

“I said, happy Boxing Day. I’m calling with your X-mas box.”

“BOX ME!!!” she yelled, jubilantly.

It took awhile to tell her the Western Union code number, there was so much choir and noise. “OK bye,” I said. “Sing well.” Then I called Sweet Mother, in Navrongo. Sweet Mother said that Madame Julie was in town the other day, asking of me. I then tried John Aweya, but he never has his damn phone on. I did get a hold of a well-oiled Alasko, standing on the street in Paga trying to get transport back to Navrongo. “How’s the pito? Where’s your red bike?” I ask, but he doesn’t hear me.

“…And tell Baraka the children are waiting for him!” he cries. “On the football pitch!”
I run down the stairs in the morning, to head to the store for groundnut soup ingredients. Today is a special day! I slide into my Mumbai shoes. They are still going strong, these shoes I bought a year ago on Linking Road in Bandra, Mumbai. I’ve worn them almost every day since. And the snowy Colorado day is bright, and on come the shades. I got these sunglasses on sale for $4.99 at Walgreens in Puerto Rico, and they have been all around the world, and they just keep on going and going. Wish I could say the same for my thousand-dollar-car, the one I got when I got back and needed to take a driving test...but it will get me to the grocery store.

In addition to groundnut soup stuff, I need to pick up the cake. Today is Baraka’s birthday! It is February 20, 2010, and Baraka is eleven years old.






So we had Baraka's birthday here in Colorado yesterday. I cooked that groundnut soup and my wife made Kenyan samosas, and we had friends over and had a great time. Earlier in the day we hit the bowling alley, Longmont's very groovy Centennial Lanes. I love it there because it feels just like the bowling alleys in Seattle that I was addicted to when I was eleven. You walk into this place and can just imagine it back in the day, breathing deeply in, the clouds of imaginary cigarette smoke belching out across the lanes.





It is the next morning, and Baraka is here with me now. He just woke up and came down the hall to where I sit at this desk. He's laying here on the little bed next to me, on a blue Winnie-the-Pooh sheet, listening to me tap-tap-tapping away.

“Baba, for a whole year, this is the sound I woke up to.”



I used to travel to go to work in this office building on this beautiful campus in South Carolina. For the better part of two years, I was there as often as I wasn’t, and when I wasn’t there, I was somewhere else (i.e. not home). This was a very beautiful, park-like place, buildings interspersed with gorgeous green grass, and waterways, and trees, and ducks. The place I worked in, I used to call it the “Darth Vader” building. It was this black, monolithic, curved thing that rose about seven stories out of the grass. As I approached, it contrasted in a cool way with the deep green parkland surrounding it. It wasn’t threatening or anything.

I had a cube by a window, on the sixth floor I think. I could look down to a field, and a tree, and a canal flowing nearby. It was particularly beautiful on hot summer afternoons, when they hadn’t mowed in a little while, and the grass was a little long with weeds and flowers and some dandelion fuzz.

Sometimes I’d pause what I was doing I’d look out the window, down to the tree. There, in my mind, was Baraka, sitting under the tree, in all his three and four year old little body. Sitting there, waiting. For me. It's not that he minded that much, maybe he didn’t even know he was waiting. He didn’t know anything, yet, about how anything was supposed to go. Sure he got bored...he would have liked to have more to do. Sometimes he’d get up, in his little pants, and walk over to edge of the water, and throw a rock, or prod the water with a stick. Then, he'd turn around and go back and sit under the tree again, and wait some more.

I’d watch from the window, as my nose twitched and my eyes filled up. But then I’d get over it. The thing that saved me in those times, the only thing that kept me going, was the knowledge of this trip we were going to make, and all the time that he and I were going to have together...in a while, in just a little while, while he was still a boy, before he grew up.

Now it is years later, and we did it. We went and did it. What’s next? Hell if I know. There are no clear answers, few ideas even, where I thought there would be. But that’s okay. I do know that I am grateful for the time we took, and for the time that we are continuing to take, and for the time to come.

And I’m grateful for Baraka, and for knowing that he was always there. He was always there, and there was no way he was going to let me go over that edge.

And when I almost did, I’m glad he caught me. I really am.