THE GYPSY WITHIN

God, I wish you could stay home more.
Always running off. Another place to visit, another story to write, another week, or two weeks this time, incommunicado.
First it was Painted Desert. That was okay, because you got to bring the family along. You were going to be there for a week or so.
Then it was Niagara Falls.
A month ago, you were in Borneo.
Borneo? I had to look it up encyclopedia to remind myself where you were in the world.
You and Miguel, always off to some new place, a future tourist-trap in the making or a place begging to be preserved.
You know, you haven’t been home three weeks in a row for over a year”
It‘s true.
Not since you went rafting on the Colorado River, through the Grand Canyon, with Miguel and a group of activists trying to get the Glenn Canyon Damn reopened.
You came home from that trip, scratched up, bruises all over your body, and too sore to travel
anywhere, not even from the living-room to the kitchen.
So you took a couple days off.
And it turned into six weeks, while you regained your strength, worked out the kinks, and got the sound of rushing water out of your ears.
So this month, you’re doing a piece on hitchhiking. Following at a discreet distance as one of the magazine’s crew hitchhikes his way from L.A. to Atlanta.
I don’t even know your whereabouts tonight.
Oh, you called, between refueling and stock up on food, but it was a thirty-second call to let me know you’re alive.
And before I could ask, the hitchhiker was moving, so you had to go, lots of love, kiss the kids, and click.
Hello? Hello?
It isn’t like I didn’t know you were restless.
Restless hell! I knew you liked to travel. It was one of the first things you told me when we were talking at that New Year’s party ten years ago.
Said if it didn’t fit into a backpack, you didn’t want it. You wanted to be able to pick up and move whenever the whim struck you.
Just a leaf on the wind, that’s how you put it.
As if you couldn’t control it, that’s how it appeared—appears—to me.
But that was how you justified the motorcycle, the backpacking equipment, the ever-packed pick-up. You had to be ready to move.
And the wind and the time have moved on. But you’re still moving, running, not carried helplessly.
What you didn’t’ say, what maybe you couldn’t say, but I can attest now, is that you didn’t want to settle down.
Oh you had a family. How long does it take to create a child anyway? A night? One night for each child.
Three nights home, and you have t three children—two of them Irish twins, born eleven months apart.
But are you going to nail your feet down to the ground in a year5 or two when the boys are old enough for soccer or Little League?
Will you be home for batting practice?
Will you be in the audience when Brendan’s class has their spelling bee? It’s in three weeks, y’know.
And Lisette wants you to teach her how to fly a kite.
And she’s seen the pictures of the hang-gliders you took last summer, and she wants to try it. So she says now anyway.
When she’s older, when she’s not so fragile, will you be there to expound on her accomplishment when the wind carries her upward, spiraling higher and higher then setting her free to glide earthward?
Will you be there?
But I’m not even thinking two or three, or ten years down the road, Matthew.
No, I’m thinking in terms of two or three months, a year at the outside.
Write here.
I’m sure there are stories you could cover within a radius of a hundred miles, about mountain marathons, grizzly bear attacks on those brave enough to go outdoors alone, community plans for development of the open land where all the old cars are abandoned.
Couldn’t you decide to stay in one place, write about here, from here, a fresh approach, covering your own home town as an outsider might see it?
Couldn’t you do that?
I’m surprised you bought the house if you don’t want to stay in one place.
I would have bet on a mobile home, or “manufactured housing,” as they call it now.
Want the comforts of home even when you’re not there, the mobile home would be ideal.
But then, it wouldn’t fit into the backpack, would it?
And you’d have to do more planning.
And where would you store the maps—road atlases to all the places you hadn’t been yet?
And you still wouldn’t see the kids, or me, any more than you do now?
So I don’t know if that would be a solution.
But at least I’m looking to solve the problem. You don’t even see the problem, or acknowledge it.
Or maybe, you don’t se it, because spirit, this gypsy in your blood is always drawing your attention to the open road in front of you, free of obstacles, clear of the debris scattered in the wake of your stores?
God, it’s after midnight, and I’m still arguing with you in my head, not sleeping, resting, before the boys’ first grade picnic.
Its Labor Day weekend, and two days from now, two-thirds of your family will be in school, Matthew.
“And what did you do on your vacation, Marcus?”
“Wrote letters to my Daddy. He’s a writer and he’s never home, so I wrote him letters every week.”
That’s what’s coming, you know that?
Meanwhile, you’re pursuing the monarch butterfly; the story of the last seen unicorn, the apparition of the Virgin Mary on a farmhouse wall, or whatever stories it is this week, this month, that day.
You know, sometimes the only way I know where you’ve been—not where you’re going, but where you’ve at least been—is when I get the phone bill and I can see where you made calling-card calls from?
Aztec, New Mexico: you covered the hot-air balloon races.
Page, Arizona, and Bullfrog, Utah. That was the Colorado River rafting trip, which was part work, mostly play, wasn’t it?
Coeur D’Alene, Idaho? I can’t remember what story that was for.
And Point Barrow. You went as far north as it’s possible to go, on the Greyhound, last summer, on a whim, on a lark, not for an assignment, just because. Because you wanted
to, always had wanted to see how far you could go.
I’m surprised you haven’t gone to Tierra del Fuego, the other extreme, just to say you’d done.
I’d better never mention that. All it takes is a spark, a small idea, and you’ll fan it into a “have-to” of a flame, and you’ll be gone—again.
Into the fiber-optic oblivion of long-distance, disconnected calls at odd hours, because you can never keep track of time zones and differences. You always think it’s just “now” everywhere, and that the whole world’s waiting to hear from you.
You’ve woken me up from a sound sleep after one of your all-night writing binges, just beginning to descend from your energy-high, but to my body it’s 3:30 a.m. and all I want is to go back to sleep.
And I see you’ve bought a bicycle.
Planning on the Tour-de-France?
A retracing of the Bike-centennial?
An excuse for a jaunt across the deserts, over the mountains, fighting wind and rain and fatigue to ride from sea to shining sea.
I can’t tell you what time it was when I started writing this, but it’s turned into the longest letter I’ve written in years.
Somewhere it went from a tirade inside the mind to this long list of wishes and accusations and counter-offers.
So here’s my last comment.
When you get back from wherever it is you’re at, and the mail’s collecting on the floor enough to jam the door when you open it, and you’ve discarded your gear, including your dirty laundry, you’ll notice that all the personal items have been removed.
I’m selling out, Matthew.
Or rather, cashing out.
I’m exchanging everything that isn’t nailed down, that’s easily convertible to cash, and skipping out, like a stone across the surface of a pond or a lake.
And where will you find me, you wonder?
Well, the new address will have to be a P.O. Box for now, since I don’t think the post office delivers to sail boats, especially sailboats in the middle of lakes, or out on the open sea.
I think I’ll settle for a lake somewhere, rocked to sleep at night by the pull of moon and water.
And I’ll take the kids to school in a little runabout, speeding into the marina just in time to meet the school bus.
You see, Mathew, I like to travel too.
But I believe in anchors, to keep me in one place when I need to be there, to keep me from drifting into trouble.
I’m not going to compete with your inner gypsy.
Nor will I deny you visit with your children.
When they’re old enough, and you want them with you on one or more or your assignments, or on one of your whims, you’ll be able to take one, or two, so you can show the boys what Daddy does for a living.
Somehow, I don’t think you’ll ever be inviting Lisette.
No, I think she’s more settled, with roots ready to grow to the center of the earth.
Oh, I know you’ll invite her a few times, and she’ll enjoy the time with Daddy.
Tell her a story on Disney World? She’ll go.
And she’ll come back with stories and souvenirs by the bundle.
Or a lunar, or solar eclipse? She’d enjoy that, too. Lots of picture to show her friends
when they ask what she did on her summer vacation.
But I think she’ll just return to the boat, the one place where movement is limited to a single body of water, up and down the\length of the lake, in and out of coves—a new one every month or so until we’ve memorized them all and pick out our favorite.
So Matthew, you can send your letters, postcards, pleadings, whatever, to us care of Escape Clause, Page Arizona.
You know where that is, don’t you?

Bye.
\Genevieve.

Copyright © 1998 by the author