The Journey 

By TAD BARTIMUS

It's the same every year: Eagerly awaited Christmas cards get ripped open and hastily read, then tossed in a basket and ignored until the last dry pine needle has been swept out the door.

Finally, then, I sit down with coffee in hand and footstool at the ready to savor the last joy of the season, to reread the cards, laugh and/or grimace through the photocopied letters and intently study the images of smiling children, adorable dogs and faraway friends who surely can't be that old.

It is by this ritual that I measure time. Marriages, deaths, illnesses, births, promotions, retirements, vacations, anniversaries - each card contains a mile marker or two. Add them together, and they're the Blue Highways of your life.

This year also brought electronic messages, some accompanied by jerky dancing elves and disembodied computer voices singing HO! HO! HO! A sense of urgency that was lacking in the heavy bond and recycled paper brought by the postman jumped out at me from the computer mail, as though its writers were breathlessly trying to impart brief snippets and then rush off to conquer something.

Many of these greetings arrived from exotic climes, sent by peripatetic pals with itchy feet and antsy fingers.
From the United Arab Emirates, friends from Alaska wrote that moving to the desert to teach college English to Arab women was an "amazing, incredible, confusing, exhilarating, challenging," etc., etc. experience. My professor pal - retired less than a year when she took this new job - did it, she said, to "soak up a whole new world." Her easy-going husband went along "because somebody has to shop and cook." 

From Shanghai, a corporate hard charger opted to oversee the creation of a 40-story, 350-room hotel in a country where he doesn't speak the language or know the culture because - simply - "it's a challenge. Besides, I'm a quick study! 

"When I first saw this place I looked at all of the impossibly high buildings, all colored as if from a talented child's crayon box, and thought: 'The only things missing are the anti-gravity cars of Buck Rogers,'" he e-mailed. "Now, imagine 30 buildings, all politely spaced in an area injected with steroids and (aiming to) become the financial hub of the world -- where else would I want to be?"

This past year my lawyer friend - divorced, children launched, bored by the same job she'd long ago mastered - decided to leave behind the life she'd lived for a quarter century. E-mailing that she didn't quite know what she was looking for, nor did she expect her journey to be easy, she added, "I believe it will be worth it. Stand by for details."
Another friend on the far side of 50 moved from the country to the city, from a secure job to temporary work, to return to school to "better myself."

"I looked down the road and saw more of the same, and it wasn't enough" she tearfully told us the night she announced she was leaving. "I'm alone in this world. I have to make my own security, so I have to get the tools to do it."

She turned down a plane ticket to go home for the holidays because it would be "too sad. I might be tempted to give up." Instead, she phoned the day after Christmas.
"I sat in an empty apartment with a single candle and a pine bow I'd picked up off a Christmas tree lot, and I cried and cried. But I got through it. The pieces are falling into place. I know in my heart this is the right thing to do."
Some of us are mental travelers; others dare to traipse down uncharted paths in distant lands. Like Mark Twain's "Huckleberry Finn," we are wanderers in search of ourselves:

"Well, I reckon I got to light out for the territory ahead of the rest because Aunt Sally she's going to adopt me and civilize me and I can't stand it. I been there before."
As every explorer knows, there's nothing worse than backtracking.


© 2001 The Women Syndicate

Visit TAD at www.tadbartimus.com and send your own great stories – 300 words or less – to friends@tadbartimus.com or write c/o The Women Syndicate, P.O. Box 728, Puunene, Hawaii 96784. Thanks for sharing.

© 2001 The Women Syndicate. The content on these pages is the property of The Women Syndicate and may not be used without express written permission. Contact friends@tadbartimus.com