I am in Lima in an apartment. A dog is barking. It's an unusual apartment complex. Every window faces another apartment. It's very clean and a woman just showed up to prepare me breakfast and coffee. Could be worse.
In the hours before I left Urbana, I sensed Lee more than I had in a very long time.
A sort of vision occurred. She was downstairs in the hammock, as real as always. Those flashes of her presence have been happening with more regularity. I welcome them.
Somewhere in my papers, there is a poem I wrote about her in 1973, when we were living together in a trailer in the country. She could be so exasperating. It was part of her charm. Our whole 46-year relationship was like that, a wonderful wrestling match.
In spite of our disagreements, I could be sitting in the trailer, tinkering with record albums and recording experimental soundtracks on a Dolby-enhanced cassette tape deck, and my heart would jump up, excited, to hear her coming home, tromping through the pasture, likely with horse shit on her shoes, whistling.
Joan Didion wrote about the year of magical thinking following the death of her husband, and sometimes it just doesn't seem that Lee is gone.
I may never have another partner. Building a relationship is much work. I don't have 46 more years. I might be content to sort through the past and fill my days with recollection.
Our last months together were in one sense the best. We had no other agenda, nothing to accomplish but to love each other.
Amtrak arrived two hours late and I arrived in Chicago around midnight, walking the few blocks from Union Station to the CTA.
I sidestepped the throw-up on the floor of the Blue Line car, where a bizarrely burly cop watched three homeless men trying to sleep; They had asked me for money. I only had a quarter.
I knew I'd be spending the night in the airport. Minutes before I left home, I checked what the Internet knew about places to crash. Someone recommended the Hilton Lobby, which was quiet and relatively comfortable, despite the three millennial girls across the way laughing and talking loudly and sleeping on the floor. Still , they gave me cover. I didn't look homeless, just another traveler.
Spirit Airlines are the chicken buses of the air. While others were complaining about no-show pilots, missed flights, thwarted vacations, I remained unperturbed. The screaming children – and there were many – didn't seem to be fazing me. I was in some kind of zone.
With zero amenities to distract us, my traveling companions were very pleasant, a young man with tattooed fingers by the window, a young Vanity Fair reading women in the middle and me, juggling to cram my cold weather hoodie, down jacket, stocking cap and the like – in preparation for the snow-capped mountains of Peru – into my pack while everyone else was dressed for disco night in sweltering Miami.
In the Ft. Lauderdale airport, I caught up on New Yorkers, reading profiles of Steve Bannon and Rod Dreher. Dreher has posited the Benedict Option, espousing withdrawing from engagement from the world by forming religious communities. Fleeing is a form of resistence. But I know enough about the Bruderhof and Amish communities, which he seems to revere, to know that all is not well in in those intentional paradises, either.
At the last minute before the flight, I downloaded the ebook of Pierre: Or, The Ambiguities, the Herman Melville novel I've never even tried to crack.
Charging my phone in the Cuban restaurant, I down a large beer and eat very dry chicken chunks covered with chicharones with rice and plantains. But lime cures all ills.
The Spanish/English spoken universally here in Florida is so Caribbean as to be slang and sometimes nigh onto indecipherable. I just use both simultaneously without thinking. No one seems to notice how tenuous my Spanish is, in this manner.
The 5 hour flight to Lima could have been excruciating, but I sat next to a 6 year old and his father, an "adult babysitter," his description of someone who owns and manages 31 properties in Detroit. Not exactly a slum landlord, but fascinating, with Asian wife and three sons, the 18 year old also on flight. The older son is also buying properties with money he earned in summer jobs.
They fly all over the world, also using Spirit cut rate fares, escaping what they see as the inevitable coming of the end of the world. They home school.
The arrival is smooth. Customs a breeze. The money exchange convenient and the Spanish spoken here is rapid, clean, and easy to understand. No one even tries to speak English to me.
I grab an Uber to my AirBnb, make myself at home, plug in the WiFi, and start chatting and video chatting with Peruvians on line.
Just like home.
I pour myself a Pisco from the cabinet.
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