Love at the Speed of Email (6 page)

He was cute, too. He was in only one of the thirty photos
he’d put together for his birthday celebration, but it was a beauty. He was
kneeling, surrounded by children in Rwanda, looking at them instead of the
camera. His eyes were green, his smile wide.

Who has the power to stay untouched by
that?

I certainly didn’t, but I was nervous, too. I hadn’t dated
anyone in three years, not since my last long-distance relationship had
derailed in painful slow motion.

Dating? Wait just one
minute! Am I out of my mind??

Mike and I had exchanged a grand total of three emails, I
reminded myself. There was an 18-hour time difference and about seven thousand
miles between us. We had jobs we loved anchoring us on different sides of the
world, he had spotty internet access, and we’d be starting from the ground up
with these constraints already in place. If I’d ever heard of an
against-the-odds long-distance scenario, this was it. Why was I even
thinking
the word
dating
?

I knew it didn’t make the slightest bit of sense, but I was.
There was no getting around it. The next night I settled down to see if I could
corral these thoughts into a coherent reply.

Monday,
October 22

From:
Lisa McKay

To:
Mike Wolfe

Subject:
Re: A breath of fresh air

Hi Mike,

It’s a mellow evening.
I’m on the couch. The pumpkin’s oiled, salted, and in the oven. The door’s open
to let the tail end of the eighty-degree day into the house, and I remembered
that there was a whole case of red wine buried in the storage closet in the
garage after I thought we were out and the pasta sauce was going to have to be
wine-less.
Happy days.

It seems, however,
that I have not drunk enough of that wine yet to stem the sudden shyness I am
feeling. Yes, I know, it seems silly. I write these essays and put them online.
I am choosing to live out part of my life in an incredibly public forum. But to
find out that people are reading them and resonating on some primal level …
well. That is profoundly exciting and validating and comforting in that inner
essential loneliness, but it’s also scary. Because I know it’s an edited
version of me that goes into those essays.
All the boring
parts, all those days and moments when I’m flat or exhausted or grumpy or
uninspiring or selfish … they get cut out.
I know I’m not as interesting
or witty as those essays make me appear when read in a vacuum (not to mention
not as attractive as the press photos for the book might imply).

So your letter
yesterday morning both startled me and made me smile. I’m flattered and
intrigued but, like you it seems, wary. My points of reference with regard to
long-distance relationships have not ended in happily ever after either. One
attempt that started with a premature and reckless intensity ended in a tangled
mess, with his heart broken and me discovering I had serious conflict-avoidance
tendencies in romantic relationships. A second attempt taught me the very
important lesson that the living, breathing someone will inevitably turn out to
be very different from the idealized someone who springs to life in my head
when I read their writing.

So, all that said, I
don’t know much about you except that you have good taste in friends, have
chosen to live and work in a field that has captured my passions, are game to
ride in trucks on dirt roads and sleep in huts, are probably largely fueled by
those twin forces of adventure and purpose-seeking, have an eye for
photography, and have a smile that suggests warm and friendly.

I would like to get to
know you better. So if you're game, let’s email.
As friends.
Or as people who think they might want to become friends.
With
no expectations of anything more until we at least cross paths in person, if we
ever get there.

And as for
inaccessibility over the next two months, I leave on Sunday for a month on the
road myself. I’m off to Kenya, then Ghana,
then
back
to Baltimore. My life is officially scheduled to be insane until the 28th of
November. Then I have about a month in L.A. before I’m off to Australia for a
holiday. So, yeah, I get the whole out-of-touch thing. But when you are near
electricity and the www and fueled up on Coca-Cola, I look forward to hearing
how your trip is going and what started you on this path in the first place.
How did you end up in PNG from Pennsylvania? Where’s home?

And now I must get off
the couch, check on that pumpkin, and put the rest of the red wine to good use
in the pasta sauce.

Cheers,

Lisa

During the next week, before Mike and I got on planes and
headed for parts beyond the reach of the worldwide web, we exchanged thirteen
thousand words. And in those rapid-fire exchanges I learned a great deal about
Mike.

He’d grown up on a small family farm in Pennsylvania, almost
as isolated from pop culture then as he was now. The farm and his parents were responsible
for instilling in him a German-
Puritanesque
work
ethic that still haunted him. Although, he said, he felt he’d made great
strides in his work-life balance strategies in recent times. He used to arrive
at work between 5:30 and 6 a.m., and now he aimed for 7, you see.
 

Bent on embracing solidarity with the poor, Mike had
followed a passion for justice into aid work by taking a volunteer posting in
Tajikistan, and he promised that story later – a story of “light, darkness,
hope, angst and wonder all intertwined.” His current posting in Papua New
Guinea was raising the quintessential humanitarian-worker dilemma:

“My heart screams, ‘I
hate this complicated messy type of work and I’m sick and tired of being so
damn lonely and why can’t I just go get a job somewhere normal (whatever that
is)?’ but my brain says, ‘It’s good, stick with it, it’s worthwhile.’ The
shorter version is that my emotions vacillate wildly. My emotions are real. But
the way I feel at any given moment isn’t the exhaustive truth about the world.
And so, God, please give me wisdom, grace, endurance, patience, hope, and joy.
Please, God.”

He liked red wine and dark chocolate.

Planes still filled him with the excited sense that he was
headed for adventure.

His letters made me laugh.

 
I learned some things
about myself that week, too. I already knew that I was a sucker for funny,
chatty, emails written by people irresistibly attracted to challenge. But I
learned that Mike’s frank expression of interest and the boundary lines I’d
drawn in the sand freed me to be relaxed and openly, casually honest in ways
I’d never been with a man before. And I learned that I wasn’t sure I had a good
answer for one of the first questions I was asking Mike.

Where is home?

I was still thinking this issue through when I got on the
plane to Kenya.

“Home is a name, a word, it is a strong one;
stronger than magician ever spoke, or spirit ever answered to, in the strongest
conjuration.”

(Charles Dickens)

Nairobi,
Kenya

I landed in Kenya twenty-eight hours after I left
California.

It was 9 p.m.

It was dark.

It’s less than completely desirable to land in Nairobi in
the dark. There’s only one road linking the airport with the city. It’s not
unheard of for vehicles to be ambushed on that road, especially at night, and
not everyone offering to be a taxi driver at that airport can be counted on to
have the purest of intentions regarding your valuables or your person.

After years of traveling the world solo, I might be rather
too casual about the specifics of my itinerary sometimes, but I do know enough
never to treat travel by car in Nairobi lightly. I’d arranged with my hotel to
have a trusted driver at the airport to greet me, and the hotel manager had given
me specific instructions regarding the driver’s identification. He’d be
carrying a sign with the hotel logo, the manager wrote, and wearing a green
badge with his name stamped on it in white.

I saw the sign easily enough as I exited customs, and a wide
smile, but no badge.

“Ah!” he said. “You are the Lisa!”

Where, I inquired with a smile of my own as we shook hands,
was his badge?

In the car, Willy the driver confessed conspiratorially. The
others would tease him, you see
,
if he wore it. There
would be no end to the laughing and the calling out of his name by the hundreds
of other men thronging the arrivals area.

“Hey, Willy!” he demonstrated for me.
“Hey,
my brother, Willy!
Yes my friend, will you be taking me in your taxi,
Willy
?”

I sighed. If the word
willy
meant the same thing
in Kenya that it did in Australia, I was sure that was not all that the mocking
throngs did with his name.

“Okay,” I said as I followed him out into the night. “But I
can see the badge at the car, yes?”

Yes.

There was no trouble on the drive into the city from the
airport; the only unexpected sight was a herd of zebras. They flashed past,
stripy and gorgeous in the headlights. It was so dry here right now, Willy
explained, that they were jumping the game-park fences and wandering into the
city outskirts, desperate for water.

“Are things quiet here?” I asked as we left the thirsty
zebras behind and continued on into the darkness.

Willy knew what I was asking about, the post-election
violence that had surprised Kenya and the rest of the world nine months before
and left more than a thousand dead.

“Oh, yes,” he reassured me.
“Very calm.”

The area where Willy lived had been hit hard by the rioting,
but he hadn’t lost his house or any of his family. He had, however, seemed to
have lost any faith he once possessed in his government, or democracy, or
perhaps both.

He would never vote again, he said.

“What is the point?” Willy said. “You get up before the day
comes and line up all day in the sun to vote, and in the end it means nothing
and you can lose everything – your home, your family, your life.
Everything, eh?
Everything.”

There were many things I wanted to ask him in the car that
night, not least of which was why he believed that not voting was the best way
to prevent such violence from happening again. But I felt too tired and too
foreign to formulate that question with appropriate tact, and in the end Willy
didn’t give me the space to try.
 

“Where is your home?” he asked me.

Five years ago whenever someone asked me this question I’d
launch into a long list, rushing to pack it all in before their eyes glazed
over. I was born in Canada but my parents were Australian, I’d explain. Then we
moved to Australia.
Then Bangladesh.
Then Washington, D.C.
Then Zimbabwe, the
U.S., and Australia again.
Oh, and Indonesia.

 
Three years ago when
someone asked me this question, more often than not I’d simply freeze.

Lately I’ve been embracing simplicity.
And
brevity.
I seem to finally be losing the need to assault strangers with
my own uncertainty around this issue.

“California,” I told Willy. “I live in Los Angeles.”

“Oh!” Willy said, impressed. “Lots of movie stars, eh?”

Yes.

“This is your first time to Kenya?”

No, I told him. This was my fifth trip here in five years. I
was here to run workshops on stress and trauma for aid workers.

“You see and hear a lot of terrible things when you work for
humanitarian organizations,” I said.

Willy fell silent. I wondered whether he was thinking that
someone should come run those workshops for Nairobi’s taxi drivers.

“You could hear it, the shooting and the yelling,” Willy
said, and I knew his mind had jumped back in time, to the terrible uncertainty
of January and February. “You could hear it from my home. My neighbors, eh …
How can you forgive the people, afterward, those ones that killed your family,
your parents? How can you forgive those ones? No, that forgiving—that is not
possible. It is better just to forget those terrible things. Everyone, they
want to forget. They do not want to talk about it. Except, maybe it is that you
look
like you forget, but you do not.
And in ten years, or twenty years maybe, those things they come back. And then
there is the revenge. You like Kenya?” he demanded, suddenly switching tack.

“Yes,” I said honestly, “I like coming to Kenya. I’ve been
here so often that now it feels a little like coming home.”

But even as I used that troublesome last word,
home
, I felt an internal tickle.
A sense that I might be blaspheming something that I do not yet
fully understand.

Willy, however, liked it.

“Ah,” he said. “That is good. This is a very good.
Karibu
.
You are welcome.”

“Asante
sana
,”
I said, using about
half the Swahili that I know in that one exchange.

Thank you.

Kona,
USA

The fact that I might have a real problem when it came to this
concept of home didn’t occur to me until I was twenty-six years old.

I was having the time of my life at the first creative
writing workshop I’d ever attended. A friend had linked me up with
accommodation for ten bucks a night, I was surrounded by people who
loved
to write and, as a bonus,
I
was in Hawaii.

During the first week I didn’t have much trouble with any of
the writing assignments we were given in class. We had to write about two
people meeting on a beach when one of them was self-conscious about being seen
in a bathing suit, or create a scene where what one of the characters said and
what he actually meant were very different. These sorts of exercises came
relatively easily. It wasn’t until day seven that I really stumbled.

Borrowing inspiration from the tale of the prodigal son in
the Bible, our instructors had told us to write a “coming home” story. We
should, we were told, write the prodigal who was us as an adult, coming home to
ourselves as a child.

“Pick the clearest recollection you have of home and use
that,” they said.

Everyone else reached for a pen or a laptop. I just sat
there.

I was still sitting there ten minutes later.

Eventually I went up to the front of the room, to the giant
leather-bound book of synonyms that was sitting on a podium, looked up
home
and wrote down these words:
Birthplace.
Stability.
Dwelling.
Hearth.
Hearthstone.
Refuge.
Shelter.
Haven.
Sanctum.

I went back to my seat and stared past the book of synonyms,
past the palm trees standing still under a blanket of midday heat, and out into
the hazy blue of an ocean that promised a horizon it never quite delivered.

The list didn’t seem to help much.

Birthplace
conjured Vancouver, a city I’d visited only twice, briefly, since we’d left
when I was one.

Stability
then.
Unlike my parents’, not a word that could be
applied to my childhood.
In stark contrast with their agrarian
upbringing, I’d spent an awful lot of my time in airports.

Maybe that was it, I thought, wondering whether the sudden
spark I felt at the word
airport
was
a glimmer of inspiration or merely desperation.
 

There was no denying that as a child I’d thought there was a
lot of fun to be had in and around airports. More than one home movie shows me
and Michelle arranging our stuffed animals and secondhand
Barbies
in symmetrical rows and lecturing them severely about seat belts and tray
tables before offering to serve
them
drinks. When we
were actually
in
airports, we spent
many happy hours collecting luggage carts and returning them to the
distribution stands in order to pocket the deposit. We were always very
disappointed to find ourselves in those boring socialist airports with free
trolleys.

Money was a bit of a recurring theme in my childhood airport
adventures. Traveling out of Bangladesh one time, Michelle and I procured an
in-flight blanket and draped it over our two-year-old brother. We then
persuaded the agreeable blond cherub to toddle off and beg from the other
passengers in Bengali.
“Baksheesh?
Baksheesh?”
Matthew
said,
his green eyes and dimples irresistible.
As I recall, we got some money out of the exercise, which my scandalized and
exhausted parents made us return when they figured out what we were up to.

In Hawaii, I was tempted to start writing my story about
home but didn’t.

“Your clearest memories of home as a child cannot possibly
be in an airport,” I scolded myself, still staring past my laptop and out to
the white-laced toss and chop of cerulean. “Home is not a topic that deserves
flippancy. Work harder. … What about dwellings and hearths?”

That year my parents were living in the Philippines. Matthew
was in Sydney. Michelle was in Washington, D.C. The bed I could legitimately
call mine resided in Indiana. I had lived none of these places except D.C. as a
child, and
they
were such awkward,
lonely years that the thought of going back, even in a story, made me squirm.
We lived in Washington, D.C., for three and a half years before moving to
Zimbabwe, and what I remember most clearly about that time is that I spent much
of it reading.

I’ve been in love with reading since before I can remember.
Our family photo albums are peppered with photos of me curled up with books –
in huts in Bangladesh, on trains in Europe, in the backseat of our car in
Zimbabwe.

I can’t remember my parents reading to us before bed,
although they swear they often did – sweet tales about poky puppies and
confused baby birds looking for their mothers.

“You were insatiable,” Mum said when I asked her about this
once. “No matter how many times I read you a book, you always wanted more.”

“
Awwww
,” I said, envisioning long
rainy afternoons curled up with my mother while she read to me. “You must have
spent
hours
reading to me.”

“I
did
,” my mother
said in a tone that let me know she fully expects me to return the favor one
day. “But it was never enough. So I taped myself.”

“What?” I asked.

“I got a tape recorder,” she said. “I recorded myself
reading a story – I even put these cute little chimes in there so you’d know
when to turn the page. Then, sometimes, I sat you down with the tapes.”
 

“Nice,” I said in a way that let her know that I didn’t
think this practice would get her nominated for the motherly hall of fame.

“You loved it,” she said, completely
uncowed
.
“Plus, I needed a break every now and then. You were exhausting. You never
stopped asking questions. You asked thirty-seven questions once during a
half-hour episode of Lassie. I counted.”

I can’t remember any of this. My earliest memories of
reading are solitary, sweaty ones. They are of lying on the cool marble floor of
our house in
Bangladesh,
book in hand, an overhead fan
gently stirring the dense heat while I chipped away at frozen applesauce in a
small plastic container. But it’s when we moved from Bangladesh to the states
when I was nine that my memories of books, just like childhood itself, become
clearer.

Of all the moves I’ve made in my life, this was one of the
most traumatic. Abruptly encountering the world of the very wealthy after two
years of living cheek by jowl with the world of the very poor, I discovered
that I didn’t fit readily into either world. My fourth grade classmates in
Washington D.C. had no framework for understanding where I had been for the
last two years – what it was like to ride to church in a rickshaw pulled by a
skinny man on a bicycle, to make a game out of pulling three-inch-long
cockroaches out of the sink drain while brushing your teeth at night, or to
gaze from the windows of your school bus at other children picking through the
corner garbage dumps.