The Turk Who Loved Apples (42 page)

Authors: Matt Gross

BOOK: The Turk Who Loved Apples

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What was left was to stay put.

I figured this would be impossible. I figured the wanderlust would rise up in me within days, and I'd book a flight, or that some editor would suggest I visit Chile or return once more to Paris, or that, well, I'd run out of money and start pitching stories and my life
would go on as it had for years, with me barely touching down in New York before I was back on the A train to JFK.

At the end of March 2012, I returned from the annual family trip to Taipei resolving to go nowhere for as long as I could hold out. I had some writing to do, a few checks coming in, and no new stories assigned, but still, I doubted this self-imposed period of stasis would last long. Surely something would intervene, and I'd fall back into my old habits.

But all those years of brief “vacations” at home had prepared me for this longer one. My days were boringâgorgeously boring! I helped Sasha get up and ready for preschool in the mornings, I drank my coffee, I went running three days a week in Prospect Park. I'd write in my office, near the Brooklyn waterfront, all day long, fielding e-mails and chatting with my officemates and complaining about the poor lunch options in the neighborhood, and then, at precisely 5:20 p.m., I'd hop on the F train or, if the weather was fine, ride my bike over the Manhattan Bridge and pick Sasha up from school. On the way back to Brooklyn, we'd stop in playgrounds so she could cavort with her little friends, and their parents and I would sometimes grab a beer, and I'd pick up affordably dry-aged steaks at the local butcher, or six pounds of chicken wings to marinate (Jamaican jerk or Thai, that was the perennial question), and I'd cook dinner and wrestle Sasha into bed, and give Jean, now pregnant again, a back massage, and we'd watch TV and read and fall asleep well before midnight. And on weekends it was just the same, with a longer run and no school, and maybe we'd ride the train to New Jersey to see friends who'd given up on the city, or we'd have other pals over for dinner.

I watched the seasons change. In April, the dogwoods on our block burst with pink flowers that, after a heavy rain in May, made an eerie glowing carpet upon the sidewalk. At the end of the month, I started scouting the mulberry tree in our neighborhood playground,
squeezing and tasting the fruits and planning to harvest them for jam when they were good and ripe. I loved checking on the mulberry tree. It reminded me of Montenegro, where in 2006 my local friends, Dave and Tomas, after driving me around the countryside for hours, chanced upon an isolated grove of fruit trees.
Murva
, they said the fruits were called, or
dudinja
. I'd never seen them before: nubbed like blackberries, but white with tinges of green and pink. The riper ones tasted sweet, intensely so, while the immature ones were grassily tart. We ate a few, then took off, and I didn't see
dudinja
againânot until I noticed these fruits hanging over Sasha's playground.

As Memorial Day approached, I could wait no longer. Jean, Sasha, and I tramped out to the playground with a colander we'd found on the street and, standing on benches, plucked not-quite-ripe mulberries from between the leaves. But there, in the shade of the mulberry tree, mosquitoes thrived, and they dove at our legs and ankles, and we finally fled, with barely a pint to show for our itchy wounds. That pint wound up in our refrigerator, where I failed to remember to turn it into jam, and by the time the mulberries on the tree had fully ripened, I'd lost my will to harvest. Next year, though, I sworeânext year I'll do it right!

And then it was August, and my birthday, and I barbecued a thirty-three-pound pig for a few dozen of our friends, and I realized it had been four months since I'd boarded an airplane. It didn't feel like that long, though; it could have been just last week that I was in Taiwan. Hell, I could be there next week, and today, this Saturday afternoon, would feel no different. I knew what was coming. The next morning, I'd go running around Prospect Park, and I'd spot that rail-thin, bearded speed walker I always sawâLuis Rios, a former marathoner with more than two hundred thousand miles under his beltâand maybe this time Luis would give me a little wave of recognition. We'd never spoken, and surely he'd seen a thousand runners indistinguishable from me, but it was something to hope for, a minuscule sign that my endeavor to stay put had lodged me not only
firmly in my own rhythms and routines but in those of strangers. It would be proof that I existed in a way I never had before.

The next day, Luis did not wave at me.

But a few days later, he did, just a little half-gesture as I passed by, and there was eye contact, I'm sure of it. I may even have said hello.

And before long it had been six months since I'd boarded a plane or embarked on an ambitious journey. (A week's vacation in Cape Cod? An overnight in D.C.? Hardly counts as “travel,” I'd say.) The only odd aspect of this interlude was how normal it felt. When I mentioned this to a running buddy, he responded, “Welcome to the rest of us!”

And he was right: This stable, sedentary life was the kind of trouble-free existence most people strive forâa life occupied with friends, family, fulfilling work, decent meals, and very little drama. I began looking for a full-time job. We even renovated the bathroom! In Augustinian terms, I had surrounded myself with greater good. I'd done so, moreover, the same way I'd done everything in my travel lifeâon my own (mostly), by trying not to try too hard, and letting events unroll as they happened to unroll. If the trick to traveling well, which I'd figured out slowly over all those years, was not to care so muchâto let go of my anxieties over sickness, loneliness, and superficialityâthen I suppose I'd now done just that to travel itself. I wasn't traveling, and I simply didn't mind. I could even go on like this, I realized, working at home, tending to my family, running and cooking and reading and living the perfect New York upper-middle-class life for as long as I wantedâanother three months, another six, and then it would be a full year since I'd traveled. (A Gross family record?) Maybe by then I'd have that full-time job, and my vacation days would be vastly restricted, and that annual family trip to Taiwan would be the only one I could possibly take: two adults, two kids, rocketing in aluminum tubes across the planet for twenty hours at a shot, jet-lagged and cranky and regretting everything until the day
we'd have to return, regretfully, to our gloriously boring lives back in Brooklyn.

And maybe then I would learn what I'd always sought to understand as a travel writer, but never quite could: what it's like to travel as a regular person, with all of a working civilian's restrictions and responsibilities. Maybe I would even write about that one day . . .

Still, I know something else is bubbling up within meâthe absolute rejection of all this. Gloriously boring it may be to take my kids to school and work a stable office job, and fulfilling, too, but when I step back to look at it, I see more boredom than glory. Is this the life I want for myself and my family: steady, stable, with well-controlled twice-yearly adventures overseas? And how stable anyway? Journalism is in decline; layoffs are common. The New York City public school system is a messâa mostly functional mess, but not the kind of mess I relish navigating. Give me a crumbling medina, an Asian megalopolis! Watching cable and eating in-season tomatoes are lovely, but that kind of life is vacation life, and vacations always come to an end. One of these days, I'll need to go “home.”

To be perfectly clear, I'm not yet at the point of picking up and leaving. Indeed, I may not reach that point for months, or years. But if my homecoming experiences have taught me anything, it's that one of these days I will realize that I'm ready, and have been ready all this time, and that I can once again leave without regrets. It could happen tomorrow.

I don't yet know where the Grosses will go, though AsiaâTokyo? Saigon?âis a likely bet. In Taipei, for example, we'd have Jean's family close by. All I know is that I want to live somewhere I'll have to relearn everything: how to cross the street, how to order coffee, how to deal with people whose modes of thinking are utterly, intriguingly foreign to my own. I want to be uncomfortable, to be an outsider not just in my own mind but in the eyes of everyone who glances at my awkward, bumbling self. I want to figure it out all over again, to savor the small good moments, and I want those tiny triumphs
(and inevitable failures) to mark my days, and I want them to add up, over the years and the miles, to a far, far larger victoryâthat of experience, memory, and language over the unstoppable decay of time.

This is not wanderlust. Travel is not something separate from the rest of my life, something I need to “get back to.” For me, I've come to understand, travel and life are so intricately braided together that they cannot be teased apart. After all, it's been this way in my family since my family began, the day that sixteen-year-old Moshe GrosmÃ¼tz left MarijampolÄ behind. Why did he leave? What was he fleeingâthe poverty of the shtetl or the hovering threat of his Gentile neighbors? Had the czar's army come demanding his service, or did he bristle under the restrictions of Orthodoxy? I may never know the reality, and so in its absence I will fantasize: Moshe left because he could, because he had to, because the door was there and his legs were restless and the world called out to him in a language beyond words, offering him immeasurable riches if only he'd submit to its gravitational command: onward!