I've been coming home a lot lately

Oakland view from my weekend

I’ve come home a lot lately. First I suppose was when I landed in America again, three months gone by, and saw the smile of a friend as he picked me up from San Jose’s embarrassingly unconnected airport. The shuttle to the light-rail to the bus to the train to the other bus...wouldn’t have worked. They would have closed before I got there, and after 31 straight hours of travel time I didn’t need that.

What I did need was my friend. And he was there. And I was home, the second he showed up.

Need a photo, so that's my apartment
right now. Should I have cleaned?

And I got back to my apartment, which was nice. Clean laundry all the time!, predictable food, knowing where I would sleep and being able to choose when to do so. A functioning toilet. All good stuff. But running into my neighbors in the hallway, that’s when the phrase “welcome home” seemed to fit best.

I visited my folks in Monterey, a town where I’ve never lived, a house I’ve only visited, but the home of my loved ones was immediately a home for me too, as I curled up to sleep on the couch.

And even further, a house I’d never even seen before, newly purchased by friends, where I spent the weekend house/dog sitting with my old galpal Lucy. And to my surprise, or maybe not, even an unknown building can hold some aura of home when you know it’s beginning to shelter members of your community, where they’ll add memories and time together to the walls and floorboards.

Still definitely a fan of fetch

Definitely not mine, but definitely not a hotel. No impersonal transactions. This, all of these, were places that contacted the individual in me in some way.

And now I’m back in my apartment, not long until I go again. And though I know the physical things around me, the photos and maps and furniture, are not my definition, not the limits of me, they are the manifestations of my living, and every one of them wears memories that make this place mean more than just shelter.

And they share that, or some shade of it, with a constellation of other spots scattered around.

No filter because who needs one?

What a profound blessing to have so many homes. I remember when the closest I came was the borrowed bed for the night, and though I loved that too, when I come back here after another month of work, I will be coming home. And I’m grateful for that.

Welcome to my wayeb'

I think...and I’m not sure about this, it’s just a hunch...but I may be a Mayan. Or part, at least.

How can I be this old and not have my own Mayan
calendar pic? Thank you, shutterstock.

The Haab’ is the structure of the Maya calendar analogous to the modern year, but better. It has eighteen month-like periods, each with twenty days, then an extra period of five “nameless days” that belonged to no month to bring the year to 365. (They knew about that extra sliver of a day and noted it, but didn’t add leap years into their calendar.)

It’s those five nameless days, the Wayeb’, that interest me. They seem so...right. You spend the whole year working, trying, screwing up, learning, marking and forgetting birthdays, washing dishes, planting corn, taking care of the ak’wal and making sure they get to school on time, and then BAM!, you get drunk one night and the next morning you’ve already started the new year while you were sleeping.

Y’all Indo-Europeans are brutal, man. Wham, bam, thank you...year.

The old house, with dogs

I woke up this morning and realized that wham, bam, thank you Sam, I’ve already started a new era too. When I arrived in the Rockridge house, I assumed my departure from it would be to cross an ocean, not just to the other side of Oakland, but that home served as a place of transition from Vagabond to Traveler, and in its rooms I learned the difference.

Rockridge was a runway to touch down on, an immigration office where I could register to receive mail, and quarantine quarters where I could acclimatize to having a home. It was a place of new conversations with old friends, and foundations laid for new ones.

A house is more than a place to hang your hat...
but I have that too.

All that (and more) in just ten months for me, while for my roommate it was the setting for even greater evolution, not a runway but a home base, where careers and relationships flourished and expired as the years passed. A lot of living in that house, and then wham, one weekend we turned around and the rooms echoed, empty of the stuff that reflected the lives being lived there. Tumbleweeds of dog hair blew among the dunes of sandbag leakage, and a couple seconds clicked in the stillness.

Then bam, onward and outward; new environs, new situations, and change of address forms. With help from my brother, my lady, and my roommate friend, I moved. I woke in one house, and went to sleep in another. That don’t mean squat when it’s a hotel, but these places...they are more than that. They matter.

And my very first couch, under travel pics on the wall.

I needed a Wayeb’. Some sort of intermediary phase, that belongs to neither the era before nor the era to come, where all things abide in limbo, and you don’t have to wash your hair.

(The Mayans didn’t wash their hair during Wayeb’ as one of the defenses against the evil spirits who could easily escape the underworld during those five days, when the portals between realms were left open… But I’ll allow shampoo in my Wayeb’.)

Maybe that’s what the phase of possession accrual was. I arrived ten months ago with a backpack, and left with just a handful of boxes, so the first week of my new residency included trips to the hardware and discount stores, where I piled crappy carts full of mugs, shower curtains, and a kitchen clock to imitate the passage of time, in a room that will not echo.

I haven’t put the battery in yet… But I think it’s time. The Wayeb’ is over. Thank you to the old year, and welcome to the new one.

I think it’s going to be good.

I don't feel so good...

Today, my friends. I am a doughnut. No. Wait. That idea is making things worse. An onion ring? Dear god, somebody stop me. Perhaps a bagel then?

A plain, undecorated, bagel. And you might want to skip this post.

Not only the toilet, but the sink and
shower are also somewhat broken.
I like it, gives the place character.

I am hollow straight through. But no worries, it’s a temporary condition, and unrelated to teen angst; no wailing of long-lost love here, today. Nope, I’ve just got the flu. Not The Flu, as in the virus that killed 20 million people in 1918, but a flu. A garden variety, spending-all-day-getting-to-know-the-cold-tiles-of-your-bathroom-floor stomach flu.

In hindsight, that odd feeling late last night was prescience. But too ambiguous. Not nearly as direct as the nausea that woke me at dawn this morning. For the first few hours, it didn’t seem so bad. Everybody seemed complacent enough to file in a more or less orderly fashion to the exit. But right around noon: chaos erupted. Literally. They stormed out the entrance, a crowd of lettuce chunks and chicken slivers that I had last seen the night before.

And good thing I remembered that beet salad, or I would have been much more worried.

I dug out the old gray hoodie with the torn front pocket. Sick days require baggy old clothing. And it’s amazing how cold I am, all my system’s energy directed elsewhere. I slouch around. I make ginger tea. I imagine the muscles in my thighs being cannibalized to feed my inner army, all those miles bicycled, burning away...

But all in all? It’s really not that bad.

I have a clean bed to lie in, walls to contain my moaning, and no one is asking anything of me.

Not like that time in Bosnia, where I was on the train from Mostar to Sarajevo, missing epic mountain vistas to bend over dirty train toilets in hellish mobile bathrooms, trying to match my quaking to their shaking. No resting in that restroom.

Or the childhood trip to Paris, where I sprayed Minute Maid orange juice all over Jules Verne’s Journey to the Center of the Earth and my brother’s yellow walkman. Seriously disrupted his appreciation of Duran Duran.

Or the packed commuter train to Brussels where I nearly tested Belgian stoicism right there in the vestibule. “Get out of the badkamer, meneer businessman! Nu!!!”

I don’t get motion sick, I swear, I just have damned bad luck with trains. And I haven’t even told you about the worst one.

The border between Zambia and Tanzania...now that was an experience. But I think you’ve had enough. I know I have. Ask me about it some other time, when my belly resembles a placid crater lake more than an active volcano.

The point is that I can consciously realign my focus, adjust my perceptions, and be glad that I’m heaving in the comforts of Home. Not so “comfortable”, perhaps an airplane seat versus a bed of nails (or the other way around?) but could be a whole lot worse.

Seriously, I’ll have to tell you about that Zambian train sometime… I apologize to the people of that town.

But now it’s time for another cup of ginger tea and more of the novel I’m reading...that takes place in a certain country I can’t wait to visit...in less than two weeks…

May all your tea be properly steeped, your perceptions optimal, and your stomach congenial.

And your flus short-lived!

Will the pattern be repeated?

I am a newly civilized creature of the hostel jungle. I know where I'll sleep tonight. I walk around the more-than-one roomS of my house in confusion. What do I do with all this space? Anybody need a place to stay?

The shower is amazing. I was raised with an ethos of care for energy and water use, so just standing in the steam feels prohibited, but surely I can break the law just a liiiittle, right? God that feels good. (And I don't even have to wear flip flops.) You can try it if you like.

Man, what a kitchen. Plenty of counter space, all the burners work, and I have no problem putting my stuff in the fridge or finding it later. The dishes are clean, the sink empty. We have two ovens. Why the hell do we have two ovens? Was this a bakery in a former life? Anybody need a place to bake?

I'm in love thrice over, twelve legs to complement my two. They're far too lovable to summarize in a paragraph, so they'll get a little less than that at the moment, but suffice to say those furry bastards leave me shaking my head and laughing on a regular basis. Anybody need some animal love?

I have too many blessings not to want to share.

San Francisco breathes just a tunnel away

The location is ideal, with one of America's better mass transit systems (not the most competitive title in the world) a mere block away, plus a drug-addled spider's web of bus lines that I have not learned well yet, since the streets are relatively conducive to bicycicular passage as well.

San Francisco is close at hand, where friends abide in warm houses with chairs at the table ready for my visit. The same in towns all up and down the Bay Area, and it's not inconceivable that I would hear my name called on the street some day. There are people here who recognize me. If I keeled over dead in the gutter...people would notice.

There is a level of food security here that is unimaginable for billions of people around the world, not to mention the awed and wasted faces of millennia past.

You need this many shoes,
don't you, dearie?

I have clean clothes. Every day. I wash them before they stink. It's nearly free. I've even bought more of them, though I think I could still carry all my physical possessions at one time if I had to...but it's getting more precarious. I'd better make two trips, or I'll look like the junk woman from Labyrinth.

I'm getting work done at a better pace than ever before, and I feel almost good enough about it to share with a few more people.

Yup, life is pretty damn good right now.

Sooo...why do I wake up with varying degrees of a racing heart most nights? This doesn't happen when I'm on the road. Is the project too daunting? The To-Do List too relentlessly undone? Someonething missing? Or is it just the adjustment of a vagabond to stationary life?

Earlier this month was the five year anniversary of leaving for my first big solo backpacker wander. It snuck by, a vagabond in the night, without my noticing until it had already left town. I wasn't this Me yet when I left, but who am I now?

This is my third extended stay in the US since leaving my previous life. The first time, I lived with friends in lovely Portland, Oregon, but barely made it four months before I had to fly across an ocean to get my rhythm back. March 2010.

The second time I was house-sitting for friends, a beautiful house in a beautiful place with a kickass feline, and I didn't sleep through the night a single time in the three month span. Cross the ocean. March 2012.

Now here I am, about to finish my first month stateside. Third time's the charm? Or will the pattern continue? Will I cross the ocean in March 2014?