I want your life

“I wish I had your life.” I get that a lot. “Must be tough!” they say with a smile. And I can’t disagree. I have it incredibly good. Incomprehensibly good. Sometimes I can feel the weight of the billions of lives lived and living that would give anything for a fraction of the ease, privilege, and pleasure my life has. I don’t know how to give adequate thanks.

I can’t complain.

Today was another good day. Of friends, interest, safety and ease. And rain, musical on the windowpanes, while out in it it’s something harder, gusting to feel like stabs, only softening to water to run down inside your clothes.

A friend and I walked around San Francisco tonight, from Market Street up to Grace Cathedral, down for a meandering burble about Chinatown before finding ourselves in Long Beach and going with it, until we stood on Coit Tower’s promontory with the storm blown in off the Pacific. Back through the Financial District to drip on Bart trains, he went south, I came east.

Then a bike ride through streets like faucets open to any nook of me that was merely soggy not soaked, changing that.

For a moment, the unadulterated wind behind me, I was sailing with the vapor snakes that gave form to every vagary of wind. Grey writhing things that slid on the wet black pavement and made me feel like an windborn seaborn waterborne god.

The road curved out of that harmony, wind rocking my frame and tugging my handlebars, sticks invisible in the undertree rubble kicking my wheel out at sudden angles, tire lost in a mush of sodden leaves that my mind registered would make braking impossible under the bobbing red stoplights.

But I made it home, equally soaked and in love with the world. Moved a snail off my doorstep. And felt something unexpected and familiar.

Because I have it good. Really good. I love my life, my freedom, the fact that today I bought two plane tickets touching three continents. I don’t want to give this up. But standing in the stoop under a single yellow bulb

I realized that if I’d done things differently. Lived a little bit otherhow. There would be someone here when I got home. Someone to laugh at my soaked state, help me inside, take care of my clothes and set an old towel under my bicycle while I climb in the shower.

Instead I’ll do it for myself. And it’s fine. Really is. But here in these quiet moments after midnight, when it feels like everyone else is in bed with their paired each-others, I find myself looking over and “I wish I had your life.”

Things got a bit Biblical in Hoi An, Viet Nam

Nobody bombed Hoi An. North Vietnam, South Vietnam, even the Americans in their flying fortresses decided the ancient port city of the Champa Empire with its softly Southeast Asian old town and 16th century Japanese Bridge was not a place for the ugliness of war. (Or maybe they were just focused on Hue. But that can Hue-t.)

After escaping the festive plane I headed for Hoi An, which is kin to Bruges, Rothenburg, and to some extent Venice. Powerful merchant centers, all lost their influence when the tides of trade shifted elsewhere, leaving behind period pieces to be preserved by their neglect. Whoddathunk that forgetting something could make it so easy to remember?

Spared from the abrasive concrete edges and phlegmy pollution of its modernized neighbors, Hoi An is a beautiful place to walk, down streets made elegant by centuries of spice trade flowing from Indonesia up to China, ceramics shipped off to Egypt, and an amalgam of international styles that persist in the city’s impressive tailoring sector.

For long slow hours I walked the quiet ways of Hoi An, past the unintelligible slogans of bicycle vendors selling food to the locals, and the proffered meats and fried treats of those hawking snacks to foreigners. Dark alleyways with Vietnam’s delicious street food where I continued to eat all my meals on low plastic stools, a bowl of soup while kids peered at me and their parents coaxed them to break out a shy “hello.” I enjoyed Hoi An, but my experience was deeply underwritten by one other factor.

It rained. Nonstop. For days. The Old Town was underwater, streets for blocks around rising liquid to the tops of taxi tires. Flooding blocked off the section of the city the hotel map told me to see, but it didn’t take much effort to enjoy what I could reach. I figured I’d come back another time to see the sights.

Yes, I liked Hoi An. Despite the rain. Then I heard of the city’s fame for ruthlessly overcharging foreigners, its notoriously crummy museums with their inflated ticket prices, and all-around tourist gouging practices run rampant. Huh.

So thank you, typhoon whatever-it-was. With your deluge of assistance I saw a muzzled version of modern Hoi An, most of my fellow foreign friends holed up in their hotels, and the ambition of voracious vendors muted by your constant cool downpour.

Tourism is a hell of a thing to do to a country. And Vietnam’s got it bad. But it’s a veneer, a sideshow distraction of mutual exploitation, and it’s not so hard to get past. Sometimes you just have to walk two minutes away from the tourist hub (Hanoi), and sometimes a mere relentless rainfall can restore an ancient city to its fundamental character.

Fine by me

That same Venetian storm

It didn’t take me all that long to realize I was creating a problem. The tour members were not listening to Elizabetta, and she’s my favorite local guide in all of Europe. Apparently, the sight of their guide standing in the downpour, soaked through to the subdermal tissue, was distracting.

“No, thank you for the offer, really, but I don’t need to crowd under your wee umbrella with you, I’m fine out here.” What’s wrong with that answer? I didn’t get the reason, they didn’t get the rationale.

Venice wears water well

I don’t know if it’s my nature or my nurture, my aquatic affiliation or growing up in a drought, but I have no problem with being wet. At least, not when it’s warmer than frigid and I have the prospect of changing clothes within the next couple hours. This was Venice, African wind acquiring Mediterranean moisture to rain romantic drops of tangible Venetianity on my dry self. Warm water down the spine and across the mosaic. Drips off the ears of man and lion. The tickling timpani of tiny impacts on shoulder and canal. I loved it.

That monsoon on the edge of the Nepali jungle

So when it rains when I’m traveling, knock on dry wood, it’s not the biggest problem for me. In general. I do remember the Nepali monsoon that was so incessant, my bag began to mold and stink. And yes, I remember the Sri Lankan monsoon that was so profound that it left the skin of my thigh beginning to mold too. That was just gross. Let’s skip that story. Because there’s another advantage to rain. For photographers and romantics, anyway.

It’s clear as celluloid to me that Hollywood is off its rocker in a couple dimensions. Their assertion that women are not allowed to age, must look like Barbie and have just the right touch of insouciance to be sexy, but not enough intelligence to be scary, is friggin ridiculous. And we’re, what, a decade or two into the assumption that a man’s stomach should look like a topographic map of Colorado. But one thing they do get right: wet streets just look better.

Panama Dock

“Gee, fellow adapted-for-film character, I don’t remember it raining during any of the previous hours, but it sure is moist out here as we finish our conversation, and damn it looks good.”

So waking up this morning, after a surprisingly terrible night’s sleep, hoisting the blinds to find wet pavement outside my window, droplets clinging to the austerity of a Japanese maple in winter, I feel immediately relaxed. This cup of tea is suddenly pure ambrosia, and yes, yes I will take the fuzzy slippers today.

Happy rinsings to all of you, and may that next good book be close at hand.