Monday, May 17, 2010

Let me begin at the biginning...

Home is where your bags are.

In northern Mexico, where I was born, the days are very long and hot in summer. One has time to have dinner, linger a bit, converse about the day's events, and then go sit outside to have your coffee and watch the sun go down.

When I was a boy I would follow my grandfather to the patio and while he quietly had his after dinner brandy, I would sip my coffee (heavily laced with milk on my grandmother's instructions) and watch the red-orange, glowing disk slide down slowly between two thin, very tall palms.

"Don't stare at the sun like that, boy. It'll ruin your eyes," my grandfather would say. My eyes were not ruined but my desire to stay in one place was.

Many years later, a man interviewing me for a job asked, after reading my resume, "So, where is home?"

"Are you going to give me a job?" I asked.

"Yes," he said.

"Then its here," I said.

The image of the sun going down between those palms has stayed with me all of my life. I remember that it stirred in me some sort of absurdly romantic urge to go someplace, somewhere, anywhere.

Later on in life, a film-like image was added to my catalogue of pet obsessions. I think it came from a book, or a dream, or a movie, I am not sure which; in it, a captain of the French Foreign Legion was kept prisoner in a palace which was in an oasis in the middle of the Sahara.

"There are no bars in the windows, captain," the sheik, lord of the castle, tells him. "There are no guards at the gates. The desert is better at keeping you prisoner than either bars or guards."

I don't know if the image of the captain, sitting on the ledge of a palace window, looking longingly out into the vast desert is something I invented but I can still see it in my mind. The reason it was importart to me, and perhaps the reason I was obsessed with it was that I can remember feeling like that captain: a prisoner of a desert, except in my case it was a cultural desert not a physical one.

Even at a very early age I was aware of the limited possibilities of our little town. The only bookstore had few works of fiction. It sold mostly textbooks. I asked the owner why he didn't have any of the classics or even best sellers. He just shrugged and said, "What for? Nobody reads in this town."

But, unlike the captain of my imagination, I did escape. After my father had a row with an aunt, who also lived at my grandfather's, we had moved out and our family went to live in the United States. We ended up in the "Big Chief Camp" in Corpus Christi, Texas. The Camp was a ramshackle conglomeration of wooden cabins that had once catered to summer tourists. Now they were rented as temporary homes to some of the many immigrants that were flooding into the United States after World War II.

That beautiful little port was a boy's paradise. We played in the harbor and climbed aboard the ships that came in to load up with oil and gasoline. We scurried among the bales of cotton that were stacked high on cargo barges, or scampered around the harbor waiting for the sailors on guard to turn the wrong way so we could sneak on board the destroyers or Coast Guard frigates that came in to the port. The sailors on the commercial vessels gave us fruit and showed us pictures of their homelands, and the sailors on the warships eventually gave up chasing us away and showed us around their ships; we had a grand time.

In the Big Chief Camp there were German, Polish, Portuguese, Mexican, families. They too told us stories about their countries, the war, the things and places they had been and seen. Food was passed around and shared. We ate the delicious bread made by the German Jewish families, and Italian raviolis and, the Portuguese fishermen would send us shoe boxes full of huge shrimp they had caught off the coast of Mexico. My mother would make mounds of flour tortillas to send back in return for bounty we had received.

I wanted to go to those places that these people talked about. A French man who had lived in Morocco told stories of the desert. He said it was like a sea of sand, with huge dunes that stretched to the horizon and shone gold and red in the evening sun. Then, on a school field trip to the city library, I found T. E. Lawrence's "Seven Pillars of Wisdom". I checked it out and marveled at the pictures of Lawrence astride his camel, and of the Arabs charging over the desert, and of his descriptions of Wadi Rum.

Having escaped a cultural desert, I was now infatuated with the idea of going to see a real one. The National Geographic Magazine in the school library had pictures of archaeologist working in tombs in Egypt. That settled it! I would study to become an Egyptologist or something. "Home is where you start", said T. S. Elliot. I was certain, with the certainty only a romantic child can have, that the desert would and should be where I would start.

I never went to the Sahara and never found my place to "start". I did not become an archeologist trekking the desert or jungle looking for lost cities and forgotten tombs. Instead I became a rather stodgy engineer whose jobs and companies took him to many of the world's cities and towns, yet never staying long enough in any of them to be able to claim them as "home".

I had almost given up finding my private "Wadi Rum", until one day, I decided to go to Paris. Why Paris? Well, I was in the middle of divorce proceedings, I had been told by my lawyer that I would have to move out of the house as demanded by law (and my wife), I had lost my job and had decided not to go to work for another company but rather to "freelance" for a living, and I was watching "Singing in the Rain" on television, so why not Paris?

Twenty years before I had been in Paris for a month while on a consulting job. But the job had only been an excuse to follow a girl there with whom I was very much in love. The city, at that time, had come closer to being my Wadi Rum than any other place on Earth. So, why not Paris?


As I remembered it, Paris welcomed the homeless, the artistic, the disenchanted, the romantic, the talanted, the curious, the tourists, the wanderers, the monied, the chic, and infatuated lovers from all over the world. I guessed it would have room for a burnt out, over-the-hill, ex-businessman looking for a place to call "home".

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