Page 64 - Vol V. #8

Shake Me Up, Judy (continued from page 48)
drives to the city of Manchester’s airport, to watch planes come and go. (The first suntan my husband ever saw was that of Prince Philip, who popped through town on the way back from visit- ing his native Greece.) Maybe it’s not surprising, then, that my husband would gleefully be packed and ready to fly to the moon in fifteen minutes if asked; he’ll sleep in a hammock and eat a bowl of gruel-drizzled rice if that’s all there is en voyage. He rushes now to arrange each next trip—often a year in advance.
Africa with the Peace Corps, ate and drank and sang and wept with my co-volunteers, all very young women like me who (like me) fell in hope- less love with our handsome Senegalese language instructors and who (like me), once installed out in the bush, often spent a lot of time squatted over a makeshift hole in the earth (courtesy of amoe- bic dysentery), looking up at the vast African sky filled with pinpoint stars. All this was carried off with easy fatalism. (Dysentery was a nuisance, but we were immortal.) Years later my then-boy- friend and I, between rentals, slept in a pup-tent on pastureland halfway up a Hawaiian volcano. A cow liked to lean against the tent to scratch itself in the morning. We stashed our few belongings
I understand his reasoning. It’s everyone’s man- tra, words people love to fondle and recite on cue:
in the tiny storage pocket behind the back seat of my old Volkswagen Bug and washed in local gas station restrooms. Later we stowed away to the island of Tahiti on a flight chartered for a soccer team, and slept our first night in Papeete in a pub- lic park. I woke at dawn to find the park’s French security guard stretched full length beside me, wistfully running a hand ever-so-lightly along my exposed leg. (No harm done. I woke my boyfriend; we gathered ourselves groggily and raced away; the guard sat up smiling, sheepish.)
That it’s good for us.
It’s startling to look back upon that young woman now. What most touches me is her spirited Yes to everything. You simply got on with the adventure in those years, however you could. That was the single mandate. No blame, no whining, no equivo- cating. There wasn’t even a half-baked mission statement: just cheerful, practical onwardness. More touchingly, beneath that I see, like strong bones in an X-ray, the core assumption—not belief but assumption, the way we assume the fact of air—that all these wanderings were important. All had meaning.
Brain and body waken, as well, to the fact of Oth- ers: their decency. This comprehension, for me, is probably the central gift of travel. Despite everything, most people are focused on staying upright, caring for themselves and their families. These tasks are visibly harder outside America, even in posh capitals, and travel always reminds us of the comparative luxury of our own lives. The arbitrariness of our luck brings a moral un- dertow: how should we live in response to that? In responsible response, that is.
My husband remains, even at our late ages, much like my younger self. He grew up so poor in the industrial north of England that his family could never afford to go anywhere very far from its depressed mill town. He’d show his parents brochures for warm, pretty places. They’d shake their heads. The best they could offer were small
Somehow, the cells remember everything. This is not quite related to the whatever-doesn’t-kill-you model. It may be closer to a trope expressed by the character Mr. Smallweed in Dickens’s Bleak House. Smallweed is a venomous but curiously vi- tal man whose unnamed illness keeps him stuck, semi-supine, in a chair. His body’s old and rotting. When he wants freshened clarity he orders his strong, grown granddaughter, who obediently moves behind him, “Shake me up, Judy!” She gets her upper arms under his armpits from behind, and proceeds to lift and turn his torso while
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Good to be forced to push, especially when it’s hard. Good to be uncomfortable, to solve or fix or cope. Good to be stone-mystified. Good to wade into difficulty, strangeness, humbug. Good to see new stuff. Good for the brain, good for the body. Oh, right. We’re alive.