by Lisa McKay
But as I entered my fifth year in Los Angeles, I began to notice a subtle shift in her tactics.
The previous May, six months after my parents had finally moved back to Australia, my siblings and I had converged on their place for what we hoped would be a relaxing week. The morning after we arrived, however, the three of us trailed dutifully out to the shed to engage in the parental-mandated activity of packing and unpacking boxes, also known as “organizing our stuff.”
Organizing our stuff means braving snakes, spiders, and rats in the back shed to unpack some of the many boxes containing fragments of our mobile childhood, provide a compelling argument as to why Mum should not be allowed to put said fragments in the “throw away” pile, and repacking it all and labeling it so that we will be able do this all over again even more efficiently in another two years. Organizing our stuff does not rank highly on any McKay child’s list of “favorite things to do on holiday”.
This time, though, it was proving more tolerable than usual. My sister unearthed a stack of stories she’d written in her first-grade class in Bangladesh, and I was immensely gratified to see that they all featured me as the main character or at least the driving force in the story plot. I was flicking through my own first-grade stories, happily basking in the warm glow cast by decades-old sibling worship, when Mum dropped the bombshell.
“The Salvation Army truck is coming next week, and we thought we’d just load this on with everything else.”
The “this” she was indicating so casually was the first and only decent piece of furniture I’d ever bought on Australian soil, a pine dresser. I was very attached to this dresser. When I bought it I was still in graduate school and it had represented a huge step for me. It was brand new, it cost me $300, and there was no way I could fit it in a suitcase. That dresser represented stability and belonging and sinking my emotional roots deep into the rich red soil of my home country. It had helped cement my Australian identity. So what if it had now been sitting in storage ever since I had left Australia seven years earlier for what I’d said would be two years?
“I want to keep it,” I said. “I’ll need it when I come home in two years.”
“Okay,” Dad said. “We weren’t going to tell you this, but a family of mice chewed through the back and made a nest in there and peed all over everything.”
Great. My Australian identity was now saturated with mouse piss.
“Fine then,” I sulked. “Give it away.”
“We’ll help you buy other stuff when you come home,” Mum wheedled. “Nice stuff.”
That was the start of the uncharacteristically maternal offers that have recently been linked to the words come home.
Dad is typically the soft touch in our family. He is prone to excessive guilt regarding any issue remotely related to inherited physical challenges or to emotional scarring that may have been caused by our peripatetic upbringing. This makes him good for all sorts of things from prescription glasses, to phone cards that facilitate our staying connected to friends worldwide, to family-funded credit cards to be used in case of an emergency, to sneakers.
Come to think of it, I’m not exactly sure why he continues to buy all of us sneakers at regular intervals, but it’s very nice of him.
Mum is more pragmatic and less indulgent. She says that none of us would trade our childhood international experiences no matter what they have cost us and suggests that since we are all now past our mid-twenties, perhaps it’s time we kids started buying our own expensive sneakers.
This is why I was surprised when it was Mum who began casually dropping the phrase come home into conversations. If I came home, she said, she’d help me look for another job and buy me furniture and fly me up to Ballina for the odd holiday.
I wasn’t using all that psychology education to counsel, but I hadn’t forgotten my thorough grounding in trend analysis. I figured that it was only a matter of time before the stakes in the “come home” campaign escalated, but nothing had prepared me for what she flippantly said one night, right in the middle of a completely unrelated discussion.
“If you came home,” Mum said, “we could get you the house across the road. It’s for sale. It’s got forty acres, two waterfalls and a spectacular view. It’s a writer’s paradise, and you could walk over and have breakfast with us.”
“How much is it?” I asked.
“$770,000,” Mum said.
There was awed silence. I think even Dad was taken aback.
“Pocket change,” I said.
Dad snorted.
“What else?” I asked, teasing back. “I’m getting out of bed to get a pen and I’m writing this down so that I can consider the offer carefully tomorrow.”
“Well, I don’t know if I’d call it an offer exactly,” Mum said, backpedaling.
“You clearly said, ‘We could get you,’” I said.
“That’s right,” Dad said, joining in on the fun. “I was a little surprised, but that is what you said.”
“Fine,” Mum said, clearly figuring that if she was in for a penny she may as well be in for $770,000 plus some extras. “What else? There are stables. I’ll throw in a couple of horses.”
“It sounds perfect.” I said. “I think you should buy it now. That way it’ll be there for me when I come home in two years.”
San Diego, USA
The thing is, almost six months after my thirty-first birthday, more than four years after I moved to L.A., I was surprised to find that my two-year timeline had shifted with me. When asked, I was still saying I could see myself staying here “about two more years.” Yet I was also still tempted to abandon current realities and follow the lure of the unknown toward possibility and trust that little voice that whispered to me of greener pastures elsewhere, of love that surely must be waiting just across the next ocean, of happier alternate lives.
One Saturday morning I talked this over with two of my closest friends in California, Erica and Leah.
If you had seen the three of us that morning sipping lattes around a small table adorned with blue and yellow print, eyeing the pastries while the trams rattled past, you might have thought we were in Fontainebleau or Melbourne. Either would have been a good guess. The dark-eyed waiter spoke with a French accent. All three of us spoke with Australian ones. Not much about the scene spelled San Diego, but that’s where we were.
Two traveling husbands spelled girls weekend away. And girls weekend away spelled breakfast out. And while you might have thought a Saturday breakfast would spell sleepy chatter about our families, our men, or our plans for the day, it didn’t. It meant focusing on the one topic we all needed to debrief before we could wander along the marina or through Little Italy or into the lingerie store (where I would later dust myself and whoever was standing nearby with body glitter and then find the scented candles and wonder how I could go about getting paid to come up with advertising phrases like “The spicy allure of warm blackberries suggests languid summer love in the grass”).
No, before the marina and Little Italy, and definitely before body glitter and languid summer love in the grass, we needed to talk work.
This took a while.
Leah is a composer. She was finishing up a year as a Fulbright scholar, negotiating a music licensing contract in the states, and discussing projects on the home front with her Australian agent.
Erica is a scientist at UCLA’s Cousins Center for Psychoneuroimmunology. She focuses on cancer and stress, and since her field is so specialized that it doesn’t exist in my spell-checker, I’m not sure why I’m still surprised when Erica says things like “Next week I really need to order the primers of metastasis-related genes to test timing effects of nadolol,” and I really don’t have a clue what she’s talking about.
When it was my turn to update the others on the last week, I led off with “I’m in the middle of launching a global program called CARD – Counselors Assisting Relief and Development – to register mental health professionals worldwide who are interes
ted in working with humanitarian workers.” Then I sighed and told the whole truth. “It might sound glamorous, but it mostly comes down to a lot of emailing.”
I thought about the previous week and sighed again.
At times my job could certainly bring adventure, but what I didn’t talk about nearly as often were the weeks when I did little more than write emails. Emails to the keynote speakers for the symposium I was organizing in Baltimore. Emails to the Kenya program trying to get them to confirm workshop dates for October. Emails to the Ghana program seeking same. And, that week, an endless stream of emails to publicize the existence of CARD.
Erica and Leah would have cheerfully listened to me describe what spending the week sending emails had been like. They would have asked intelligent questions about the programs and how I was structuring my day to help me stay focused and motivated. But it was Saturday morning. Suddenly I didn’t want to whine about emails. Suddenly I didn’t even want to think about emails.
“What would you do if you weren’t doing what you’re doing?” I asked them instead. “I mean, if you were living an alternate life, what would you do?”
I don’t know what I expected them to say, but it certainly wasn’t something quite so sensible.
“Maybe I’d teach,” Leah said.
“I could be a consultant,” Erica said. “No more lab coats. Bring on suits and high heels. What about you?”
“I’d own a pizza shop in Ballina near Mum’s and Dad’s place,” I said.
Erica and Leah did not laugh. They did, however, look at me in a way that made it clear they weren’t sure whether I was serious or joking and would suspend all judgment until they figured that out.
“Okay, not a pizza shop, exactly,” I said. “An Italian restaurant with white linen tablecloths, a wood-fired oven, and tall candles lodged in wine bottles. The scent of fresh garlic bread would season the air while my customers dined on homemade pumpkin ravioli in a sage and brown butter sauce.”
I was making myself hungry, no small feat considering I had just polished off two crepes slathered in nutella. I wondered if it would be bad form to lick out the nutella pot. Probably. I swiped the edge of it with my finger and licked that instead.
I think about alternate lives a lot. Growing up, I spent days on end pretending I was an orphaned English child being raised as a Hindu Indian Princess, a child who would eventually be rescued by a dashing British soldier after the aged (and impotent) bridegroom whom I had been forced to wed at the age of thirteen suddenly died and I was expected to follow custom and immolate myself on his funeral pyre.
This is another one I blame on my parents. They’re the ones who gave me the thousand-page novel The Far Pavilions to read when I was nine.
At thirty-one, however, my fantasy selves tended to live in two rather divergent worlds. Down one path lay khaki pants, orphanages, and refugee camps in Africa. Down the other lay fresh pasta and an Italian restaurant in a small sugar-cane farming town in Australia, a place where I could eventually get to know half of the people in town, where making bread dough would substitute for hours on a computer, and where the saddest stories I’d hear would usually be on the evening news.
I am fully aware that by living in L.A. and working with a nonprofit, I am daily living out other people’s alternate-life fantasies. But that doesn’t negate the fact that the basic economic principle of opportunity cost holds just as true in relation to the wealth of time as it does for money. By choosing this, I am giving up other lives – different lives that would shape a different me.
Some of those alternate lives are easy to pass up. I mean, who in her right mind would really risk being burned alive on the funeral pyre of her deceased husband in India? However, some aren’t so easy to pass up. Not living in a small country town (regardless of whether my mother is right and I’d go stir crazy in six months) is costing me a whole different set of experiences, relationships, and life lessons.
Robert Frost took the road less traveled and it made all the difference for him, but even if he’d choose it again without hesitating, I’d wager he wondered about that other path occasionally.
As we spent four hours crawling up the freeway on Sunday afternoon on our way back to L.A., Erica and I had plenty of time to wistfully contemplate other paths, paths free of millions of other cars carrying people who’d apparently also gotten the idea that San Diego was the place to go that weekend. Roads way less traveled had rarely looked so good, and Erica circled back around to this topic.
“What keeps us doing what we’re doing then?” Erica asked. “Because all three of us could live those alternate lives.”
She was right. Leah could teach, Erica could consult, and I could own a restaurant. Those two, at least, would be very good at their alter-lives. So what kept Leah scoring music, Erica separating cells, and me writing emails during weeks or even months when it just wasn’t much fun? What made us choose this path and stick to it for years?
What drives any of us to stick with something for years when it’s not a constant carnival? For many, a need to pay the rent and eat, clearly. But that’s not all. Few of us who live in the Western world must do exactly what we do to feed and clothe ourselves. Many times our career choices are really more influenced by a cocktail of duty, fear, apathy, talent, priorities, and passion. Alternate lives, at least one or two of them, often lie within reach.
“What keeps me here?” I repeated. “I feel as if I wandered onto this path and I’m never quite sure it’s the right one for me to be on. But I think it almost helps to know that I have other options I could pursue if I chose to. That steadies me. It helps me say: ‘For better or for worse. For adventure or for email. For now. I chose this.’”
“How long do you think you’ll keep choosing this?” Erica asked.
“I don’t know,” I said. “I still can’t see myself here long term – L.A. is not my home. But I love my job, I’ve got good friends here, and perhaps for the first time in my life, I’ve decided that I need a better reason to leave than an intangible restlessness and the sense that I don’t quite belong.”
This resolve to fight the restlessness and ignore the temptation of other paths was a huge paradigm shift for me. It was also a decision that would shortly be tested. Barely two months after this conversation with Erica, a stranger’s email would startle me into wondering whether that better reason to leave might have just landed in my inbox.
Los Angeles – Accra – Washington, D.C. – Sydney – Zagreb – South Bend – Nairobi – San Diego – Atlanta – Madang – Kona – Canberra – London – Baltimore – Itonga – Vancouver – Harare – Dushanbe – Lira – Petats – Port Moresby – Brisbane – Ballina – Malibu
In the Beginning Were the Words
Los Angeles, USA
I was at Erica’s house when the letter arrived.
We were all still in our pajamas at 9 a.m. I was at the kitchen table on my laptop. Leah was lying flat on the floor in the long ray of sunshine falling through the bay window. Erica was rinsing coffee mugs and trying to talk us into finding the energy to go to the L.A. farmers market.
“Huh,” I said when I opened the email.
“What?” Erica asked when I didn’t say anything else.
“This guy,” I eventually answered, still scanning down the page. “There’s this guy in Papua New Guinea, and he’s just sent me a really long letter.”
Leah lifted her head off the floor and raised an eyebrow.
Erica wasn’t amused either.
“New Guinea? Where do you find these people?” she asked.
“Hey!” I said, deciding the letter would keep for a while and shutting down my computer. It was not the most sophisticated of comebacks, but I wasn’t in any position from the little I’d read to argue that this letter already felt different from some of the other missives I’d received since the novel I’d finally finished had been published two months earlier.
“Have you heard from that other guy again?” Leah asked.
“Lust-thrust guy?” I asked.
Lust-thrust guy was becoming a regular conversation topic among friends. I was starting to regret having told anyone about him, but when the first email arrived, I’d just been puzzled and amused by the opening gambit. “I came across a pamphlet near my mailbox,” this stranger wrote, “and while browsing through the book summaries your photo caught my eye. It was love-phase-1 at first glance.”
Seriously?
No, seriously??
That was my reaction until the second letter arrived two weeks later, after my first reading at a local bookstore.
The knowledge that he’d been in the audience gave me my first shiver. The poem he finished his letter with gave me my second, and it didn’t take more than the first two lines:
“Dust to dust, I wander in the lust,
You gave the dreams, how about the thrust?”
I’d laughed about this with my friends.
But then the next letter, titled Divine Chemistry, arrived two weeks later.
Then another letter, two weeks after that.
And I stopped finding it funny.
I never answered any of these letters, and lust-thrust guy eventually stopped writing to me. I, however, never quite stopped scanning for his face in the audience whenever I did a local reading.
The letter I’d just received on that sunny fall morning was different, though, I was sure. For one thing, I hadn’t seen any creepy rhymes in my quick perusal. For another, I recognized his name – Mike had written to me before. The previous Tuesday a note from someone named Mike who lived in Papua New Guinea had dropped out of nowhere into my work email account, right in the middle of a very busy day.
Atlanta, USA
The seed of Mike’s first letter to me was planted not in Papua New Guinea but in Atlanta.
In Atlanta, a stranger named Erin, an acquiring editor for a magazine, had received a press release about my novel. As she scanned the synopsis and my author biography, it wasn’t my book that had held her attention – it was my day job as a stress-management trainer for humanitarian workers. Erin thought of her old friend Mike, who was a humanitarian worker in Papua New Guinea, and figured she should sign him up for the Headington Institute newsletter.