Outward Bound

Seeing the wonderful movie The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel the other night got me thinking, and not only about how rarely you see older people in films depicted as anything but pathetic or clownish—which they certainly are not in this story, but rather as actual adults with ambitions, inner lives, and nuanced spirits. 
 

The movie—about a group of “seniors” (a word I’ve always hated; I makes me think, at what high school?) who are lured to an overpromised retirement home in India—is essentially about a junior year abroad for adults. I’ve written before about that kind of experience, which I knew as a young man, as well as my history of shying away from adventure. It's always heartening to be reminded that the door isn’t really closed. 

My 50th-birthday trip to Germany last summer made me think I’d like to do a two-week Goethe-Institut program in that country someday. Much like the movie, I've thought of it as a mini–junior year abroad for the adult me. I’m better equipped to roll with any disorientation and language problems than I was at age 20—and I’d better be, because two weeks goes by fast. Also because I took a German test on the Goethe-Institut site after I got back and was shocked to see, in stark numerical terms, the rudimentary level this former German major had devolved to. I mean, I knew from the trip that my street skills had atrophied (I had to be reminded by a phrase book how to ask for a restaurant check), but I’d always tested well! 

 

In my mind, I tend to define adventure in literal terms—travel, relocation, trying new activities—but it's worth acknowledging the smaller doors I've stepped through. During the four years I was single after my last long-term relationship, one of the biggest surprises to me was that it was possible to make new friends in your forties. Strangely enough, I never really doubted love was possible again, but I didn’t expect new friends—real ones, not the verbs but the nouns. A couple of them in particular helped sustain me during those years, just by being up for getting together on a Monday or Thursday night or a rainy Saturday at 4. Those times when the 15-year-old in you takes over and you think everyone else must be busy and why would they want to spend time with you on such short notice? When the riskiest adventure feels like picking up the phone to call someone you're still getting to know, and the nicest sound is that person saying, “Sure, let’s do it.”

Photo: Oberammergau, Germany
By Billy

Now Boarding

When I was in Prague in November, I bought Me, Myself & Prague: An Unreliable Guide to Bohemia by Rachael Weiss in an English-language bookstore. It's a memoir about the Australian author's first year as an expat in the Czech capital a few years back -- easy to read, not as funny as it wants to be but often winning, and pretty informative about a fascinating and somewhat mysterious city, if about 100 pages too long. What it does very well is evoke the disorientation and struggle that often accompany moving to a foreign country, as well as the pride in coming to call a once-strange place home.

For me, it also awakened reflection on the subject of adventure-taking, which I tend to shy away from. Specifically, it made me think about 20 years ago when the Iron Curtain fell and the subsequent flood of Americans and others who moved to Eastern Europe to teach English, set up businesses, have a part in the establishment of budding democracies -- and just live an adventure during a ripe time in an inviting place. (Even though that's not the period in which the book I was reading takes place, it was on my mind because, by chance, D. and I were in Prague for the 20th anniversary of the velvet revolution of November 1989.)

I started asking myself, "Why didn't I ever do something like that?" I lay awake more than one night thinking about the good it would have done me to up an take off for Prague or a place like it in the early 1990s, put down stakes for a year or two or more, and see what happened.

In fact, that period in history coincided with a time in my life when I was unencumbered, somewhat lost, and utterly available to being shaken up. I had finished graduate school in the fall of 1989 as the Berlin Wall was being torn apart. In the winter of 1990, at age 28, I was working in a bookstore making $5 an hour. A romantic relationship with a woman, a dear friend, was disintegrating from the corrosion of my as-yet-unspoken gayness. (She was actually in another city attending to her dying mother as I, to my eternal shame, remained paralyzed by my confusion and fear over what I'd gotten myself into -- no balm to her grief whatsoever.)

If only someone had said to me (after I made things right with my friend, of course), "I was reading about how English teachers are needed in Prague -- you'd be good at that." Or "Look at this article about Americans helping to bring the former Soviet countries into the 20th century -- why don't you think about doing something like that?" Or "Billy, I'm going to go travel around Eastern Europe for a while -- I don't have a plan, but I think it would be fun. Wanna come along? (And hey -- my dad has a few thousand dollars in the barn we can use to finance the trip!)"

That's what it would have taken: someone prodding me, essentially forcing me into adventure. I never would have thought of it or done it on my own. I was certainly aware of what was going on in that part of the world at the time (I remember it quite clearly). But it never crossed my mind that this could have anything to do with me or have any practical bearing on my life.

That was the most telling and sobering realization.

Of course, in the pre-Internet age, it would have been harder to find out about such opportunities, let alone make arrangements for them, find a place to live, etc. I know all that. But this is a what-if fantasy.

And here's the thing about this fantasy: Like some sort of alternate-reality travel agent, I found myself trying to arrange when it would have worked out best in my life: I wouldn't have wanted to be in an unfamiliar country when I came out of the closet (in the summer and fall of 1990). I really needed that support group I took part in -- and that shrink I saw for a year was lifesaving, too. So it wouldn't have been a good idea to go to Prague (I told myself) until I'd laid that psychological groundwork. Oh, and it would have been nice to have my first relationship out of the way before moving -- he was such a nice guy.

"So here's what I can do for you, Billy," the travel agent in my head told me. "I can fit your Prague fantasy in from the middle of 1992 until, say, 1995 -- how's that? I think about three years in Prague would do you a lot of good and you could still return to America in time to get on track to become who you are today."

That says it all -- I can't even have an adventure fantasy without assuring myself that I can be back in time for the me-train to arrive at the present-day station as scheduled.